A Non-Review of Bioshock

This is supposed to be a review of the guaranteed-to-be-a-cult-classic Xbox 360/PC game, Bioshock. The problem is, I don’t really know what to say about the game. The first 75 percent of the game is epic, grand, and enthralling, and then all at once it all falls away and becomes a standard shooter with a boring and mud puddle-shallow revenge driven storyline. To get an idea of how egregious this is, imagine if you will that towards the end of Citizen Kane, after learning of the life and trials of Charles Foster Kane, our intrepid reporter returned to his home where he was ambushed by the movie’s eponymous subject, and beaten within an inch of his life. Finally, Kane reveals that some years previous, the reporter had run over his beloved dog “Fruffers,” and the billionaire newspaper magnate faked his death in order to carry out his revenge. Now imagine that he produces a shotgun, kills the man, and then has to shoot his way out of the apartment complex, blowing away hundreds of faceless thugs. Would you still call that a good movie? Keep in mind though, that up to this point this new version contains every single captivating scene from the original, save for the crucial “Rosebud” reveal.

I was going to use an analogy here comparing the game to having sex, and just before the climax you stop and go home. But that’s not really what it’s like. A better analogy is just as things are getting good, you remember that you have a whole bunch of math homework you have to do. You still come, but it’s cheapened somewhat by the fact that now you have to spend the rest of the night doing equations.

Okay, so what the fuck am I talking about? Well, to get specific, I’ll need to provide a quick synopsis of the game. Take care, beyond this point, there be spoilers.

You start out the story on a plane, speaking a single line of insignificant voiceover. This stands out as odd, because these will be the last words you will ever hear your character speak. The plane soon crashes, and you find yourself swimming to a curious lighthouse in the middle of the sea. Inside is a conspicuous bathysphere, which you climb into without hesitation and throw the switch. Why in the name of Ayn Rand you would do this, is an interesting question, and a matter for later on. Immediately you plunge beneath the sea, the sphere darkens, and a projector suddenly springs to life. Across a dusty screen flicker images of propaganda as a charismatic and confident voice fills you with his ideals. The screen suddenly shrinks away to reveal his underwater utopia, the city of “Rapture.” And it’s beautiful. It’s sort of an underwater New York meets Chicago, with three times the vertical height, with whales and giant squid roaming between the tube-connected high-rises. You can’t help but feel a sense of awe at this impressive feat of artistry and design, and as you approach your destination, the game teases you with advertisements, saying things like “free samples of telekinesis.”

As soon as you enter the docking station, however, everything changes. Inside, the city is literally falling apart, and there is trash and debris strewn everywhere. Worse yet, the only inhabitants you see are horribly mutilated punks, who wander the city, violently assaulting anyone they encounter. Your only contact in this dank hellhole is a charming fellow with an difficult to place accent named “Atlas.” He enlists you in helping his family escape the city. Without even a second thought, you agree and start collecting weapons, and powering yourself up with “plasmids,” solutions which alter your DNA giving you fantastic powers. As you proceed, you start to find tape recorders, lots and lots of tape recorders. Apparently the citizens of Rapture were encouraged to keep audio diaries and then leave them all scattered about. Through these recordings, you begin to learn of the city, and how it came to be first divided by class warfare, and then utterly destroyed by plasmids. You also learn of the little girls, transformed into monsters by the substance that allows the transformations, called “ADAM,” who are trained to gather and recycle the precious gene-altering substance from the recently deceased. You quickly learn from experience of the nigh-unstoppable killing machines whose sole purpose it is to guard them.

By the time you reach Atlas’ family, the Charles Foster Kane type you heard back in the bathysphere, Andrew Ryan, has begun to notice your presence in his city, and is now actively trying to kill you. He responds to your escape attempt by blowing up your escape submarine, killing Atlas’ wife and child in the process. Heartbroken, Atlas charges you with a mission of vengeance, asking you, “would you kindly kill Andrew Ryan?”

By this point, and along the path toward Ryan, you begin to notice strange things. As this is a video game, death is impossible, because that would permanently ruin your ability to progress in the game. However, this game actually handles death with something that exists within the world of the game. If you die, you are instantly transported to a Vita-Chamber, a sort of glass resurrection tube. From here, you can, step out of the tube, and everything will be as it was, except you are not alive. It is not a retry, as your actions, have not been reversed, it is an honest resurrection. But sooner or later, you’re going to begin wondering why the Vita-Chamber only works on you. The answer is revealed to you first subtly through tape recordings, then explicitly once you reach Ryan. You are Ryan’s son.

You were conceived illegitimately, and your prostitute mother sold your fetus to researchers, probably so that she could score more ADAM, and your genes were altered to resist the poisonous effect that junk had on so many. You were also conditioned to someday return to Rapture, to kill Andrew Ryan. Atlas’ quirky catchphrase of, “would you kindly?” is revealed to be a codeword which forces you to follow the request without question. As a result, you have no choice but to watch as you brutally kill an old man, who wants nothing more than to save your freedom. Atlas is then revealed to be Ryan’s rival, the man who started the black market that eventually destroyed Rapture, the smuggler Fontaine. Turns out his family, as well as his endearing accent, were fake, and just the tools of deception he employed to use you to take out Ryan.

Now, up to this point, this sounds pretty great, right? Well, this is the point where the story takes a nose-dive. Obviously it isn’t over, as you clearly need to deal with Fontaine now. The stage has been set, Fontaine’s plan has succeeded, and now he should be poised to take over Rapture, right? The only problem is that he doesn’t. Instead, he spends the rest of the game taunting you, and just generally being a dick over the radio. Doesn’t this guy have stuff to do? Plus, as he’s talking to you over the radio, he doesn’t really reveal any new details. You never really get to see why he used this plan in the first place, or why he’d even want to take over Rapture after he’d basically turned it into a cesspool where only survivors were crack heads all hopped up on superpower juice.

So you shoot a bunch of guys, and you no longer really care about the setting. In fact, it hardly seems like you’re underwater anymore. After killing who knows how many crack heads, you finally reach Fontaine, who has pumped himself so full of ADAM that he’s a giant glowing steel monster. There is absolutely no explanation for why he did this, in fact there’s no indication up to this point that he’d been indulging in ADAM. After a pathetically easy boss fight there’s a cutscene which I swear is only about 45 seconds long, where you return to the surface with the little girls you’ve saved, it’s shown that you raised them as surrogate daughters, and then you’re returned to the title screen. No credit crawl, not even a fade to black, just “Bioshock: Press Start.” That’s all you get for beating the game.

You learn nothing new about Fontaine, and nothing new about the city, from the moment you kill Andrew Ryan onward. There are still tape recorders everywhere, but they only tell you where you can find the next macguffin to bring you closer to the final fight.

This is not a review of Bioshock. I say this because even having expended this many words about the game, I still don’t know what to think of it. Bioshock invited me over for a party, and it was a kickass party, until for some unknown reason we all started taking turns humping the radiator. If I had to score it, I would give the first part a perfect score, and the second part a score of “a porcupine fisting a cream pie.”

So now I’m going to retire to the garage and finish construction on my Big Daddy suit, so I can finally finish the game properly. See you on the evening news.

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