Print
“A man chooses, a slave obeys.” With those six words, THQ Boston opened the door to a new era of gaming. Ken Levine’s team built a gorgeous undersea world, filled it with interesting and believable characters, invites you to kill said characters using a perfectly balanced combat system, and then uses the game to do more than simply tell a tale. Unlike every other game we’ve ever played, BioShock uses the medium’s interactivity to explore concepts in a way that is simply impossible in films and books.
While other designers would have taken the underwater wonderland that is Rapture and driven the player through increasingly difficult mazes, Levine uses the framework he built to explore objectivism and free will with the player as an active participant. By allowing the player to choose whether to save or harvest the Little Sisters, but not whether to kill Andrew Ryan at the game’s climactic moment, Levine forces players to make difficult ethical choices, while confronting them with the fallacy of free will in games.
Sadly, the final act of the game doesn’t match the brilliance of the first two parts, and the “big finish” is an offensively clichéd boss battle. Even with its flawed third act, BioShock represents everything that we want to celebrate with our Game of the Year Award. Bravo.
http://www.2kgames.com/bioshock/, ESRB: M
Comments are closed on this article
