Warning: If you don’t want to read spoilers, don’t read this post!

I finished Bioshock this evening. I don’t finish too many games but this this one was pretty short overall. I’m not sure how long it took but it couldn’t have been more than 12 hours, which is fine with me. Took me 2 weeks to get those 12 hours in as it was.

The day I got the game, I wrote a very excited post about how much I was looking forward to playing through it after having logged a couple hours of play time. Unfortunately, my interest in the game declined pretty much linearly from that moment on. I simply do not understand why this game has been reviewed so well unless the reviewers only played the first hour or two of the game.

The pluses:

  • A pretty game. Very, very nicely-done art in an attractive art deco-ish style. Not too many games use art deco, so that was refreshing. In fact, I think it was one of the things that initially suckered me into believing this was anything but a standard FPS wrapped in a huge hype ribbon.
  • The writing was not offensively bad. That’s a big step up over most games (probably including my own). Compared to most games the writing was excellent, in fact, but that’s not a very high bar to leap over.
  • Bug-free. Though I can’t speak for anyone else’s experience, mine was mercifully 100% free of bugs…just like all console games should be. Patching console games is lame. Still, this is the single 360 game I’ve played thus far for any length of time in which I didn’t notice any bugs.
  • The first 2 minutes. Possibly the best opening I’ve ever seen in any video game in any format.

The minuses:

  • The hype machine. I came into this with huge expectations. There was going to be this great storyline. There were going to be innovative gameplay mechanics. There were going to be real moral choices to make. All hype. I mean, don’t get me wrong, this is still a great game. It’s just not an awesome one, to my taste.
  • The story. I don’t tend to enjoy first person shooters, and pretty much the only way I’ll typically play one is if it allows for co-op play. Bioshock was pitched as having this engrossing story that shows games are art, blah blah blah, but if that’s art then pardon me, but big fucking deal. I mean the climax of the game is an absolutely standard battle against this larger-than-life guy who can throw fire, ice, and electricity. Call him a wizard or a super-villain and there are probably well over a 1000 games that culminated in essentially exactly this way. Big let-down.The other big letdown is that the story is almost entirely communicated to you by listening to tape recorders. Very little of what you actually do has any bearing whatsoever on the story. What you spend 99% of the game doing is shooting what amount to zombies, some of which throw fireballs, some of which leap at you, but all of which look more or less the same.
  • The gameplay. In your right hand you wield a weapon (various types of guns/projectile weapons) to attack things with. It has limited ammo, aside from the basic melee weapon (a wrench). In your left hand you wield ‘plasmids’ which are flat-out D&D-type spells. Fireball, lightning bolt, etc etc. Then, you walk around shooting things. That is the extent of the gameplay barring a minigame that is used for everything from opening safes to disabling attacking security bots to hacking into security cameras. By the end of the game I truly loathed that stupid minigame, which feels very awkwardly stuffed into the game to me. The most valuable thing in the game for me ended up being auto-hacking tools since they allowed me to mainly avoid the minigame.
  • The supposed moral choices. There was exactly one really meaningful choice to make in Bioshock, though you repeated that choice multiple times (perhaps 15 in all?). The choice is between killing these freakish little girls and getting X of a resource called ‘Adam’ (used to buy new spells or “plasmids” if you prefer) or not killing them and only getting X/2 of the resources. Of course, in the latter case you’re compensated after every 3 girls you rescue with gifts that more or less make up for what you lost. So in fact, the moral choice doesn’t even have any meaningful consequences for you, which makes it a trivial choice at best.
  • The “social commentary.” Sorry, but criticizing objectivism (Ayn Rand’s economic/moral psuedo-philosophy) is like criticizing Scientology. Satire, not criticism, is where it’s at for ideas that are just patently not worth taking seriously. Bioshock took itself very seriously and I occasionally got the impression that the developers felt they were really making a philosophical statement by incorporating some of the basics of Rand’s “philosophy” into the ostensible bad guy.

I suspect that had I rented this rather than bought it (definitely does not pass my ‘buy’ test in retrospect) and had I not been seeing ratings like 9.9 out of 10 and 5/5, and had I not read all sorts of people putting forth the notion that Bioshock is a credible comeback to Ebert’s assertion that games are not art, I would have been reasonably positive about it. On the other hand, there’s an equal chance that after the first hour or two I would have just gotten bored and turned it off. Had I known what was in store for me, that’s exactly what I would have done. I just kept holding out for the payoff (like with Fable) that never came and when I was done I was mostly just glad to be done forever with it.

I don’t like to get involved in the “Are games art” debate in public because my opinions may offend my fellow developers, but I’ll say this: If you hold Bioshock up as an example of the best art that the games industry produces, then you’re essentially saying, to my ears, is, “Dawn of the Dead is the pinnacle of film.” (And that’s unfair to Dawn of the Dead, which is a pretty well-done satire on something very real: rampant consumerism.)

I don’t mean to criticize Irrational/2k Boston (the devs) either, or damn them with faint praise. Bioshock is absolutely one of the most polished game experiences I’ve had in awhile. I just felt quite misled by the hype preceding the game’s release as well as the first minute of the game (which is awesome and literally bears no relationship to the rest of the game).

Overall, I’d give Bioshock, say, a 9.1 rather than the 9.9s its been getting.