No, sorry, the game’s not revolutionary. It’s just a mess of poorly thought out ideas and a bland shooter to boot. What’s not to hate? Given my seething critical distance from first-person shooters, Bioshock is really one of the worst I’ve played, primarily because there is so much made up around it, yet everything that is within it lacks any real substance at all. The problem of Bioshock is almost as much the built up expectation as the letdown of a game it actually is.
The story of the game is one in which the player makes “choices.” This is one of the big selling points of the game, and like so many games, a choice simply revolves around how many definitively good or definitively bad actions you take. Such stark contrast between possible actions has always struck me as odd, because people themselves are really rather fascinated with minute, seemingly inconsequential details. The way in which a fork is lighted in a foodie movie can be more important than any of the presentation of the food (note that the food is never unimportant, but not as important as the utensil with which it is consumed), which is the supposed “star” of the show. Videogames never really seem to follow minutia, they have never really seemed interested in it.
Well, that’s not entirely true. There are some RPGs that emphasize the convolution of minutia, mostly through menus or superfluous item sets, but in first-person shooters, such as Bioshock, there is a strong, annoying push to making everything extant, everything overt. Even the narrators are just “fact” drones, dropping their “knowledge” bombs on you as you helplessly listen to their annoying droning. In some ways, simply subverting everything that is overt could be the metric against which a first-person shooter is measured.
On the other side of things, any game with an art deco style is kinda hard to deny as being gorgeous if the artist has any clue as to what they’re doing. That is something undeniable, yet unfortunate about Bioshock. The art style of this game deserves so much exploration, yet there’s nothing ultimately interesting that the artist is allowed to do with the style, forced to simply make a boring shooter environment, where all the first-person shooter actions can happen effectively. The intimidating factor of the deco style is actually lost to make space for game construction.
This isn’t to say the space doesn’t make sense, just that the space conforms to a first-person shooter, not the sort of awkwardness that firefights would assume in deco domiciles. The problem of Bioshock is thus a question of boredom. Can you stand a boring game to look at some great artwork? If you can, Bioshock might be the game for you.
Recommended: No