Where great ideas and beautiful designs go to die.
While playing through Bioshock Remastered for the first time, I encountered the mad J. S. Steinman. He was the first minor antagonist; a surgeon gone mad in a world without morals. I saw his grisly work firsthand. Mutilated corpses lined his clinic, and his failed experiments found themselves nailed into the walls, or hung from the ceiling. The game truly sets up a nightmare scenario. I eventually cornered the doctor in the operating room, and he rushed me.
Thirty seconds later and two first aid kits down, the crazed doctor lay dead at my feet. And I couldn’t help but feel disappointed.
This was my entire experience with Bioshock. Almost everything in the game is wonderful – in theory. A mad surgeon forcibly operating on patients in a quest to create a being of pure beauty. An extreme artist who tasks you to kill his students, photograph their corpses, and turn those photos into an art piece. The main antagonist, a mad Ayn Rand wannabe who was crazy enough to try and build utopia, and was so committed to his ideals that he’d let utopia crumble around him rather than let a government intervene.
All of these mock-ups have insane potential, enough to carry their own games. And yet after each and every one lay dead at my feet, I felt nothing. Killing the monster that started all of this felt no different than killing any of the thousands of splicers and henchmen I’d already left in my wake. Whether I killed Cohen, Ryan, and Steinman or ignored them didn’t matter to me.
It’s hard to describe but Bioshock, like few other games, engenders passivity in me. There were multiple times where I sat down, and questioned why I should even continue. At first it was out of intrigue – I wanted to see Andrew Ryan. I wanted to find the personality behind all of this, and I wanted to finally meet a real character. But after Ryan came and went, my only motivation to beat the game was to review it. Which is rarely, if ever, a good sign.
It doesn’t help that Bioshock’s gameplay is rudimentary. It’s just not engaging.
The gun-play is thoroughly uninspired. My options felt limited, rather than intentional. Whenever I used the revolver or the crossbow, it wasn’t because I wanted to. It was because my machine gun ran out of ammo and I couldn’t buy more just yet. Whenever I used the plasmids – this game’s magic system – it was never because I wanted to. It was either due, again, to a lack of ammo, or because I absolutely had to stun an enemy. Bioshock tries to provide a wealth of options to use in combat, however this generosity exposes how flimsy it really is.
Plasmids are another causality of this generosity. There’s 11 active plasmids, and outside of “Electro Bolt” and “Inferno” I never really found any use for them. EVE – the mana – is a pretty scarce resource at times. And the amount of EVE you’ll need to fight Big Daddies is hefty. So why waste it on some random shmuck you can one-shot head-shot anyway?
Although speaking of the Big Daddies, I’ll give a little praise to the game. The enemy design – and indeed the artistic design of the entire game – is phenomenal. Despite disliking the actual game, I love everything it does artistically. The idea of Rapture, a New York City below the sea, is such a beautiful visual. The Big Daddies and Little Sisters, despite their names, are an amazing idea. The heavy use of glass walls and ceilings to emphasize the crushing weight of the ocean above you, and the flooded hallways you come across are potent reminders of how insane the entire thing is. Even the plasmids and guns, as dull as they are in practice, are still beautiful.
But that’s the exact issue with the game. Every brilliant, imaginative idea it has is wasted on a disappointing implementation.
To highlight this point; the Big Daddies. They’re fearsome creatures that guard the Little Sisters. Fighting them early on is a really dangerous proposition, with a huge reward. You provoke and attack this creature that can three-shot you, and invest the ammo and first aid kits needed to defeat it in order to gain access to the Little Sister. Little Sisters are how you gain ADAM, a key upgrade component (which I’ll touch on later), and they’re the only way to get it.
At first glance this is a fine gameplay loop. Hell, it’s an extremely basic one. Kill the strong enemy to get the rare item. However this loop has two crucial flaws.
Firstly, it’s boring. Fighting the Big Daddies are roughly to same each time, and to get the good ending you need to fight over twenty of the guys. Meaning twenty of the nearly identical fight, as your character gets stronger and stronger, quickly outmatching the Big Daddies and removing any sense of threat. Secondly, it doesn’t test your skill, it’s a pure resource sink. You can’t kill the Big Daddies faster with better play, or kill them easier with accurate shooting. You just have to have either enough EVE to spam “Electro Bolt” (a stun attack) until they die, or you have to have enough first aid kits to survive its attacks until you fill it with bullet holes.
Again, this is a design flaw that plagues most of Bioshock. Need to hack an enemy? Then spam the puzzles until you get a solvable one. Need to kill some enemies? Well use the machine gun, unless you’re out of ammo, then go down the flowchart of weapons. Need to kill a boss? Run in circles draining their health faster than they drain yours.
This was a major reason why I couldn’t get invested in Bioshock. It didn’t feel like caring or thinking about the gameplay any more than the bare minimum would help me. And when your audience is so disinterested in your game that they go on autopilot for multiple hours, well that’s not exactly a great thing.
Leaving Rapture, I feel a profound apathy I didn’t have upon entering it. I was excited to jump straight into Bioshock 2, but now it’s just another name on my backlog. I know I’ll get around to it eventually, but I’ve lost the intrigue the series held over me.
Bioshock was always lauded as this magical series. Supposedly one of the best video games ever created, it would go on to inspire dozens of clones and had a profound impact on the games industry. But actually playing it has been a chore more than anything. Although I’m glad to have finally beaten such a classic game, and glad to put another game under my belt, part of me wishes I never had. Part of me wishes Rapture was still a mystery, deep beneath the sea.
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