Bioshock Xbox 360 Demo
It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed any video games. That would be because I haven’t had time (or the will) to spend time on the consoles.
I got curious with a game that’s been all hyped up by the gaming community. It’s been getting high review scores such as 9.0 from Gamespot (9.7 from Gamespot critics) and has been labeled the most anticipated game release rah-rah-rah. I’ve become a skeptic with these types of fan-boy hype ever since Gears of War went through the same thing. Don’t get me wrong, it was a good game, but I wouldn’t rate it higher than GRAW (it’s pretty hard for a game to beat GRAW in my books).
So anyway, the point is, we downloaded the Bioshock demo last night after some initial hesitation. Hesitation because of the hype and the fact the download was over 1 gig. It’s not a bandwidth issue, it’s a I-can’t-be-arsed-waiting-for-stuff-to-download thing. Anyway, at 11:30pm, the download finished and I decided to take it for a spin before I curled up in bed.
It was quick to impress. Set back in the 1960’s, you start of (smoking!) on a plane over the Atlantic when suddenly the plane crashes and you’re in the water. It took me a good… oh… 20 seconds to realise that the game gave you control when you’re in the water (I can be daft and slow sometimes… I blame it on age). So you swim to the only place you can, this takes you to the underwater city called, Rapture.
I’d like to point out here that I’m a wuss when it comes to survival horror type games like Resident Evil. As much as I love the games, they creep me out and Bioshock certainly comes into this category.
Once you arrive in Rapture, the first thing you see is some weird monstrous creature killing another human being in some gruesome way. I’m already icked out here. Next, the same monstrous creature then jumps onto your bubble vehicle thing that was used to bring you to Rapture and makes some noise and attempts to get to you. Again I’m icked out some more, so when Atlas, the guy on the radio, tells you to exit the bubble vehicle thing, you can imagine me… “Nooo… I don’t want to… I’m scared”. Completely and illogically scared. I haven’t even gotten into the game and I want to give up. Gah!
But I push on and it’s good that I did because the very first thing one notices with Bioshock is the sheer beauty of the graphics. The style of the graphics may not be everyone’s cup of tea, it’s a weird mix of components from the old 1960’s and somewhat futuristic underwater city. But nevertheless, it’s still a great looking game.
The weaponry I encountered so far is old 1960’s style pistols and machine guns. But then you have the plasmids… which obviously aren’t old 1960’s at all but falls into the futuristic side of the graphical stylings of Bioshock.
I haven’t seen much of the enemy AI. I fought a few Splicers and saw a Big Daddy at work protecting the creepy Little Sister. There’s something about “innocent” little girls doing creepy things that seriously gives me the ickies and there seems to be a trend going on using little girls to scare the wits out of people.
I didn’t get as far as to engage a Big Daddy, although I don’t think I want to judging my what I saw it do to a Splicer that scared a Little Sister. The Splicers are really quite aggressive, they’ll come after you once they see you. I liked using the combination of Plasmid and traditional weapon (like the wrench) to beat up the Splicers, there’s something strangely satisfying about walking up to a stunned Splicer and beating the cr*p out of them.
In the end, the demo hung on me so I never got to finish it, but so far, it’s looking good. An interesting FPS set in an interesting environment.
