BioShock (PS3)
PS3 owners: Fourteen months later, here's your chance to kiss a Big Daddy.
10/21/2008 6:24 PM | 1 Comments | Page 3 of 3
What's Hot: Unique setting; Incredibly bold take on the increasingly dull FPS genre; Engrossing storyline; Manages to be both cerebral and visceral at once
What's Not: Tepid third act; Devoid of multiplayer; 12-minute start-up install (or, as I like to call it, a funstall); Nothing here that 360 and PC gamers haven't seen before
Scott Jones
Status: Coffee makes me feel 4-percent sexier.
Which brings us back to the 14 months that have elapsed since
BioShock debuted. The PS3 version, especially considering the inherent roominess of the Blu-ray disc format, could have been the definitive version. Imagine a director's cut of the game, including a never-before-seen lost level; a level that the developers wanted to include, but didn't have time to implement in the original. Imagine a slew of documentaries on the production team; live-action video interviews with Ken Levine and company.
Here's your damn Blue Cross-Blue Shield card!
Unfortunately, what you get is a no-frills version of
BioShock. Yes, there's a new Survivor mode in the PS3 version, which forces you to be stingy with your bullets and more creative when it comes to deploying your plasmids. But honestly, it's a save-crawl experience -- i.e., you save, then crawl a few feet, etc. -- and not really all that much fun.
It really wouldn't have taken much to get me to go back to Rapture. I was hoping for an excuse to go back. Honestly, even the smallest nudge, and I'd gladly go. Yet the PS3 version doesn't contain that nudge. There's some promised downloadable content coming along in the form of Challenge Rooms, but what they are, and whether or not they will be the nudge I need, remains to be seen. (Challenge Rooms were not available at press time.)
Still,
BioShock retains its status as a landmark achievement in Rapture itself, which seems so very, very far-fetched, and yet, at the same time, the game makes us wonder, "Well, why can't there be a damn city at the bottom of the sea?"
That's the ultimate magic trick at the core of
BioShock, the thing that I never saw coming. No matter how hellish Rapture seems at times, with pipes bursting and water flooding in around you, and splicers and Big Daddies lurking at every turn, you can still clearly see what this place once was like -- what it must have looked like in its heyday, even in its current post-apocalyptic, blown-out form.
You can see that it was once beautiful down here. Hell, it's
still pretty damn beautiful down here. And, as nutty and unsympathetic as Andrew Ryan seems, at the heart of the
BioShock experience is the dirty little secret that we, as gamers, inevitably wind up being seduced by his wild and utterly impractical vision.
This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.
