Opinion: Phil vs... Bioshock

Posted at: 2:28am 10th September 2007 by Phil Hartup

In the first of a regular, wrath-filled series of Monday columns, CPC contributor Phil Hartup directs his ire at Bioshock. Not quite the masterpiece everyone claims it is, apparently.

With a whopping average review score of 96% it’s clear that the press can’t heap enough praise on Bioshock. For the Xbox 360 version this is hardly surprising, in such a limited field Bioshock certainly does enough to shine, but one wonders how the PC version managed to get such high scores. After all, it’s not really that good is it?

Why does Bioshock not deserve such praise on the PC as it gets on the Xbox? There are many reasons for this, but let’s just settle upon the obvious faults which have the overwhelming majority of reviewers didn’t see fit to mention - despite them being starkly obvious to anybody who has played the game past the demo - the gameplay and the story.

Bioshock is a first-person shooter, but by PC standards it’s a mediocre one. The underwater city of Rapture is a thing of beauty, but most of the locations you actually see in the game are repetitive and dull. It’s all dripping corridors and small, dark rooms, with only the occasional port hole to provide a view of some kelp and corpses to lighten things up.

The enemies, aside from the Big Daddies are uninspiring. Mostly you’ve got a horde of maudlin zombie types, called Splicers, and gun turrets; pretty much the same sort of stuff anybody who played through System Shock 2 has killed enough of to last a lifetime. The Little Sisters are fairly unusual, but they really don’t count as enemies per se, and besides we’ve seen their like before in an FPS – FEAR – and even that lifted the idea from a horror movie that’s nearly ten years old.

Bioshock’s boring enemy design is further weakened by poor AI: the splicers’ basic tactic is just to run at you, weaving around and cackling. You may recognise this behaviour from, ooh, most PC games of the past fifteen years, and also schoolchildren at playtime.

Then there are the game’s primitive controls; Bioshock completely lacks modern innovations such as the ability to lean around corners or aim down the gun sights, and your character moves at a fixed pace - a pace more suited to viewing paintings in a gallery rather than evading gun turrets or, heaven forbid, fighting.

While we’re on the subject of the character, Bioshock takes another leaf out of FEAR’s book by having you play a nameless, speechless person. For most of the game, he shows no reactions at all – despite the fact that the year is 1960 when he injects the first dose of plasmids and is told his ‘genetic code is being re-written’, he doesn’t say a word. Just as in FEAR, your character constantly receives guidance over a radio, which includes stuff about killing splicers, mad geniuses, sick doctors and so forth, but never once replies. Your character is as excitable as Nigel Mansell. Clearly, wandering around a decrepit, dangerous city at the bottom of the sea is all in a day’s work for Mr X.