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Okay, let’s cut right through the hyperbole, the 10/10 scores, all that bullshit. BioShock is not that great. In fact, it’s hard not to be disappointed by BioShock. It is at once the most incredible and most frustrating game in recent memory.

BioShock starts off beautifully. After an amazing, cinematic opening, you are led into a series of scripted events that suggests a lot of care has gone into crafting a stunning experience for the player. This is reinforced by the way the story tacitly unfolds around you. When games have a story as strong as this, the designers sometimes feel a tendency to shove it down the player’s throat, as if to say “We paid our writers a lot of money and, by Christ, we’re going to get value for that money.” BioShock is different. By picking up crew ‘diaries’, you’re given glimpses into the back-story of Rapture, but you’re left to piece them all together yourself, if you want to.

And even if you don’t, there’s still plenty of things to shoot at – your first introduction to a splicer gives you a great taste of your vulnerability down here, and had me twitching at the controller in an equal mixture of excitement and terror.

After the first hour, however, things start to get a little lazy. The environments, which were so dazzling and atmospheric at first quickly become cramped and uninspired. The possibilities of a huge, sprawling underwater city become reduced down to a series of similar-looking halls and offices and you realise that the open sandbox has been replaced by a very linear shooter.

By the second hour, you begin to wonder if Wind Waker hasn’t been usurped as the most offensive abuser of fetch-quests to pad out a game’s length. Once you have settled into the rhythm of BioShock, the rest of the game is spent collecting random items strewn around labyrinthine levels. Often you are told to travel far away to collect something, and once that’s done, you are told to travel back to your starting position to collect something else.

It’s frustrating, lazy game design, and completely mars the experience. Because once you notice this, you begin to notice that there aren’t actually that many enemies in Rapture. There are, all told, five or six character models, repeated ad infinitum. You begin to notice that your vulnerability has disappeared and you are suddenly armed with an arsenal of massively destructive weapons and psychic abilities. There is nothing you can’t kill, and barring any major fuck-ups, nothing that can kill you. Even the Big Daddy, the iconic, melancholy giant of the game, is easy prey when you’re loaded up with a grenade launcher and shots of electricity.

There are still moments of genius to be found in BioShock. The meeting with the artist is genuinely entertaining and unnerving in a way that I wish more games would emulate. But there are very few of these standout moments in the game, and the majority is spent in unremarkable encounters with unremarkable enemies in unremarkable locations.

There’s no question that BioShock is a good game, but given a longer gestation period, it could have been a lot better. Even without the padding, it could have been a lot better. Give me a 10 hour game of solid quality over a 10 hour game with 8 hours of padding any day of the week.

Addendum

Other things I didn’t mention that also disappointed me about BioShock:

  • The ‘moral choice’ of saving/harvesting the little sisters – once again, games reduce morality into a completely binary decision.
  • The weapons/plasmid upgrade scheme – pointless and irrelevant. A double-whammy.
  • Glitchy physics – throughout the game, I don’t think I saw one corpse that wasn’t twitching in some way.