A Big Daddy lets out a deafening metal groan as he stomps his foot to the ground, shaking the earth and paralyzing you temporarily just before he charges at you, shoulder first, knocking you back ten feet and blurring your vision. The way the camera moves during these battles, other games are afraid to do outside of cut scenes, and while it’s jarring at first it helps BioShock be as immersive as any video game ever has been.
If you manage to defeat a Big Daddy (doing it without dying is a serious challenge for much of the game), the Little Sister he was escorting will sob over his corpse until you choose to either harvest Adam from her, effectively killing her, or save her, turning her back into a normal child. These are among the best enemy encounters and most emotional moments ever in a game, and really put the cherry on top of the sundae that is BioShock.
Its atmosphere feels very real, thanks to the horrifying ambient music and sound effects, the Splicers ranting to nobody almost incoherently about the lives they once had in Rapture, the eerie messages scrawled out in blood on the walls, and the way the game plays with lighting. Because of this, the licensed songs from the time period, and the beautiful and accurate art deco architecture, Rapture truly feels like a place that could have existed, despite being a fantastical undersea city with robot security where people can mold their genetic code however they wish, due to a type of sea slug that was discovered to excrete pure stem cells.
It’s these stem cells, modified into a genetic material called ADAM that the Little Sisters gather from the expired residents of Rapture. Adam’s application to your gene structure gives you tonics and plasmids, basically the game’s magic system, which keep the gun play surprisingly fresh. Plasmids are mapped to the left triggers, and guns to the right, so using combinations of the two (like freezing an enemy then shattering it with your shotgun) couldn’t be easier to pull off. Once you’ve gotten about halfway through the game and have a wide range of powers and weapons available to you, you can get really creative. For the most part, the AI and level design are pretty standard for a modern shooter, but combat feels great overall, and oftentimes will really get your blood pumping.
It’s the best example of Western gameplay design since Half-Life 2 in 2004, and the best example of Western storytelling in a game since Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic in 2003. The story is told mostly through audio logs, recorded by various citizens of Rapture, that you find hidden throughout the world. You listen to them as you play, and the writing and acting in them, as well as the game’s few cut scenes, are superb. The game’s plot twist is among the best I’ve experienced in any medium, and while neither ending is spectacular, they’re both at the very least satisfying. The narrative in BioShock is truly what makes it a special game. It’s so good, in fact, that it makes games, even great games like arguably the last two “game[s] of the year,” Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War, seem lazy in comparison.
BioShock is the rare kind of game that’s so good that the handful of missteps (lack of a melee button, some glitches with the audio) stand out, but in the end their effect on the overall experience in negligible.
At this point in time, most people who play video games see them more as grounds for competition and mindless fun than as a legitimate art form capable of more than just that, and BioShock is among the few games that prove these people wrong. Anyone at all interested in video games should play the game, and I’m confident it will change the way they think about the medium.
