Bioshock Clan Review
Clan Overall Score: A+ (98%)
overview of the rating system
| Presentation: | (4.8) Excellent |
| GamePlay: | (4.8) Excellent |
| Ambiance: | (5.0) Peerless |
| Fun Factor: | (4.8) Excellent |
Shalewind's Scoring
Overall Score: A+ (96%)
| Presentation: | (4.5) Excellent - Bioshock is amazing looking. The graphics on all the moving pieces are immaculate. Humanoids look a little hollow, but the game itself is so pretty you hardly notice. The Big Daddies and water effects in particular are excellent. The game has an excellent soundtrack, but offer very little music. The voice acting is spot. |
| GamePlay: | (4.5) Excellent - Movement is good, with only a few hang ups. I found walking backwards to be a bit tricky and there are the occasional hangs on objects. Overall I think it could have been smoother motion. However, combat is fairly fluid allowing for easy motion and fair jumping control. The difficulty is just about right, playing on Hard gives you a real challenge without being obscene. Frame rate is good and I only saw it flutter a few times. The game handles well with a variety of creative weapons and plasmids. |
| Ambiance: | (5.0) Peerless - Bioshock is one of the most innovative in its class for story and immersion. It's creative, dark, and has excellent period piece elements. To be honest, the prospect of playing in Art Deco was not appealing to me, but once I started play I realized the attention to detail and immersion was intense. The story scenes are light, but the emotional attachment and depth is strong for such a short view. Bioshock got one of the best endings I've seen in a while, even though it's only 90 seconds (I'm talking about the savior ending). I loved the good and evil choices and found moments with the Little Sisters to be very touching. Excellent in all regards to story and atmosphere. |
| Fun Factor: | (4.5) Excellent - For an FPS, Bioshock delivers. You get to fry, shoot, shock, and pummel baddies in all your favorite ways. Best part is, you don't have to do it in a particular way. Sure, you CAN pattern fight some of the "bosses" and other dezians of the deep, but you don't HAVE too, and this is key. I simply adored telekinesis and the crossbow, others found other weapons equally appealing. I played through using a variety of techniques so I didn't get bored, but there is some repetition approaching the last boards. This game delivers in the fun department. |
Dark Gyraen's Scoring
Overall Score: A+ (100%)
| Presentation: | (5.0) Peerless - Bioshock is a gorgeous game, and ranks up there with the likes of Gears of War. Every inch of Rapture is perfectly lit and wonderfully detailed. Water is wonderfully animated, dripping from every corner and pooling on the floors. While the 'Art Deco' style might have kept some at arms length to begin with, its blend with a near apocalyptic collapse looks visually stunning, to the point players may find themselves stopping to admire the view. The occasional stutter might occur, and this game will be hard to run on the PC without a serious rig, but none of that detracts from the beautiful visual achievement that is Bioshock. |
| GamePlay: | (5.0) Peerless - Bioshock doesn't so much reinvent the FPS genre, as it adds new elements that make it a vastly different game. Much like the Deus Ex series before, Bioshock equips you will with a number of weapons and magic like plasmids, ensuring that each enemy faced can be taken down in numerous ways. Bust into a room guns blazing, laying waste to your enemies is one option, but so it setting them on fire and watching them run to the nearest body of water to put themselves out, only to allow you to electrocute them. Smooth as silk FPS controls seem well used here, and while the game is fairly easy towards the end on the regular difficulty setting, bumping it up to the next level makes the game seem just about perfect. The vita-tube chambers sap some of Bioshocks bite, knowing that players will just pop back, ready to finish the fight they started, but that's the only kink in the iron clad armor that is Bioshock. |
| Ambiance: | (5.0) Peerless - Other developers, take heed, this is how you make game atmosphere. Rapture is the perfect setting, high decadence laying in ruin. Rounding a corner to see some insane woman weeping over a stroller, you hesitate for a moment before crushing her skull with a wrench, only to find her baby was a handgun. The sound and music of Bioshock is perfect for it's setting, with music from the time period often playing in the background, or the ramblings of the insane splicers, to the ever popular quotes of the Little Sisters and the whale like moans of the Big Daddies. And then there are the Little Sisters, one of video games most morally challenging devices of all time. Destroy them to harvest the life giving Adam, or save the small girls and give them your freedom, the choice is yours. And it's such a choice that when having admitted I harvested the girls, one friend asked me "What kind of monster are you?" When was the last time anyone asked you that because of what you did in a video game? When was the last time you cared what you did to a digital denizen? Bioshock makes you care, and that's a huge achievement. |
| Fun Factor: | (5.0) Peerless - It's hard not to get sucked into Bioshock, with the variety of weapons and powers at your disposal, every fight is new. You can spend the whole game finding new combinations that allow you to dispatch of your enemies. Even after you beat the game; it seems worth it to play through the entire epic a second time, for the second ending, and to play with the toys within Rapture a bit more. Never has a game made you begin to take mental inventory before a fight, but every time one of the lumbering Big Daddies stomps his earth shaking way onto the screen, evil little girl in tow, players will begin to do that checklist in their head; "Do I have enough grenades? How many health packs do I have? Is it worth it to take him down now, or should I find him later?" Every aspect of the game keeps you enthralled, enjoying the fall of Rapture in a dark, loving way that pays homage to the skilled developers. |
| Overall | Despite having no multi-player support, and as of now, no online support, Bioshock still stands out as the best game so far this year. Incredible graphics that are in the top tier of gaming, combined with almost perfect music and sound use creates an atmosphere that draws players into the fallen city of Rapture. Plot twists and moral decisions will keep players enthralled, and every minute spent with Bioshock is like a love letter from its developers. This is easily the best game so far of 2007 and one of the most likely forerunners for 'Game of the Year'. |