Kalamaf Drackonsbane

About a month ago I borrowed Bioshock from a friend of mine for the XBox 360. Last week I finally got around to trying it out and it definitely lives up to the reviews I had read. The story is interesting and compelling right from the start when your plane crashes into the ocean. Fires roar all around you as you try to find somewhere safe to swim to. Out of the smoke appears a tower in the water and upon reaching it and looking inside, there’s an elevator that takes you down into an underwater city called Rapture.

The game is certainly creepy enough and is very well laid out. The environments are well designed and believable, right down to the grimy plumbing fixtures in the busted up washrooms. It looks and feels like a dying city overrun by madmen. I never had a problem with getting lost thanks to the auto-map, the goals button and the arrow that frequently points you in the right direction. The Big Daddy’s are downright unnerving the first couple of times you encounter them, and the little sisters are great at messing with your emotions as well, especially if you have a real child of your own.

When I was playing through for the first couple of hours, my 4 yr old was sitting next to me, watching me play. When I got to the first Little Sister my daughter was asking ‘are you going to kill that little girl?’. This made it rather difficult to harvest them, so I opted to rescue them instead, explaining to my daughter that no, I wouldn’t kill them, I would save them. Even still, she was confused as to why the sisters kept saying no and why they looked so evil. All was well afterward though when they returned to normal and said thank you before running off. It speaks volumes for a game like this to actually make it difficult to ‘kill’ something childlike. It boils down to the fact that it’s only a game though, and if I play through it again I’ll harvest them all just for the extra adam. To play through on hard difficulty I think you’d need every bit of it.

When it comes to the plasmids (super power-like abilities) I found I only used 3 of them with any regularity. Shock to disable turrets and cameras, fire to melt ice when needed, and telekinesis when fighting Nitro Splicers and for picking up far away items. Aside from that I never really used the others, simply choosing to shoot all my enemies. I found I used most of the weapons though, but near the end I was favoring the wrench most often since several of the guns just didn’t seem to do much damage.

For physical tonics I had equipped the wrench damage increaser, the invisibility mod and the one that quiets your footsteps and gives crits on wrench swings. For guns, the upgraded shotgun and machine gun tended to be my favorites but I did use the others when those 2 ran out of ammo. The hacking mini-game gets extremely repetitive though and after I unlocked the ‘hack 50 items’ achievement I pretty much stopped hacking things altogether since money isn’t much of a concern after the first few hours.

The story kept me hooked though, especially after that little plot twist about 3/4′s of the way through. I hadn’t really seen that one coming so it was a nice surprise that renewed my interest and made me want to keep playing to see what was going to happen next. I found the end was a little abrupt though, and the last fight not overly difficult. I did burn through most of my health kits though due to some bad timing on movements, but I killed him on my first try.