I wasn’t as taken with it as Tycho. The most obtrusive problem is the enemy design. In System Shock your enemies were programmed cyborgs which explained their simple enemy behavior. In System Shock 2 they were mindless mutants, which ditto. But the people in Bioshock are people, and I simply do not understand why every single person in the world is willing to fight to the death to kill me as soon as they see me. You can say, “Splicing drove them insane” except that there are several points during the demo when I hear splicers talking to each other rationally. Of course, as soon as they sense me, they turn into Quake 1 monsters and all I can do is shoot them.
Second flaw, in my opinion – very little backstory. Atlas starts barking orders at you as soon as you leave the bathysphere and tells you nothing about what is actually going on in the city. Yes, one of the charms of games like this is that you piece it together for yourself, but it’s just incongruous not to get ANY information from him…even if it’s misinformation. He doesn’t even tell you about plasmids; your character basically just walks up to a busted vending machine, picks up a syringe and plunges it into his forearm for no good reason (as far as he knows at the time).
The whole demo just feels kind of lazy, as if Ken Levine & Co are betting that you played previous Shock games and know the formula and thus they don’t have to spend time setting things up.
And one more niggling thing…the voice messages you get are vital both in terms of plot and to keep the gameplay flowing, and they are hard to understand because of all the “it’s a late 50’s recording device” scratchiness overlaid on them. I turned on subtitles, but that’s got its own problem…subtitles actually run ahead of the audio you’re listening to, which is annoying, and the only things subtitled are recordings and transmission – no in-game speech is subtitled.
The good? Goshwow, it’s pretty (though my computer can barely run it). The story does seem complex and interesting and there’s a suggestion on one of the voice recordings that Atlas is not being completely straight with us, so it may not just boil down to Ryan == Bad, Atlas == Good. Plasmids are fun. Shooting is fun (if the frame rate can stay high enough to make it possible). Holy crap the game is creepy in spots – excellent atmosphere.
I’ll almost certainly pick up the full game eventually…but unless the game improves immensely, I don’t think it’s going to beat System Shock 2 despite all the pretty.
The demo has been cut down pretty severely from the full version, I’m told: you shouldn’t have access to that many plasmids that early and there’s a gentler curve to the plot involved.
The subtitles are buggy on both the 360 and PC versions. I’m hoping a patch will be made available.
So, is the full game better? Or are the 9.+ reviews of this game the kind of rampant gamer fanboyism that gives me a headache and overall misanthropic attitude towards gaming “press.”
For us non-native English speakers subtitles are pretty much a must. (Which makes me wonder why max payne didn’t have subtitles.. =)
Actually, if you make use of the help screen, you may notice that there are transcriptions of each of the radio messages.
To me, the explanation of being hostile to anything unfamiliar worked ok. Some splicers work fine together and others will fight each other to the death. Playing the full game, I walked into a couple rooms where splicers were fighting each other without me using any plasmids on them. You also never seem to see more than two or three working together. If you hear the things they yell at you as they attack you, the paranoia/demented angle seems plausible to.
As far as the backstory – well, the demo is almost identical to the opening chapter of BioShock, but the story is also really held back until you get past the Welcome chapter, as if Welcome was just a way to get you used to exploring the world with the controls at hand.
I was on the fence about getting an FPS for my 360, but the demo enthralled me enough that I went and ordered it the same afternoon that I played the demo.
Just heard about the copy protection.. won’t be buying that one in a hurry.
Elaborate on the copy protection please sol_hsa? I have yet to decide if I will be buying BioShock (not a FPS kind of guy) and heard that there are a lot of spoilers about, and so have avoided reading much on the game. Copy Protection that replaces drivers, and/or keeps me from playing a game I paid for and then can’t return because all customers are assumed to be software pirates is a Pet Peeve of mine (I’ll spare you all the rant, however!).
Apparently installs a new service, and you need to authenticate the game online – and should you want to change the harddrive or reinstall your OS, remember to de-authenticate first, or it’s game over. The same system is also in the steam version. I don’t have firsthand experience about this so I don’t know if it’s true, but I’d say that it comes from a fairly reliable source (a finnish national game mag website).
Dang! With the bad taste left in my mouth from other DRM schemes like that, I am not going to be messing with that. Thanks for the heads up, sol-hsa.
I agree with you, I’ll admit I haven’t played to much but I want to like Bioshock but it is no System Shock 2 or Deus Ex for that matter.