BioShock (2007) Review
Lone survivor of a plane crash, you float in an ocean of fire, your only landmark a great lighthouse towering like an obelisk above the water. You swim, you enter, and descend into the sea inside a submarine shaped like a golden orb, to a vast and ruined city beneath the waves…
When the banal discussion of whether video games are to be considered art is dragged screaming from the pit, BioShock is brought up frequently. Since its Xbox 360 release in 2007, BioShock has built up a pedigree that many games can only aspire to. It sold over 2 million units within a year of release, led to a successful franchise, and allowed director Ken Levine a blank check to fritter away time and resources on some empty vanity project for much of the last decade.
Much of BioShock’s acclaim, in my eyes, comes from its writing and presentation. The decrepit underwater metropolis of Rapture is magnificent in its decay, a truly rich and almost tangible world brought to life through death. Rapture was built with great care and attention to detail, and for my money is BioShock’s big draw. There is a palpable atmosphere of ruin in the air, not only of the huge concrete structures, but the ruin of Rapture’s denizens, reduced to the drug-crazed raiders more typical of post-apocalyptic settings such as Mad Max or Fallout. Rapture, though, is its own breed of apocalypse. Indeed, the city is a character in itself, with a personality well developed across the game’s locales.
But the status of BioShock as a work of high art lies in its narrative, of which Rapture itself is very much a part. Rapture is a city built on the ideology of objectivism, an extreme form of libertarianism that celebrates individual freedom above all else, including government and community — industry, and the wealth derived from the labour of the masses being funnelled into the hands of oligarchs, is king. The self-styled king of Rapture, Andrew Ryan (a thinly veiled analogue to real-world lunatic Ayn Rand), built the city as an escape from the overbearing eyes of the state.
The player comes to Rapture long after its fall from grace, with much of the city deserted and looted by murderous Splicers, citizens turned psychotic by the presence of a newly mined drug, ADAM. The only source of ADAM is the demonic Little Sisters, who are protected by the hulking Big Daddies, terrifying creatures wearing rusted diving suits and wielding huge mining drills. Naturally, the player’s goal is to fight their way through a horde of these creatures as they work to depose Andrew Ryan, guided by the voice of their chirpy radio companion Atlas.
Partway through the story, a plot twist flips the narrative on its head, recontextualising all the player knows — or thinks they know — up until that point. It leads to questions of player agency in video games, free will, and all those other complex philosophical trifles. To new players fifteen years later, the twist might appear quite trite and worn, but it instils strong emotion nevertheless, and it is clear that BioShock is something of a watershed in the exploration of video games as a narrative device. Alongside this, BioShock is a pretty damn fun game to play, despite beginning to sport some grey hairs.
The game is a relatively straightforward first-person shooter. The gunplay is serviceable though not particularly fluid, with a good variety of weapons that allows the player to switch up their playstyle quite frequently and offers strategic depth in how different situations are approached. The true meat of the game, however, is in the plasmids system, special abilities ranging from electric shocks to summoning a swarm of furious bees, which allows for enormous variety and a great deal of experimentation. Despite the choice available to me though, I tended to stick to a few favourites and made it through the game just fine, so a deep understanding of the game’s systems isn’t strictly necessary.
Combat is hampered however by an inability to use both guns and plasmids at the same time, requiring switching between the two, which can sometimes get a bit clumsy in the heat of the moment. The level design and quest structure is solid and shows off the beauty of Rapture, but doesn’t much push the boat out. And the strength of the narrative can be stifled by its near overreliance on audio logs, strewn throughout levels, sometimes easy to miss if the player is not the exploratory type, and can bring the game’s flow to a halt if one chooses to stop and listen (rather than risk the log being cut off part-way because of a scripted sequence, or lost in the din of battle).
BioShock begat two sequels, BioShock 2 and BioShock Infinite, a couple of novels, and an HD remaster collection in 2016. The remastered version was the one I played for this review, and it does a bang up jobs of cleaning up the game’s muddy textures and boosting its performance, but I did notice a fair few crashes during my playthrough. Not enough for me to write the port off entirely, but enough to prevent me from relying entirely on autosaving.
In spite of some rough edges, BioShock is a great game worthy of its significance in the lineage of games as art. On the whole, I fall on the side of art as an ultimately subjective experience. It is descriptive, not prescriptive, relying on the strings of our hearts more than rules and guidelines. There are those who say BioShock is art, and so it is. Why else would we still be talking about it?
