Saturday Morning Gaming: Bioshock

Epic Game Store’s free game this week is Bioshock: The Collection.

All three games are included in this. Bioshock, Bioshock 2, and Bioshock: Infinite.

Now, I’ll be honest. Only the first one is a Great game. Bioshock 2 feels like DLC (if not a cash grab) and Bioshock: Infinite is eye-rollingly ham-handed where it is not confusing as heck.

I mean, I beat Bioshock 2 once and never felt the need to go back. I beat Bioshock: Infinite once and never felt the need to go back. But the first one? Yeah, I go back to that one periodically. The voice acting, the powers, the enemies… all of them top notch.

One of the brilliant things they did was understand that there is a lot of dead time in a sufficiently large FPS. So they sprinkled tape recorders everywhere. In this universe, you see, people didn’t write stuff down. They just rattled their thoughts off into a tape recorder. So instead of you just slowly plodding from this side of the map to that one, they gave you a monologue to listen to. The monologue did world building, explained the weirdness of the world around you, and just gave you something that grabbed your attention when, otherwise, you’d just be walking through a ruined casino.

The powers included being able to electrify enemies, light stuff on fire, summon bees, telekinesis… awesome stuff. The game came out and told you “zap them with electricity, then shoot them” and, holy cow, that one-two punch was fun.

As for the enemies themselves, the splicers were the fun guys that could be dispatched with the stuff you found lying around while the Big Daddies were HUGE monstrosities that you didn’t even dare attack until about halfway through the game. You’d see them and hope that their lights were yellow rather than red and, if they were calm, you’d take a wide berth around them… until halfway through the game, of course. At which point you’d go out of your way to get in fights so you could harvest that sweet, sweet ADAM and get even more powers/plasmids.

And the story! Oh my gosh. Back when “objectivism” was still a thing, the game said “let’s explore an objectivist city!” and, while it was a little strawmanny, it took the ideas seriously enough to make you think and argue about the philosophy in your own head while you were playing. A game that came out and made you think about the use of force, power dynamics, and Capitalism-run-amok.

And the big reveal at the end that made you say “I have been playing a completely different game than the one I thought I was playing” and inspired you to get angry and *REALLY* go after the big bad at the end of the game.

It’s worth getting just for the first one. And, maybe, the first hour or so of the second one.

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is Bioshock Promotional Art.)