RJ Layton

With that out of the way, I will break down the game into two distinct parts. The first part starts at the beginning and involves the player tracking down and finally killing Andrew Ryan. This is the Good Part.

The Bad Part is everything after that point. It involves the player tracking down and killing Frank Fontaine.

Why the difference? In the Good Part, the player is unaware that they are following orders, they’re learning the back-story of Rapture, and the characters are generally well-rounded and have some depth to them. The player learns to use the environment to their advantage and overall the game is pretty fun. All of this culminates in the “Big Moment” of the game, killing Andrew Ryan. Personally, I never wanted to kill him but I was forced to anyway. I don’t know how any of you felt, but I suspect that with how the game presented itself, very few wanted to kill him, or were at least very hesitant, and yet the game forced the issue. That’s fine. You were, after all, effectively a slave to your mental conditioning.

The reason this is the big moment is because it’s the big twist in the story, but also because the game is making a big statement about videogames in general, especially first-person shooters. These games all too often involve the player mindlessly following instructions to “kill this” or “kill that” like some menacing robot. There’s not really any thought involved about it, no moral qualms. Just kill it. Why? Because the game said so. Because that’s the only way to get to the next plot point.

It’s a pretty big statement on games, and a pretty effective way to make the point. At this point I was pretty enthralled with the game in general. Then the game proceeds to ruin it entirely. How? By not practicing what it preaches.

After the Big Moment, the player gets to keep mindlessly following orders! Every time I saw that “New Objective” box pop up, the game lost even more of its luster. Effectively nothing had changed, except now I had a new target, and a new person giving me orders. I’m not killing Andrew Ryan anymore, I’m killing Frank Fontaine. For a game that prides itself on “moral choices,” this is pretty hollow stuff. It’s only made worse by the fact that the game itself just made a pointed observation about players being treated like a mindless robot and then proceeds to keep treating the player like one.

There is more to why the Bad Part earns its name. No longer do we have any question as to whether we should be harvesting or rescuing the Little Sisters, so what little dilemma that posed in the first place is effectively gone. The characters go from mysterious and interesting to paper-thin cutouts. Fontaine’s quotes from the second half of the game can be summed up as: “Bwahahaha, you’ll never beat me, kid! I’m too powerful.” I half expected him to use the phrase “Let me show you my true form” at some point. And finally, the entire thing culminates in what is perhaps the biggest slap in the face to players that could possibly happen: the pathetic final boss fight.

Over the course of the game players are treated to using the environment to figure out interesting ways to kill their attackers, to trap them or use pieces of the environment to their advantage. The end boss battle then throws all of this out the window for a traditional “the boss is super powerful, use your big guns to take him down” approach that isn’t any different from any boss battle before it. Oh, and he’s got multiple attack patterns! Actually, pretty much all of the boss battles are like this. Yeah, you can use the environment to your advantage, but are we still stuck with the whole reason the bosses are threatening is because they’ve got tons of hit points and they hit a little harder? I thought this was supposed to be a thinking-person’s kind of FPS. If it was, the bosses would be trying to outsmart me. We never get that. Instead, we get enemies that are just like the rest of the game, except they take more bullets to bring down.

If we wanted something in the spirit of the game, the boss battles would have been more about an intricate level design instead of a super-powered enemy. They’d be about making the player feel like their intellect is what makes them powerful, not their guns. Instead, we’re treated to one of the more forgettable final bosses in videogame history, one that will be remembered most for how much of a letdown it was.

Some other comments I will make, but in much shorter fashion. The game was too easy. Letting players die without any consequences is ridiculous. With simple perseverance, the player can kill everything with the wrench and take each death as a setback only in time lost. Enemies maintain damage after you die, so what’s the point in trying to be cautious?

I want to finish with the Little Sisters “moral dilemma.” It felt cheap to me. I know most won’t agree with me on that. But what the harvest/rescue mechanic boils down to is just that: a black-or-white, binary choice. For a supposedly deep moral decision, there’s surprisingly little grey area. They don’t let the players do anything to the Little Sisters but make that choice. For example, you can’t bash them with a wrench before or after you’ve done the harvest/rescue interaction. Why not? What if the player decides that he doesn’t want to get involved in collecting Adam for himself because plasmids are turning everyone into psychotic junkies, and they also don’t want the Little Sisters to go around and keep harvesting Adam from the dead? What if the player decides Tenenbaum deserves death for what she did to the Little Sisters?

Anyway, that’s it for my rant on BioShock. Feel free to blast me in the comments.