I have been playing BioShock (Bioshock? BIOSHOCK?) lately and thought I would post a quick review of my thoughts.
As an FYI, I do play all the major FPSs (and some of the lesser known ones), so I have some familiarity with the genre. I have not yet finished BioShock, but am probably better than 80% finished.
First, the good news.
The game is gorgeous. The environments are really spectacular and the game conveys a slightly claustrophobic, slightly crazy atmosphere. The world feels right for the game, if that makes any sense. The sound is likewise impressive, from the scratchy records playing in the background, to the whistling of an enemy as he wanders the halls. The voice acting is excellent throughout, making the near constant diary entries actually pleasant to get through.
The plot is likewise interesting. I did guess at one major revelation early on (it is not particularly tricky). There is another, bigger twist that I did not see coming that is handled very well.
There is a scene with Ryan later on that I particularly liked. It was actually rather moving.
The level layout is decent, though not particularly imaginative. The weapons all look good and feel right, if you know what I mean. There is enough variety in the Plasmids and Gene Tonics to allow a variety of play styles and once you get enough slots, you will be able to custom-tailor your gameplay significantly.
Now, the bad:
The game crashes on my system roughly every three-four hours. I updated all my video and sound drivers, but that still has not really helped. I also have a weird problem where the game sometimes restores the default settings. I have some of the high-end graphics options turned off and on a number of occasions, I have had to go back in and reset them. This is a really strange bug that I have never seen in a game before.
There are really only 4-5 enemies in the game and I am getting tired of killing them over and over. The enemies also level as the game progresses, so the enemy that took 5 pistol rounds on level 1 now takes 15 on level 3 and so on.
Mini-Rant: I hate it when enemies level as the game progresses. My problem with it is that essentially any enemy from the end of a game could wipe out everything at the beginning. This always feels like lazy design to me. Give me new tougher enemies. Better yet, mix in the new, tougher in with the old, weaker enemies. That way I have to think about what I am shooting. I will also feel powerful (by wiping out the cannon fodder), but challenged by the bigger boys.
The Big Daddies are not particularly interesting to fight. I tried a variety of fancy tactics, but eventually got bored with trying to set elaborate traps. I just blaze away with whatever weapon has the most and best ammo. I die a lot on them, but it does not really matter.
Death does not matter. Often times, you repop right around the corner and just continue the combat, making any battle really a matter of time. In its defense, BioShock is not really a true FPS (more of a FPS/RPG hybrid), so that was probably a very conscious decision to make the game easier and more accessible.
The hacking gets very old very quickly. There is no reason not to hack everything, so obviously I do, but you can only play Plumber so many times. Alternated mini-game styles would have been nice.
Overall, the core of the game (the visuals, sound, weapons, etc) feel and look really great, but the constant crashes and setting resets hurt. The gameplay is decent, but there is nothing that really stands out. They do deserve props for some interesting plot twists and characters, however. Ultimately, I feel like more could have been done with the game.
BioShock is like a really fancy sports car with a crappy engine. Once the initial thrill fades and you realize its going to break down once a week, youre probably going to leave it in the garage.
Cheers,
-Jason
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11 comments:
thats sad to hear, I was very excited for this game now im a little dissapointed oh well.
I've played for hours, and still haven't reported back after photographing those spider splicers. In other words I'm taking it slow, trying to explore as much as possible of the areas, the enemies, the options. Good thing the SHIFT-key allows me to switch to a weapon a mere fraction of a second after taking pictures with my trusty camera. Bad thing is that I have to get too close to nitro splicers. But I'm going to have to see if crouching can be used to sneak up on them. Damn it, there should be a bonus for taking pictures of unaware splicers! After all, you don't need to see pictures of them when they're attacking - you see that all the time! ;-)
I run the game with all graphic options turned off (I think) and highest detail on the textures. Otherwise it's a little bit too laggy for this computer. So far I've only found two glitches, and one of those is after quitting the game: It seems as if the gamma has been turned up a notch, though the nVidia color correction shows no change. In game I've twice experienced that the game began to stutter, and I had to reload a saved game to fix that. Never crashed though. And I've probably started it up 3-4 times by now. Uh. Yeah. I spend too much time reading webcomics, you know. And their associated forums and blogs.
The demo crashed and showed graphics glitches, but that was because I had a lot of dust in both the graphics card fan and the processor fan. So my computer would overheat and not start up for a while. Took care of that by removing both things and manually blowing out the dust from the 'wrong' end of each fan. Veritable cones of dust were cast from my balcony on that day.
And wouldn't you know it? Today my gaming was cut short by nothing less than a crash to desktop. Apparently my latest save contains a quite reproducible error which causes the game to crash whenever I walk a bit inside the Fighting McDonaghs inn. Good thing that the save before entering the fisheries did not show that error, because I would've hated to replay the lengthy session of killing Rosies in order to take pictures of new Rosies.
(You see, after realising that I lost all my precious ammo when I gave up my weapons, I decided to go back to an earlier save and spend it all on important research and accumulation of corpses to loot later. They seem to turn into lock boxes if you leave too many of them lying around. I would've thought that might've caused the bug, if it wasn't for the fact that I killed the majority before the inn was corrupted.)
Only thing I haven't tried yet is to go back to the Medical Pavillion and then return to Neptune's Bounty to see if something has been reset to not cause whatever error it is. If that doesn't work I'm going to have to save very often, and use new slots just about every time. And they won't even let me name my saved games. As if I was playing on an Xbox. :-(
I'm on the second-to-last bathysphere level, and I've not crashed yet. I have, however, run into the "reset" error when I forget to run zonealarm in game mode and it dumps me out because zonealarm takes control of the desktop for whatever retarded reason (95% of the time there is no message, it just momentarily takes control of the desktop and dumps you out of whatever your running. fortunately they have "game mode" where you can tell it to stop doing that and either auto-deny or auto-allow. i recommend auto-deny personally!)
I did notice that there are not a lot of different types of enemies, and it was too bad that there weren't more hidey-holes, crawling spots, and other things to make it interesting for combats. Its mostly run around and shoot. Oh well!
But the story is very compelling, and the graphics are outstanding.
Minor complaint: One thing that drives me nuts is that when you look out of a window its all wavy like your looking through the surface of water. Ok, on the surface (ie. up above in the breathable atmosphere) this happens because the wind and planetary motion causes small waves. HOWEVER, underneath the surface up against glass and such this effect is virtually non-existant. Its possible they did it so they didn't have to do a lot of detail, but it still sucks, and isn't realistic.
Other than that, I have a little ways left to go!
so i'm assuming that everyone is using their PCs to play this game.
I just wanted to comment that my boyfriend hasn't run into any of those types of bugs while playing it on the 360 (I just watch and point out things he may have missed)
the story is fascinating and quite fun but creepy :)
By reading a thread on the official forums I've dicovered that in order to prevent the customized settings from being reset from a crash, one can go to C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Bioshock and delete the file Running.ini
One forum poster figured that it was a safety measure in case one of those custom settings crashed the game. He also thought that a question at the start after a crash would suffice: "Do you want to reset your settings?"
As for the wavy water, I'm guessing that disabling the "distortion" graphics option would take care of that. But then you miss out on the blurry water falling down in some places, and the fuzzy camera view. (I have now begun to play in 640x480 with high graphics option, rather than miss out on the cool stuff in 800x600.)
And I also found out that I crash every time I try to re-enter the surgical section past the Gatherer's Garden room (with the Enrage plasmid). As soon as I get close to the door to the tunnel the screen goes black and I crash to the desktop, to the sound of a moaning Big Daddy. I hope that I never have to return there ever again, because if I do, I guess I'll have to replay from the very beginning.
I'm still trying to finish the game, but the crashes are getting more and more frequent (about every hour). My game has become kill - save - kill - save - kill - save - crash - say bad words - reboot.
This is really starting to tick me off. If any other product worked this poorly, you would have some sort of recourse. If a car is a lemon, there are laws to protect you. If your TV does not work, you can take it back. Video games, however, you're screwed. You can only hope they patch the game.
I have heard of a few problems with the 360 version (mainly slowdowns in some areas), but nothing compared to the PC version.
What is 'zonealarm?'
ZoneAlarm is a software firewall, which I had to quit using when it caused my broadband to drop my connection on occasion. But that was years ago.
As for Bioshock's crashitude, I'm beginning to wonder if some crashes are due to the game trying to load some kind of incompatible content. Like a splicer with some special combination of traits, or just a certain specific splicer of all the different possibilities. Because between my "crashes at McDonaghs"-game and the saved game where I don't, I didn't go near that area. So it couldn't have been something I did. And whatever is there in my crash-game, it seems to stay there, but it's apparently not there if I go before it was loaded. I've also read about people who crash every time they try to load Arcadia, so perhaps it's the same problem there: the game randomly decides, based on previous player actions, what kind of content to put in the area, and one piece of content turns out to crash the game. I'm just guessing though. And I do remember that I stuttered once in McDonaghs, so perhaps there's something bad i that area.
Coming to think of it though, I have seen splicers who have hacked security bots. If they can do that, perhaps they can hypnotize a big daddy too? I keep hearing a big daddy every time I get one of those crashes, but big daddies never caused any crashes for me before. Perhaps it is caused by a splicer being protected by a big daddy? Have you ever seen any like that? That would seem like it'd become more commonplace later on in the game.
Oh, and speaking of consumer issues, I hope that you are aware of the 2-5 activations you have, and that you must uninstall Bioshock to regain an activation before doing something like reformatting your harddrive. Seems as if everyone knows about it now, but I suppose that if you never had problems installing the game and getting it to work, it just might have slipped you by.
I tend to crash when loading things. I pretty much always crash when zoning into a new area, but my latest crash was when I tried to hack a Health Station.
Your content idea is an interesting one. BioShock does have the auto-difficulty thing (can't remember what they call it), so that might be part of it. I have not seen any Splicers befriending Big Daddies, but you never know. I have had them run up and completly heal at Health Stations, which feels smart, but is a pain-in-the-butt.
I was unaware of the activation thing. That kind of irks me. I purchased the software and I should be able to install it as many times as I like.
Anyway, I've hit my 'just finish the game' point. I don't really care anymore and just want to see the ending.
Hey guys. This fix was posted before, so I can't take credit for it. It worked for me so I'll post it again for anyone interested.
go to C:\Program Files\2K Games\BioShock\Builds\Release where "C:" is your harrddrive (duh )
once in the release folder, open "default" in notepad and scroll all the way to the bottom of the screen. Change the script line "HighDetailShaders=True" to "HighDetailShaders=False". Do this because the Shadow creater drivers in the game do not work well with series 6 or 7 Nvidia cards EVEN IF you update all your card drivers.
If you do this "fix" it should fix all the crashes in-game and load crashes due to the fact that the Level3 shaders are on by default. Also, the game will not look near as nice as it should, however it IS stable and the framerates are quite good for me. It's a band-aid fix, I know, until 2K Games hopefully releases it's patch. I hope this helps most people still having trouble.
Cool - maybe I can actually FINISH the game now. I basically crashes whenever I try to hack anything. Or shoot. Or blow my nose.
Thanks.
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