A shooter in which you explore an underwater city and making light of the events that transpired in it.
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BioShock puts you in the shoes of an outsider entering Rapture, a city located at the bottom of the Atlantic. You quickly find out that glory days of Rapture have long since passed, with the city’s buildings being ransacked and crazy, partly mutated people roaming its halls attacking you on sight. Guided over a radio by one of the remaining sane citizens, the game tasks you with making your way through the city’s various districts in an attempt to help other survivors and escape back to the surface.
Throughout this adventure, the gameplay fluidly moves between shooter sections tasking you with defending yourself from attackers and exploration interludes in which you’ll have to solve light puzzles, collect various loot and figure out Rapture’s history. The latter is mainly done through audio logs left by various citizens throughout the city’s year-long existence. Many of these citizens are recurring, enabling you to piece together how their lives and the overall state of Rapture developed over time. You’re taken through different levels, each of which showcases one of the city’s districts and explores different aspects related to them, which I genuinely loved.
As for the shooter gameplay, BioShock provides a lot of variation to keep things fresh throughout its runtime. The game features a bunch of quite unique guns, ranging from the basic pistol and machine gun to a crossbow and even a chemical launcher, all of which come with different types of ammunition. Besides giving you a lot of options, each of these different weapons and ammo types is also more or less effective against the different similarly unique enemy types, adding an interesting layer of strategy to the mix. Different enemies can also be researched in order to gain certain bonuses when fighting against them.
In addition to the basic weapons, you’re also given so-called Plasmids, which essentially boil down to magic spells, allowing you to throw fire balls, telekinetically move objects or send bee swarms after your opponents. Both your weapons and your Plasmids can also be upgrade throughout your playthrough for even more variation. For even more customization, you can additionally acquire various Gene Tonics, which provide various buffs to your different abilities.
The fights are overall decently challenging, with a generous respawn system making sure you can’t get stuck. Even when playing on the highest difficulty and without respawns, I found only the early levels to be properly hard to complete, with later stages being trivialized by better equipment and a surplus of ammunition being available to you.
Gene Tonics and Plasmids as well as their various upgrades are mainly acquired by buying the in exchange for Adam, a limited currency which you’ll mainly acquire by defeating so-called Big Daddies. These are essentially large and hard-hitting tank-like enemies you may engage at will, requiring some planning as well as plenty of fire power to take down. This leads to some quite interesting mini boss battles and complements BioShock’s varied gameplay nicely, helping to keep things from going stale.
The narrative being told throughout the game is rather interesting, giving broad insight into the various workings of the unique location you’re exploring in addition to a decently engaging main story. Said story holds a couple of interesting turns, but stumbles towards the end of the game, dragging on a bit too long after its climax, with the still intriguing setting having to carry BioShock over the finish line.
All of this is accompanied and complemented by a frankly stunning atmosphere. The beautifully realized city of Rapture invites exploration, while its dilapidated state and the claustrophobic layout combine with the prospect of being surrounded by endless amounts of water result in a constant feeling of unease and tension. While the game’s graphics have certainly aged, they still do a great job of giving life to the unique setting, with a noticeably strong sound stage helping to create great immersion. While I didn’t encounter any notable bugs during my playthroughs, the game has a bad habit of crashing from time to time, so regular saving is mandatory.
There’s a remastered version of BioShock available, which slightly upgrades the presentation and features some additional content. This includes collectible developer commentary videos, a museum showing of various development assets and achievements. There are also a set of challenge levels, tasking you with completing puzzles and/or strategically taking on battles. Sadly, the remaster also features issues with audio quality and misplaced HUD elements, which aren’t present in this original version.
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Overall, I had a good time with BioShock. It’s a refreshingly unique shooter with solid gameplay, intriguing narratives and an unmatched atmosphere.
