BioShock Retro Review
BioShock Retro Review
BioShock Infinite: Things You Should Know
Have you ever had a game that felt like a bad omen, where every time you tried to play it, life got in the way? Well, that was me and the “BioShock” franchise for several years. When I first played the game on PC back in 2010/2011, I managed to get to Arcadia before I got insanely busy and eventually forgot what I was doing in the first game. Every time I booted the game afterwards, something happened that made me stop playing. Greetings, ladies and gentlemen of the Internet! My name is Ty with MojoPlays, and I am here to ask you a question… Is a man not allowed to use his time to experience something fantastic? “No,” says the high school principal, “it belongs to education!” “No,” says the retail manager, “it belongs to the store’s time sheet!” “No,” says Ricky, “it belongs to Monster Hunter!” I rejected those answers. Instead I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose… “BioShock”! Before we begin, we publish new videos all week long, so be sure to subscribe and ring the bell to be notified about our latest videos! And if you wanna see what else I’m playing or have a suggestion for a future Retro Review, hit me up on Twitter - @GhostRyderTyler! For your reference, I played “BioShock Remastered” on PlayStation 5 and played MOST of the game on Hard difficulty. I’ll explain that last bit later on. “BioShock” wastes no time throwing you into the game. You are a man named Jack whose parents told him what a great boy he is. Suddenly, plane crashes, mayday mayday, we’re going down, everything is awful. You swim to a nearby lighthouse where you discover the entrance to Rapture, an underwater utopia that turns out to be anything but. With a man named Atlas as your guide, it is up to you to uncover Rapture’s downfall and hunt down its creator, the infamous Andrew Ryan. What follows is a journey filled with thought-provoking commentary on various political and social topics, and I’m gonna shut up before I get too deep or else we’ll be here all day. As you explore Rapture, you’ll find an assortment of weapons you could find in most other first-person shooters - your ordinary pistol, shotgun, maybe an assault rifle (or in this case, tommy gun), and a few specialties like a flamethrower and crossbow. However, “BioShock” gives you another set of tools to interact with the world and fend off the common Splicer. Plasmids grant you elemental powers that can aid you in finding rooms filled with goodies as well as combat. Zap enemies into a state of vulnerability, trick them into fighting on your behalf, or burn them alive with a snap of your fingers! Every one of them is remarkably fun to use and encourages you to build your own playstyle as you venture throughout Rapture. However, the game will force you to use the other weapons as you encounter more variants of Splicers and Big Daddies. Not everything will be solved by a couple of shotgun blasts or even electrocuting water. So, you’ll have to think and adapt quickly! In addition to Plasmids, you’ll have another tool at your disposal that can grant you damage bonuses, and it comes in an unexpected package. The camera starts out as a simple quest item and could have very easily been a throwaway mechanic, but props to director Ken Levine and his team for incentivizing it and making it extremely useful in the long run. Another feature that impressed me was how user-friendly the UI was! If there’s anything I can appreciate in games like this, it's open and direct communication, especially when it comes to things like collectibles that could determine the end of a playthrough (i.e. rescuing or harvesting Little Sisters). “BioShock” does an excellent job at informing you of how many Little Sisters are in the area, making it easy for players to track their progress if they want to go for a particular ending. And much praise to the navigation system! “BioShock” gives players a “Crazy Taxi”-like arrow that directs you to where you need to go. I know it sounds crazy that I’m praising a simple waypoint system, but what “BioShock” excels in here is that the arrow was never a visual nuisance. Most games these days have a guidance system that ends up removing the player from the world, either by forcing them to constantly refer to the map or creating a visual mess with arrows and pathways in the world itself. The “Lego” games’ ghost studs are a graphical nuisance when you just want to explore. “Skyrim” has a compass that’s too simplistic and can be overwhelming when quests are constantly being thrown at you. But “BioShock” has managed to incorporate something that’s easy to refer to AND ignore if you want to explore and loot for a bit. Part of what makes the exploration so enjoyable is the level design. “BioShock” has that sense of place, a philosophy I’ve often criticized and praised certain games for in the past. What I mean by “sense of place” is that as the player, I should be able to tell exactly where I am or at least have some idea. Achieving this can be tricky, but in the end, it comes to a mix of color theory, level and environmental design, all the way down to something as seemingly minute as enemy placement. The player should be able to easily identify their surroundings without the need of a map, and “BioShock” does this exceptionally well as every area is given a particular theme and color palette. There’s no way you’re going to confuse the blue, sea docks of Neptune’s Bounty with the nature and flora-covered Arcadia. It’s this design philosophy that has made Rapture so memorable. Speaking of which, Rapture itself is a marvel to behold in both narrative and presentation. Visually, the city is beautiful and full of character from its various shops and casinos to its neon lights and propaganda posters. From its early 1920’s aesthetics to the various audio tapes regarding life before Rapture’s downfall, the world very quickly establishes its identity with the player. Even if you play through just the first ten minutes of the game, you’re never going to forget that grand reveal in the submarine or the first encounter with a Big Daddy. Adding to the immersion is enemy behavior and AI; when not in combat, enemies will be in their own little worlds. Splicers will be talking to themselves, often trapped in a past memory while Big Daddies without Little Sisters will walk around depressed and desperately banging on porthole tunnels. This mix of AI, visuals, and collectibles helps ingrain an image of Rapture in the player, a Rapture that was once thriving and excited by its own ideas and potential before everything collapsed. Yes, it does make things depressing and oftentimes disturbing, but each little tidbit of information makes Rapture more morbidly fascinating. It almost makes the goofy vending machines come off a little uncanny with their cartoonish, commercialized sounds. Even though I was enthralled with “BioShock’s” story, level design, AI, and sound design, I did have a few problems towards the end of the game. (Don’t worry - I’m not going to spoil the story! “BioShock” is one of the few games I believe you should first experience with as little information as possible.) One mechanic I have not mentioned yet is hacking; rearrange pipes before they’re filled to reprogram turrets and cameras or unlock safes and some locked doors. At first, I did not mind this. However, after the midway point, hacking becomes very luck-dependent as you need to uncover tiles in order to find pieces you need and avoid tiles that could harm you or trigger security bots. Given how important hacking is for your survival in these last few hours, this obscene difficulty became very annoying. Had the difficulty not spiked at this point, I would have stocked up on auto-hacks much earlier. Adding to my irritation was the frequent spawning of various, more powerful Splicers. It reached a point where rooms I had cleared a minute or two ago were getting the same number of beefy Splicers spawned back in. This can disrupt immersion in a logical sense. Come on, if you were in Rapture and took out seven dudes in a big room, there’s no way another horde would appear again a minute or two later. That, my friends, is what a zombie game does. “BioShock” is a game focused on immersing the player, making them feel like they are in a world that exists or once existed. In that sense, wouldn’t you want to convey that realism by not bombarding the player with spawns? I will acknowledge that my experience in this is probably different than most players as I progressed through most of the game on Hard. However, I eventually got fed up during the second-to-last mission and cranked the difficulty down. One last thing I’d like to mention is that players wanting the best optimized performance shouldn’t play on PS5. Several times did I turn and catch parts of the world popping in, and it got worse the further I progressed. Playing on Series S and PC, on the other hand, I didn’t notice anything jarring. Despite my grievances in the last few hours of the game, “BioShock” was a tremendous treat to experience. With diverse mechanics, brilliant world-building through level design and AI behavior, and user-friendly UI, “BioShock” still manages to stand on its own legs all these years later and even outshines most modern AAA games. It does so many things well that it makes me eager to play the sequel and “Infinite”, and I’m even planning to read the book that inspired it, “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand. If you haven’t already, you need to play “BioShock”. Even if you’ve already played it, play it again - it’s more chilling when you already know what’s coming! Thanks for watching! If you liked this episode of Retro Review, be sure to check out our other episodes and tell me in the comments which game you’d like to see in a future Retro Review! I already have a precursor for the next episode, wink wink!
