Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1325 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Take 2
• Released on: 2007-08-24
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• Platform: Windows XP
• Original language: English, German, French, Italian, Spanish
• Subtitled in: English, German, French, Italian, Spanish

Customer Reviews

Terrible name - brilliant game
A brief summary of my experience with Bioshock to date.

Firstly, installation - this worked fine for me, but the game must be activated each time it is installed via an online registration process. Internet access is required. There is also an auto-patching mechanism that updates the game to the latest version as part of the install - this took around 5 minutes for me on an 8mb broadband connection. I understand some people have had difficulty with repeat installations. At present, it seems that customers are limited to five installations per purchase, although supposedly a credit is given for each time you uninstall. This credit system appears to have gone awry in some cases, but Take 2, the publisher, looks to be making appreciable efforts to deal with issues as they arise. Ultimately if you intend playing on more than one machine, or you have a habit of uninstalling and reinstalling, bear this in mind.

Once installed and activated, all ran smoothly until just after the first introduction movie, when the sound almost completely died, to be replaced by strange clicks and pops. I gather this is another issue that many buyers have experienced, and it seems not to be related to any particular model of sound card or chipset. I solved it by switching off "reverb" and "EAX effects" in the options menu - a bit of a shame, but ultimately not a huge loss. There are other fixes being posted on the internet if this doesn't work - and it doesn't seem to be a problem for the majority of buyers.

Technical issues resolved, I cracked on with playing and was stunned. This game has atmosphere in spades and feels more like an interactive story than anything I have yet experienced. The story in question is entertainingly bonkers - a mad scientist's vision of a utopia under the seas gone horribly wrong. The utopia in question, Rapture, is a highly stylised art deco metropolis rendered with stunning graphics and filled with perfectly judged sound effects and music. I haven't felt so engrossed in a world since Half Life 2, which has a very different style but similar overall feel (in the sense that the game is fundamentally linear, but it just doesn't seem to matter).

Probably the standout element of Bioshock is the ability to modify your genetic make-up to develop new weapons and abilities - for instance, early on you gain the ability to fire lightning bolts from your hands, which can then be used on a simple level to stun enemies, rendering them more vulnerable to a solid whack with the wrench, or on a more strategic level to electrify water and take out multiple enemies, fry electrical devices, or enrage the hulking guardians of the city, the "Big Daddies" and goad them into attacking other bad guys. Later on you can adopt more macabre "plasmids", like the ability to fire swarms of bees, and passive skills like the power to tap into electronic devices. I would echo other reviewers' cautions - this isn't a game for kids or the squeamish, as it can be pretty bloody in places and some of the themes dealt with are controversial. For instance, the substance that enables you to develop the above skills ("adam") is harvested by "Little Sisters", screwed-up children that wander the city tapping corpses for their genetic material. Your choice is whether to free them from their gruesome task or kill them to harvest their adam in turn. At least the choices you make have an impact on how the story progresses, and playing the good guy can lead to some welcome surprises!

A quick note on performance - on a Core 2 Duo 6600 with 2GB RAM, an Nvidia 7950GT (512mb video RAM) and X-Fi Music card it runs nicely at 1280 x 1024 resolution with all but a couple of settings on high. Anything bigger than a 19" monitor and an 8000 series Nvidia or equivalent Radeon card is probably the order of the day.

Basically, once teething troubles are dealt with (one star lost for these) it's a gripping, beautiful, atmospheric interactive movie that plays like a dream, given a decent system. Thoroughly recommended.

Missing the point..
I think the main criticisms of the game have been done to death, so I'm not going to concern myself with copy protection, DRM, Vita-chambers or difficulty curves. To my mind anyway, these are very minor factors when set against how good this game is.

If you pidgeonhole Bioshock into our well-defined PC gaming stereotypes, it doesn't always measure up. As an FPS alone, it isn't HL2. As an RPG or experiment with emergent gameplay, it isn't Deus Ex or indeed System Shock 2. As a survival horror, it isn't Stalker, and as a stealth/exploration game, it isn't Thief. As a game experience, I honestly think it's better than all of these.

Remember when you first played Deus Ex. Suddenly you were faced with decisions you had never made before in a game, along with a reasonably developed storyline that didn't patronise the player. To my mind, Deus Ex was one of the first 'grown-up' games, with a unique sense of place. Since then, only Vampire - The Masquerade has created the same atmosphere, through its setting, storyline and fantastic voiceovers.

Bioshock combines the very best elements of heavily-scripted FPS games with the enviromment and tools to allow emergent gameplay should you choose to play this way. It's possible to blast your way through in a straight line, but play it on hard and approach it like Thief to really feel the intricacies of the game.

But combat gameplay aside, this is a more perfectly-crafted world than a series of environments to kill people in. With the possible exception of Planetscape:Torment, I've never been as engrossed in the multiple, interwoven storylines Bioshock gradually reveals, never felt so moved, never felt so angry. The scripting and voice-acting is exceptional, and moves Bioshock out of the restrictive gaming medium and into some more immersive.

So there you have it - I can appreciate the critisms levelled at Bioshock, but even if there are shortcomings to the individual gameplay components, mix them all together in the most incrediblly-realised virtual world ever made, put some time into absorbing all the background lore, stories, characters and emotions available, and trust me, you'll have a good time.

Shocked?
There's a massive difference I think, between those that play this on PC and those that play it on Xbox.

On the one hand, the XBox does not have all that many games of this ilk and consequently it appears fresh and new. On the PC however, it threads familiar enough territory and does not seem exceptional.

More pertinent, on the XBox, you pop in the disk and play the game, let your mates play, bring it to their house, play as often as you like... On the PC version there's very significant copy protection measures that limit how many times that you can install the game per user account, not just per PC. Also, the PC DVD comes, bizarrely, without the game!! ie the "exe" needed is not there, you have to download it from servers. Which really makes me wonder what will happen if I fancy playing this in a years time or whatever, who knows who then will own the rights to the game or if the company can still afford to run these servers?

It's an unusual way of doing things, pretend that you are selling the game but actually you are only really renting it to people. Even more annoying is the way nothing about this is mentioned on the Bioshock box or even in the manual. Nothing is said when you try to install the game. You are just left to discover some time in the future that your "activations" have run out or your game (ie "exe") is no longer available for download.

Whatever about the qualities of the game itself, shooting things in very nicely rendered surroundings for about 8 hours then game over, for PC users there are far more fundamental reasons to avoid this game. Game publishers do have a right to protect their products but not, I think, in this underhand secretive way that the publishers of Bioshock have undertaken. It's true the game does not last very long and perhaps is not special enough to warrant re-installing many times in future, but we should at least have a choice in this matter and at least know about these limitations when buying. I would avoid on PC for those reasons.