I haven’t seen a single Lord of the Rings movie, so I’m a complete stranger to Middle-earth and it remains one of my big film duties. If there are similar deadly sins in video games, I fulfill many of them. There are works that I haven’t touched even remotely, so I’ve decided that it’s time to put my batteries together and visit a part of the past that I should never have avoided.
I have a multitude of titles on a list and, if I find the time to play, I will begin to delve into their universes. A few weeks ago I decided to take the plunge with Titanfall 2, one of the best FPS campaigns ever, and this time it’s time for one of the best settings ever made. 16 years later, I have finally opened the doors of BioShock.
The weight of the legend
Back in August 2007, Irrational Games put its particular shooter on sale in which neither more nor less than they sent us in a bathysphere to the depths of the sea. Rapture is not just an impossible metropolis, it is one of the most remembered settings for the community. The utopia that Andrew Ryan imagined under millions of liters of water, in the middle of the ocean, continues to be a beacon on which a multitude of games have been built and inspired many more. It is not surprising that the presentation of Rapture was recorded in the retinas of everyone, as the occasion deserved it.
“It was not impossible to build Rapture at the bottom of the sea. It was impossible to build it anywhere else”
If there is a moment that I must emphasize in my game, it is precisely this, the first 20 minutes at the controls. Swimming from the plane crash to the gigantic lighthouse, as big as the mystery that surrounds it, and entering it to meet Ryan’s inquisitive gaze: “Neither gods nor kings, only men.” The first example of the bombast of a visionary who was wrong and of the exacerbated ideas that he managed even until his last moments. He did not know how to control the society that he himself founded, but there is no doubt that the condemned man knew how to attract the masses with a magnetic oratory capacity.
One better understands the appeal of Atomic Heart as soon as Rapture appears before your eyes and begins to wander through its corridors. The citadel is the antithesis of the Soviet Union, showing an absolute decadence of a model that was intended to move away from capitalism and communism. However, it is inevitable to see shops, cinemas, theaters and entertainment shows for the masses, while purest style of the 50s in the United States. Obviously, all of it decorated in that art deco style that fascinated me so much in Prey. Yeah, BioShock It has been a masterclass for developers.
The team led by Ken Levine knew how to perfectly capture the vision of the creator of System Shock 2 and the atmosphere is so cared for that there is no way it will age badly. It all still looks great, even though it’s a PS3 and Xbox 360 title, but the graphical brilliance pales in comparison to a visual palette most gamers dream of. The splicers are terrifying, ADAM has corrupted the city, you can tell that one day everything was revelry and self-confidence, but now there is only decadence and terror around every corner. Rapture utterly failed, but Irrational Games nailed it hands down.
Finish them off, will you?
It’s not the first time I’ve played BioShock, the truth. At the time a friend lent it to me and I was not convinced after just an hour of play. That dodging cameras and security systems completely pushed me away, but now I have found that fun that I didn’t have. We talk about a old school FPS, without coverage of any kind, so you have to play the classic cat and mouse with the corners of the rooms. We are not even talking about a frenetic pace in the fighting, because when the tension invaded me it was due to the sheer accumulation of enemies on the screen.
This is where the plasmids come into play, those powers designed to cook faster, help at work and in any other task that is not electrocuting the splicer that pounces on you. On the other side are the conventional weapons: the pistol, the machine gun, the shotgun and so on until I reach a crossbow that I have not even used. A combination of both facets that I have found entertaining throughout the game, although it is clear that the industry has advanced when it comes to offering more variety of situations.
Yes, it is true that the powerful Big Daddy or the turrets are differentiating elements, but we are mostly talking about burning them all to ashes. I’m lying, actually electronic devices have the peculiarity that they can be hacked, an ingenious mechanic and one that I’ve ended up quite fed up with in my 8 hours of play. And it is that there is a problem in BioShock and it is the benefit of repeating several tasks that divert the focus from the action. I mean hacking and registering to get resources.
In the first case I have ended up enhancing my engineering section to a great extent, since it is much more advisable to have the turrets in your favor than to destroy them. They save you many times, they work as escorts and hacking the vending machines saves a lot of money. In the second case we are talking about an unavoidable situation. There are too many items in the game that can be searched, be it drawers, suitcases, desks, bookshelves, splicers, Big Daddies, and a multitude of objects scattered everywhere. I have entered into an acute Diogenes syndrome from being aware of corpses, every tile and nook instead of focusing more on how Sander Cohen has decorated Poseidon Plaza.
Despite the fact that open worlds have been greatly reviled, I did not expect at all that BioShock fulfill part of that formula. Can revisiting the different complexes that make up Rapture is phenomenal, encouraging us to clean the areas completely. Too bad yours truly decided that shooting Cohen as soon as he came down the stairs was the best idea. What do you want? The guy was like a shower.
Ryan’s Failure
If Andrew Ryan failed for something, it is because he did not take into account that parasites are necessary in society. The creation of that paradise in which there are no rules or creative limitations for any area is very good, but someone will have to take care of cleaning the bathroom, even if nobody feels like it. That there are no classes among the people is almost a fantasy that he could not fulfill and to top it off he did not know how to satisfy everyone’s needs. Elites began to form and the mob just wanted to break out of Rapture jail.
Characters like Tenembaum, Suchong or Fontaine, along with Ryan himself, are tremendously attractive. I have had a fabulous time listening to his contacts on the radio and the recordings that are scattered around the stages, as they are as enriching as they are fundamental. If we do not attend to this optional information, we will not fully understand the fall of the city. Through the essential cinematics, BioShock It’s not that he goes into overdrive about the details and origins of many of the big problems plaguing Rapture. That doesn’t stop the most momentous revelations from still being shocking. Finding out that Atlas is Fontaine, that Jack is practically a wimp or that simple “do you want?” it is an order for us to continue to function. Despite everything, some of these surprises I already knew beforehand.
What I did not expect is that the final stage was so disappointing. There is practically no fault with the rhythm of BioShock until Ryan dies at our hands, but the remaining hour or so of the game is completely left over. Not only because becoming a Big Daddy and escorting a Little Sister feels tedious, but also because the final confrontation with Atlas is very artificial. It seems that you have to get slapped with an even more monstrous mutation for no reason, because this is a video game, which does not fit too much with Atlas’s personality. In any case, I was not unscrupulous who harvested the young without mercy, but I saved them absolutely all so that they would have a better future -and I, my dear ADAM-. I have some clue as to what awaits me at Columbia and at some point I will have to visit the other side of the coin within Ken Levine’s imagination, but I have done my duty on this trip.
