Heya folks, Shaun here, and I’m finally back with a new review! I’ve been taking a bit of a break from completing games, hence the delay since the last one. This time, I’ve finished replaying the original release of BioShock by 2K Boston, 2K Australia and 2K.
So, I’ve now completed both the original version, and the remaster, of this game, and I’ll admit that there are certain things that I like more in the original release, over the remastered version. The first is the lighting, which I feel captures the mood better in the original than the remaster does. The 2nd is the textures, which I feel highlights how wet the world is supposed to be, given that Rapture is underwater and leaking. This is something that was lost when they updated the textures in the remaster. The original release is not without it’s problems however, and there’s quite a few annoyances to deal with ranging from crashing every 40–60 minutes to audio cutting out when you perform certain actions. I also still think the final boss is super lame in this game as well.
Gameplay-wise, I think the game is a lot of fun, despite the issues it has. Running and gunning your way through the desolate halls of rapture while filling splicers with lead, or clonking them in the face with a wrench is quite satisfying. The splicers also become quite the bullet sponges in the late game, but their AI doesn’t get any better, so they’re still pretty easy to put down depending on your difficulty level. I largely used the wrench to defeat the splicers. First shoot them with the freezing plasmid then whack them with the wrench to take them out in one hit. Fighting the Big Daddy’s is still as thrilling as ever as well, in most cases anyway. Some of them go down pretty easily, but most of them put up a good fight, especially in the latter stages of the game. The final boss leaves a lot to be desired though. You can just blast him with the chemical thrower and have him defeated in less than 1 minute and 30 seconds. He barely puts up a fight, and it’s honestly kinda disappointing considering the rest of the game’s enemies put up a better fight than he did.
Graphically, I think the game still looks quite good. The lighting effects really add a lot of ambience and atmosphere to the game, that I felt was kind of lost a bit in the remaster. That said, the game is nearly 20 years old at this point so, it doesn’t look super impressive, but for a 20 year old game, it looks pretty great for its age. It’s also worth mentioning that the game, unsurprisingly, doesn’t play nicely with an ultra-wide monitor. It zooms in too far if you set it to 2560x1080, so it’s better to limit the resolution to 1920x1080. I also played it in windowed mode, and used Lossless Scaling to fix it to 16:9 aspect ratio because my monitor auto-stretches the image to 21:9 aspect ratio, which looks awful, and I personally hate that feature.
Audio-wise, it’s very good as well. The atmospheric sounds, and background noise is pretty phenomenal still. I honestly think it sounds better than the remaster in some cases as well. The only downside is that it requires you to manually tweak some ini settings and your system sound settings in the control panel to get to work properly. Even then, the audio doesn’t always work very well. I noticed a lot of auditory bugs in the game that include audio cutting out when reloading/firing a weapon, or audio crackling when activating a shop. Also, if you don’t perform those manual fixes, the game will have no audio whatsoever when you’re in game. So, the game loses some points in the audio department.
Performance wise, the game has a lot of stability issues on modern PCs. The game crashed on me 5 or 6 times throughout the course of my 5h playthrough of the game. It always crashed in 40 to 60 minute intervals, and usually when opening a shop menu. There was one crash right at the end of the game when it tried to load the final boss fight as well. Thankfully I’d saved it just before that point because I had a feeling it was going to and did not want to do that annoying escort section again. The crashing was definitely the worst part of the game, and there were times when I had to do an entire section or half a section over again, so I started saving the game every few minutes so I wouldn’t have to keep redoing everything. The game loses a few more points for the crashing as well.
Overall, while I did find the game fun, I feel like the many issues that I encountered have left me a little mixed about the whole experience. The game has aged so-so, and playing it on a modern PC introduces more issues than I feel is worth dealing with in order to replay it. So, if you have a modern PC, I recommend playing the remaster instead, it has less issues that you’ll need to contend with, and I had none when I played through it in 2023 by comparison. In the end, I’ve decided to give the game a 5 out of 10, which is average. Without the issues it’s closer to a 7.
