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Friday 8 February, 2008
GAMEPLAY
Upon playing the game for a second time, I found that the expanse of the graphics (primarily in regards to character and level design) as well as the immersive storyline surpassed by previous amazement even further. I consider myself an avid horror movie fan, and even this game was frightening and rather disturbing to me. I found the storyline disturbing and extremely interesting. As it progressed, I found myself feeling sorry for the inhabits of Rapture who had been overtaken by greed and gluttony.
One aspect of the game that made it unique among the genre was its use of weapon and plasmid upgrades. I found the enemies becoming progressively harder (for example there was a new bomb throwing enemy), and as they became harder I found myself needing more powerful weaponry and plasmids. The game accurately answered this concern by allowing my main character to obtain new upgrades at various dispensers. As opposed to most FPSs where you simply obtain new weapons and rarely use your old ones, Bioshock allowed for multiple types of ammunition for each gun, making them extremely important based on the situation I was in.
Making it even more interesting, my character obtain the currency ("Adam") necessary to purchase upgrades by following the storyline and confronting the "Big Daddy's" (protectors of the demonic little sisters). This idea greatly helped to make me more inclined to continue the game rather than simply get frustrated and quit. Also, this gave me a choice of whether or not I would spend my money or save it for upgrades later. I found this aspect of the game to increase not only the enjoyability but the replayability as well.
DESIGN
One thing I found interesting about the game was the control scheme. At first I found it clunky and hard to aim, causing me to die rather frequently. However, once I got a tolerable control of the movement, I was able to focus more on strategies involving the other buttons. For example, the two back buttons made you shoot (the left = plasmid / the right=guns). I found this particularly important and interesting in that it was a very intuitive control scheme, which isn't often seen in first person shooters. This was also good in that the game often required me to quickly change guns and plasmids depending on the situations, and the control configuration allowed me to quickly change, rather than having to think about it for several minutes while being constantly attacked.
The one drawback I would say, though it is not exclusive to this FPS, was the difficulty of movement. Like I mentioned previously, the control scheme was intuitive and unique as far as weapon and plasmid usage, however, I found the difficulty of actually moving and aiming to be a drawback (though minor) to the overall game. Even though I didn't mind continually playing certain parts of the game as a result of dying, I felt that the movement controls made this almost an inevitability.
In addition, the difficulty to control the character made it difficult to use health and evo packs, particularly during intense battles. I found my necessity to use both hands for controlling the character made it very hard to stop movement in order to press one of the buttons necessary for accessing my med kits. This, in addition to the difficult movement, made me die more frequently than if perhaps there were a more intuitive way to perform these actions.
It goes without saying, however, that these minor drawbacks barely made the game any less enjoyable. They were only minor concerns that I expressed while playing the more difficult segments of this amazing game.
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