Shocking Sunday Demo: Bioshock

Downloading popular demos of a certain size on Xbox Live can be a taxing ordeal. Transfer speeds slow to a crawl and in my experiences, weird things start happening to my 360. My downloads may get stuck at a certain percentage or I'll inexplicably lose my connection to Live and be forced to reboot my console three, four, five or even six times.

Thankfully, every so often a demo will come around that will be of such quality that it's worth suffering through all the technical hijinks. We had one last week in the form of Stranglehold. Yesterday, the Xbox faithful were treated to the grand release of Bioshock!

Electrify the jump for my demo impressions...

The Bioshock demo, quite simply, impressed the hell out of me. Not since Gears of War has a game's presentation been so polished and appropriately "next-gen". The guys at Irrational Games have done wonders with the Unreal technology and created a spooky, organic and gorgeous world for players to explore. The visuals are not only incredibly polished but are helped along with some of the best art direction I have ever seen on the Xbox. See, the game is set in 1960, in the city of Rapture, an underwater utopia that has gone to shit. The art deco style influence is huge in the environments. Bioshock even shares the campy cartoon iconography used in the Fallout games.

The sound design is also a treat for the ears. There seems to be layers upon layers of ambient noises. Specific sound effects for weapons, voices and water are crisp and rich. All the aural qualities come together so well, it made me forget that I was playing the demo with a standard def TV armed with internal stereo speakers.

With such outstanding production values, the mood of the game really hits home. Playing the demo feels very much like walking through a bad dream you just can't wake up from. Although not billed as a horror game, Bioshock is very dark and deals with some mature themes. Granted, this is one nightmare where can lay the beats on your foes with a combination of gunplay and genetic (read: magical) powers, called plasmids.

More than a pretty face, the gameplay in Bioshock is quite impressive. The button layout is elegant and the controls are responsive. There is a certain weight and inertia to your character's movement, so the scale is tipped towards a slower, more realistic pace. The nod to realism, however, pretty much ends there. At its heart, this is a game about action and exploration. Health kits and life-restoring snacks abound, along with handy resurrection shrines known as Vita Chambers. Meet an untimely demise and you will find yourself respawned at the nearest chamber so you can continue your quest. Interestingly, this does not work quite like a checkpoint. Any progress you have made prior to your death will be maintained after you regenerate. With this method, the developers clearly want to encourage people to finish the game and not punish players too harshly for failure. At the same time, I can see how it can make the game too easy. Every battle, regardless of difficulty, just becomes a battle of attrition when you can just come back after every death and chip away at the enemies.

The demo takes you through the opening sequence of the full game and it lasts for quite some time (I played through it in about 30 minutes). You're on a plane flying over the ocean when it crashes. Surfacing from the wreckage, you're surrounded by flaming water and the tail of the airplane slowly sinking below the water. Finding a beacon in the darkness, you swim towards it to find stairs leading up to an imposing steel door. This of course, is the entranceway to Rapture. From here you're treated to a fairly hands-off sequence of opening doors and slow elevator rides. Once again, the game is unbelievably beautiful to look at and I was immediately swept up in the atmosphere.

You're soon contacted via radio by a helpful survivor located elsewhere in the city. This man guides you along the first few sections of Rapture before tasking you with the mission of finding his wife and child. There is a fair bit of combat along the way. First, the wrench is introduced for you to engage in some melee. Then you are given a plasmid, electro shock, to use in conjunction with the wrench. Pretty soon, the game hands you a revolver, the fireball plasmid and finally the tommy gun. The enemy AI is very aggressive but I wasn't able to see how sophisticated it was. Much has been made of the AI intelligence in that enemies will react to you actions in a convincing manner. Say you set someone on fire, they will go running for water to douse the flames. This is all well and good, but it doesn't seem all that revolutionary and you seem to encounter enemies in these set scenarios where it all could just as easily be scripted behaviour.

Aside from fighting, the demo also gives you a chance to hack gun turrets and security cameras. This involves playing an odd mini-game involving connecting pipe pieces to reroute the "flow" of the circuit. It's an OK concept. After a couple botched attempts I finally figured out how the game works. I hate to say it, but Irrational could have copped one of the myriad hacking mini-games from Splinter Cell: Double Agent, and that would have worked better.

In the end, the hacking mini-game does little to detract from the wholly awesome experience of the demo. After watching so many videos and trailers for Bioshock I was ready to see for myself what the fuss was all about. Based on my half-hour with the demo, I can safely state that this is the real deal. It's a toss up now between buying this game or Stranglehold. Most likely, I will need to get both and my wallet will cry itself to sleep.