After years and years of militancy on Nintendoomed, here I am finally reviewing one of my favorite titles of life. You just need to read my bio here on the site to see that I have put “the three BioShocks” in the list of my favorite games of all time. But don’t think that makes me a pro who speeds games in Balls To The Wall +++ mode . I could say the same about the two Bayonettas. I’m just a guy who really loves these three games and the stories they tell, and couldn’t wait for BioShock: The Collection to come to Nintendo Switch .
The collection, curated by Blind Squirrel Games , was released for the first time on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC in 2016, continuing the following year with the Mac version. That Nintendo Switch is only now released, as part of the triplet of triplets carried by 2K on the Nintendo hybrid. I was pleased to discover, as the initial logos scrolled, that the porting of all three games to Switch was handled by Virtuos , the Singapore studio known for having distributed Dark Souls: Remastered, Starlink: Battle For Atlas to us mortals and, for the same 2K wave, XCOM 2 Collection.
Irrational Treasure
The BioShock series itself was created by Irrational Games , a Take-Two second-party studio and a subdivision of 2K. His first work was System Shock 2 , a 1999 PC shooter set in a futuristic world, of which BioShock is a sort of spiritual sequel (even the title is similar). Indeed, at the time of the creation of the first BioShock (2007) the studio had briefly changed its name to “ 2K Boston ”, and its southern division “ 2K Australia ”; then the second kept the new name, while Irrational returned to its origins. BioShock came after a series of canceled projects, such as Dante’s The Lost. Following the publication of BioShock Infinite (2014), studio boss Ken Levine announced that all but 15 employees would be fired, and with the survivors he renamed the studio Ghost Story Games , with the idea of creating simpler and less projects. ambitious. Opened in 2017, Ghost Story Games has produced a grand total of… zero games to date . Quiet, Rocky, go ahead when you feel like it.
While above you can see the brief history of the company behind two of the three BioShock games (more on that in due course), I tell you that I, after hearing about it, recovered the Collection last year on PlayStation 4, and I’m here to tell you about the Nintendo Switch version. Needless to say, I am destined to do Switch port reviews of classic game trilogies that I’ve already played on PS4 . A cruel and strangely specific fate. We don’t fix what isn’t broken and follow a similar pattern to that other review then! Let’s start by talking about the first chapter.
Clarification: technically the titles of the versions of the three video games in this collection are BioShock Remastered , BioShock 2 Remastered and BioShock Infinite: The Complete Edition . But I won’t say the full titles because we don’t get lost in these jokes.
No Gods or Kings, only Men
In August 2007, like every summer, people just wanted to take a dip in the sea. Luckily Take-Two had the solution! BioShock , released first on PC and Xbox 360, then on PlayStation 3 and finally on Mac, could be defined as a “first person shooter with RPG elements”, and certainly that is the basis. You wander around the levels, you kill enemies by riddling them with shots, you balance between different types of weapons with different effects … so why is this game so famous? It seems to me all stuff I’ve already seen. To understand it, just play a few minutes and hear the premises of the plot …
Disclaimer: Some people say that video games would be the landing place for failed scriptwriters: no Hollywood studio bought their script for a movie, and so they turned to the video game industry, which certainly has less of the stench under the nose. WELL LET ME TELL THESE PEOPLE …they may not be completely wrong. Of course, here it goes into personal preference, and I certainly haven’t played enough titles of this genre to say for sure, but basically I will never be able to like the idea of advertising a video game by poking around about what a movie looks like, on this or that famous actor who appears in motion capture, about how long and complicated the story is. Video games are video games, they don’t have to be movies. This speech clearly does not apply to visual novels, which have much more in common (the name itself says) with novels than with movies. Either way, if you want to tell your story in the form of a video game, you better have a good reason why it couldn’t be told in any other medium.
But having said that, what is our BioShock about? We are in 1960. The protagonist is a mysterious man named Jack, he is flying aboard an airliner and his evening quickly worsens when the plane… crashes. In the sea, precisely, near an island that houses only a lighthouse. Inside the lighthouse there is a bathysphere * which unceremoniously takes him to a mysterious underwater city. She will soon discover that the city is far from welcoming, as its inhabitants have transformed into completely crazy aggressive mutants, there are huge monsters dressed as divers who accompany creepy little girls around, and the only help comes from a man equally. mysterious, a certain Atlas, who always courteously guides Jack through the city by radio. The primary purpose is… well, to return to the surface.
Canonically, Rapture is roughly located here.
* Moment perhaps not everyone knows that : The Bathysphere was a spherical shaped submarine without motor, used only by the American naturalist William Beebe for a series of dives off the coast of Bermuda between 1930 and 1934.
In the course of our first-person explorations, we will discover that the city is called Rapture , and was founded by a farsighted and dangerous individual: Andrew Ryan . Ryan, found himself in a postwar period in which the United States of America – Soviet Union – tertium non datur dichotomy reigned and not recognizing himself in either system, decided to create an underwater city without the knowledge of the American government where the greatest minds of the their time they would have lived free from the yoke of superpowers on the surface. His philosophy is a distorted and ante-litteram version of Randian objectivism, in which everyone owns what they produce and no one can claim any right over the property of others (the wordparasites is inflated to say the least in Rapture’s narrative). In addition to the two dominant economic systems, Ryan abhors religion, which he sees as a cowardly way to control the people and clip the wings of the most gifted. And let’s say this is all I can tell you about Rapture’s lore , because you really don’t want to spoil any surprises.
Philosophy with Nintendoomed: Randian objectivism
Theorized above all by the Russian-American Ayn Rand, objectivism is an economic doctrine according to which everyone must selfishly look after himself without any obligation to sacrifice himself for a “morality”. Quite simply by someone who has never studied economics for people who have never studied economics. The book that has become a symbol of this doctrine, written by Rand herself, is The Atlas Shrugged Revolt (original title Atlas Shrugged ), which is also the bible of American capitalism and is generally criticized, if not mocked, by anyone who does not believe that US capitalism may God come down to earth. An anonymous author , later cited by the Nobel laureate in economics Paul Krugman, compared the book to the Lord of the Rings trilogyin these terms: “ One is a childhood fantasy that often generates a lifelong obsession with fictional heroes, raising emotionally stunted and socially disabled adults unable to face the real world. The other, of course, is about orcs. “Sure, Rand lived long after the events narrated in BioShock, but there is no denying that there was some influence on Rapture’s aesthetic as well.
- The Atlas statue at Rockefeller Center in New York
- And its equivalent to Rapture’s Kashmir restaurant
Another story element that directly affects gameplay is the ADAM . The main reason Rapture fell into disrepair was the fight between Andrew Ryan and gangster Frank Fontaine , who controlled ADAM’s business in the city. Yes but what is this ADAM? It is a substance similar to stem cells, discovered by chance by the scientist Brigid Tenenbaum in a certain species of sea snails that haunted the surroundings of Rapture, which allows to modify the genetic makeup of those who take it. Bottled and marketed this substance in products called plasmids, soon all kinds were produced, from those that made it possible to create fire from nothing to those that made it faster and more agile. Fontaine controlled this trade and his growing power worried Ryan, who had him murdered. The situation soon collapsed and… well, the result is before our eyes.
Plasmids are one of the most important gameplay elements in the game, as they are our second method of attack alongside firearms. The first you get and perhaps the most important is Electric discharge, with which you can stun enemies (the old inhabitants of Rapture now crazy because of ADAM, called Recombinants ) and perform other electronic works, but as mentioned there are of different types, and which ones to use is all up to the player’s preferences, to create very different gaming experiences. Another important element of gameplay is also connected to the history of ADAM, as well as the characters who have become the mascots of the world of BioShock: the Big Daddies and the little sisters .
When ADAM began to run low, it was discovered that it was possible to take it from the corpses of people who had already taken it, and even better if the ADAM snails were implanted in the bodies of some girls (every other subject rejected them), which were deprived of their humanity. To protect these fragile creatures, it was decided to convert Rapture’s maintenance workers (genetically modified and fused men in huge diving suits) into “bodyguards” for the girls. Thus they took the name of Big Daddy and little sisters. When we meet these characters, once the Big Daddy dies, we are given a choice: to drain the little sister of all the ADAM in her body, killing her but having more material to empower us and create new plasmids, or save her by removing only the snail, receiving less ADAM and returning the little sister to a human child. It will be Dr. Tenenbaum herself who will encourage this second option, while Atlas warns us not to trust it. For each little sister saved (in each level there is a certain number) we can make this choice and… let’s just say that the game has three different endings.
Another element is the circumvention . Any mechanical device, whether it is a vending machine or a flying robot equipped with a machine gun (which I will always call Robertino my robot friend), can be manipulated to help the player: by lowering prices in the case of a distributor or by becoming a helper in the fight. The minigame we have to play to get around a car has also become a symbol of the game: pipes. We have a “chessboard” divided into squares, which once uncovered reveal pieces of pipe. We have a certain time limit to combine the pieces and create a path that leads the mysterious liquid to the finish square. Iconic certainly, fun certainly, satisfying to see the liquid flowing happily into the tube when we’re absolutely done, but it must be said that these minigames are often long and break the rhythm of the game. Not for nothing in the next two games have opted for much more comfortable ways of getting around objects.
The main of the ” RPG elements ” is given by the double bar at the top left: in addition to the red health indicator we also have the blue EVE indicator. EVE is nothing more than the BioShockian equivalent of “mana”, and what allows us to use our plasmids. And let me tell you, you better not dry up in the middle of a battle. To recharge these two bars there are, in addition to the classic “medical kit” and “EVE kit”, numerous consumable items around Rapture. There are four types: food recharges health, coffee (and other soft drinks) recharges EVE, alcohol recharges health but lowers EVE (and if you drink too much of it all at once, the view blurs for a few seconds. ) and thecigarettes refill EVE but lower health. Although it’s actually easier to brush it all off by pressing the repeat button rather than looking at what each individual object is. I said easier, no more recommended! Only in this first chapter there is also a shy crafting system , with which by looting the corpses of the enemies it is possible to create ammunition, some plasmids, a couple of key objects … the system is introduced quite late in the game (not halfway, but maybe a third party) and it’s not, to be honest, that memorable. I agree with the choice to eliminate it.
Ah, and since we’re on the subject, the aforementioned alcohol and cigarettes aren’t the only reason gaming is 18+ . So much violence (explicit and mentioned), so much blood and so many deaths killed badly. I don’t think it’s at the levels of Mortal Kombat, and there aren’t any particularly sensitive themes, but I leave you this notice in case you are sensitive people.
As in any game with lore, the (vocal) diaries of the various characters cannot be missing, to collect and collect. For the deaf or for those who love to listen to YouTube videos in the background, fear not, it is also possible to activate subtitles.
Did you notice that in speaking of this “shooter” I barely mentioned the existence of guns? This is because they are not a central element of the gameplay, bullets are rather easy to find, complicated weapon management is not required and eliminating an enemy does not require the absolute precision that an Uncharted might want. This is true for all three chapters.
BioShock was a game much appreciated by critics and the public, so as the sacred law of entertainment dictates… time for a sequel, baby!
Daddy Issues
The thing everyone knows, and everyone will tell you when you approach the BioShock trilogy, is BioShock 2 was not done by the original author so it’s caccapupù (the last three words are optional). There is some truth in this statement: BioShock 2 was not developed by Irrational Games, but by 2K Marin , which is not the girl’s company from Link’s Awakening, but a new Take-Two subsidiary opened in 2007 nearby. of San Francisco. As a matter of fact, all the members of this small study were former Irrational members who had worked on the first BioShock. The fact is that among them there was not Ken Levine, the closest person to a BioShock “author”, who however did not completely disown the project, but contributed from a distance.
BioShock 2 was released in February 2010, this time on all platforms at the same time, and like any good sequel decides to double dip (it happens?) In the underwater city of Rapture, as the team felt there were still so many stories to tell. . Set eight years after the first chapter, in 1968, the game stars a Big Daddy (fanservice by fanservice) , in this case the first Daddy to be successfully mated with a little sister, who mysteriously comes back to life after committing suicide by order of the his mistress and must find the grown-up child, a prisoner somewhere in the city.
The host, and the main antagonist of the game, is Sofia Lamb , a psychiatrist Andrew Ryan had called in Rapture to help residents live, well, thousands of meters under the sea, in a humid place without sunlight did not like it very much. Unbeknownst to her, Lamb had created a “family” among her patients who did not feel fulfilled in Ryan’s ultra-selfish model. No less unscrupulous than his rival, Lamb began blasting him publicly in debates and Ryan managed to get her jailed. Sofia Lamb was comfortably out of the picture during Rapture’s final fall and later re-emerged with the intent of conquering her. Strange that no one ever mentioned it in the first game huh?
In any case, BioShock 2 works largely like its predecessor: the protagonist controls himself and can use different weapons and plasmids, some new, others taken from the first game. This time, Dr. Tenenbaum is helping us by radio, along with businessman Augustus Sinclair , and once again we explore different places in Rapture one after another in an attempt to reach the person who rules everything.
But don’t think that BioShock 2 is just and exclusively more of the same … OK okay, in most respects it is, but it has also improved and deepened certain functions. For example, the bypass system has been made faster, it no longer interrupts gameplay (a double-edged sword) and it is also possible to do it remotely with a new weapon. Now the minigame consists of stopping a hand that moves back and forth in correspondence with the right color (green to go around, blue to go around with even a gift for the children at home).
The little sisters mechanism was also explored. Now it is no longer “kill the Big Daddy, choose whether to drain or save the little sister, get the ADAM, many greetings and thanks”. Being a Big Daddy ourselves, the matter is more complex. Now we have to kill the rival Big Daddy, adopt his little sister, be led to a corpse from which to extract the ADAM, protect the little sister from the Splicers on the assault while she collects the precious substance, on some occasions repeat the process with another corpse , let us lead to one of those conduits through which the little ones travel around the city and then, only then, choose whether to save them or drain them. Now watch me get by trying to make this consideration without spoiling: the ethical dilemma of whether or not to save the little sisters is, at the level of the script, managed slightly worse than in the first game. There we didn’t know, between Atlas and Tenenbaum, who was right, but in the end it becomes obvious. The fact that once again one of the choices is incited by Tenenbaum and the other by a character who has never seen it, makes it a little less ambiguous. And yes, the way to get thegood ending is the same as last time. In addition to the fact that in the course of the adventure we will happen a few times to meet characters that we can decide whether to kill or leave alive.
A new type of boss called Big Sister also appears , who are nothing more than little sisters now grown up, become strong and agile and decidedly ruthless. I remember dying dozens of times against the first Big Sister the first time I played it, what a nostalgia …
Other differences with the first game … what to say, boh. Is it no longer possible to return to a previous level after leaving it? Has crafting been properly removed? There are some short sections where you walk on the bottom of the sea, but they are not very useful, are they just links between one area and another? In all honesty, BioShock 2 is simply the first game, again. More of the same .
BioShock 2: Fall of Rapture
For the sake of completeness it should be mentioned that BioShock 2 also contained a real multiplayer campaign, titled BioShock 2: Fall of Rapture , set about a year before the events of BioShock 1, in the midst of Rapture’s civil war. The mode was developed by Digital Extremes (those of Unreal Tournament and Warframe so to speak) and… it is not included in BioShock: The Collection . A pity, but on the other hand I hate multiplayer.
In my recent article on the Mario & Luigi series I quoted the phrase in the case of a spectacular game like Superstar Saga [or BioShock] , ‘more of the same’ inevitably seems less , but I must say that I do not completely agree. Sure, if you think so, you have every right, but as far as I’m concerned, of course I want to go back to Rapture! Of course I want to be a Big Daddy! Of course I want an experience similar to the first BioShock but improved! What else could I want? Well, son, to get the answer, just look up …
Another Ark for Another Time
The reins return to Ken Levine and Irrational Games for the final chapter of the saga (and of the entire studio): BioShock Infinite , released in 2013 on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3.
Here’s the thing, the development of BioShock Infinite was so complex that it has its own separate page on Wikipedia . So if you want all the pappardella read that one, but just know that it continued throughout the development of BioShock 2. As we will see immediately, the story has many differences but also many points in common with that of the first chapter.
In 1912, private detective Booker DeWitt is summoned by two mysterious twins (a man and a woman) to retrieve a certain girl named Elizabeth . Through a kind of capsule-rocket present on the top of a lighthouse, he reaches the city in the clouds of Columbia , which the holy man Father Comstock rules with a mixture of liberalism, elitism and white man’s burden . It is mainly the blacks and the Irish, who are ghettoized minorities and openly treated as second-class citizens, at the expense. But also third.
Comstock created Columbia in the late 19th century, with the aim of spreading American and Christian values around the world. Initially endorsed by the US government, the flying city became the focus of an international incident when it opened fire on Chinese fighters during the Boxer rebellion , thus revealing itself as an armed power. Washington immediately asked Columbia to retire, but Comstock, enraged, saw this as a betrayal of American values and separated from the United States, making Columbia an autarchy that looks down on Sodom below us.(as in Columbia they call the mainland). Huge difference with Ryan, Comstock bases its cult of personality on a real religious devotion, which uses Christian-like narratives and iconographies, but all centered on the “Comstock prophet” and the founding fathers Washington, Jefferson and Franklin. Far less sympathetic to him is Abraham Lincoln, with his odd idea that blacks shouldn’t be slaves to whites.
So, although the story is very different, we immediately notice parallels: a mysterious protagonist arrives through a lighthouse at a city located in an unusual place, a city that turns out to be ruled by a charismatic and 100% evil leader with his sick ideology … without spoiler, it is obvious that these similarities do not happen by accident .
An important difference in the story is that, unlike Rapture which is already in ruins when Jack gets there, Columbia is alive, well, and in the heat of the 10th anniversary celebrations of the secession. Unfortunately, Booker is immediately mistaken for a figure that everyone in town knows: the “false prophet” who came from the world below to mislead “the lamb”. Lamb that is none other than our Elizabeth, whom Comstock is raising to become its successor.
Despite these drastic differences, the gameplay of BioShock Infinite is similar to that of its two predecessors: weapons on the one hand and pseudo-magical powers on the other. This time they are not called plasmids and EVE but Vigor and salts, but the principle is exactly the same. Among other things, the good old mechanics of the circumvention has been transformed in turn into a Vigor: no more minigames but simply a hit with this power and it is possible to have machinery and even people to fight alongside us. The only flaw, the effect is temporary, so once we bypass a turret we no longer have a permanent ally, but sooner or later the effect will end and we will return to the target of its bullets.
In addition to the standard policemen and soldiers, minibosses also appear that we will face from time to time, including the Handymen , which at first glance seem the equivalent of the Big Daddies, but their role in the plot and in the gameplay is not even remotely comparable. They are just “the most powerful enemy you face every now and then”.
The exploration aspect has been largely downsized , as a consequence of the much more open and airy setting (not watery haha) and with fewer rooms and tunnels. Now, you don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for the chance to say it publicly: the level design of BioShock Infinite is inferior to that of the other two. Not because the environment is bad, indeed it is wonderful to have a place outdoors after two games spent in the dark at the bottom of the ocean. But in fact, he has me, I do not say “disappointed”, but saddened to see how exploration has taken a back seat. Let me explain: in the first two games it was possible to get away from the sown, see a road different from the one indicated by the mission and explore that corner of the map: at the bottom there was a safe containing objects, or an upgrade for weapons, or at least a diary to listen to. In Infinite this thing happens sometimes, but as many times we explore secondary rooms to find nothing important, just some ammunition or consumables. Hell, Infinite doesn’t even have a map! And this concludes everything negative I have to say about the third chapter.
You know our article on the best games of the 1910s ? At the beginning, in the list of honorable mentions (games considered for the ranking, but discarded) BioShock Infinite is mentioned. And do you know who proposed it? The undersigned. Infinite is simply the best game in the series and the best first person game I’ve ever played, sorry Metroid Prime. And maybe it’s precisely because I’m not a FPS fan that I appreciated it so much: the shootings, although more frequent than in the first two chapters, are never the center of attention, you don’t need to have mad skillz to survive, the The setting is delightfully perverse and the story is the best of the series: complex without being cumbersome.
So to return to the initial question : I, who praise the plot, do I think it made sense that the three BioShocks were games and not movies? Of course yes: worldbuilding makes us players feel part of the game world and engines of history (and not only for the mechanism of choices and multiple endings which, by the way, is abandoned completely in Infinite), and the mechanics dei plasmidi / Vigor also inserts elements of lore into the gameplay typical of an action video game.
A portable package
Yes, I’ve praised these three games enough, but what about BioShock: The Collection ? Is the collection itself worth it? And how does it run on Switch?
The collection is also the only way I’ve ever tried these games, and I have to say that his dirty work does. For each of the three, all the DLCs are also included, whether they are simple challenge rooms or real mini-campaigns. Without a doubt the best of the latter is Burial at Sea , split into two episodes, BioShock Infinite DLC which… let’s just say… is the most explicit connection between Rapture and Columbia. Even if, once you have finished a game, you want to immediately move on to the next without wasting time with the DLC, that play it, is practically an episode in itself. As mentioned, only BioShock 2 multiplayer is missing, and having never tried it I can’t say if it’s a serious shortcoming. I don’t know about you, but I live the same.
All three games, exactly as at the time of their release, are dubbed in Italian . The voice acting is of good quality, despite relatively few voices being heard over the course of the three games. However, it is consistent, you will not happen to hear characters changing voices from one game to another. At most, you might wonder why Andrew Ryan is suddenly a Columbia radio announcer…
But now we come to the elephant in the room: the port to Nintendo Switch . Virtuos has certainly done a good job, and the games run well without slowing down. Predictably, Infinite is the one that has had to compromise the most: it is most noticeable in the textures, but we know that Virtuos knows its stuff when it comes to deciding what to keep and what to cut. Also, but this only happened to me once while playing it on a TV that wasn’t mine, the dialogue stereo effect felt a little weird: like it was the Game Boy’s fake stereo (either all left, or all right , or in the center). This problem didn’t repeat itself on my usual TV, so maybe it was the other one who was stupid, I don’t know. Ah, and if you care about these things, you can forget about 60 fps. All three games are locked to 30fps, but remain stable. According to the analysis of VGTech , the three BioShocks use a dynamic resolution ranging from a maximum of 1080p to a minimum of 720p (extreme case that only happens in the last game) in TV mode, while in portable mode the maximum reached are the 720p. While looking for official confirmation on 2K’s social channels, I found instead a host of people complaining that the Collection on Switch doesn’t have gyro controls , unlike the Borderlands collection. As I said above, shootings are a small part of the gameplay, I don’t think the absence of gyro is that big of a problem, but in case you’re one of those who care, I’ll tell you.
The framerate is really the only reason you might not like this version, but if the fps are really that important to you then may the prophet have mercy on your souls. I can also tell you one thing that the Switch version does better than the PS4 version: in the latter, BioShock and BioShock 2 were on the same disc, which made them share save slots as well. Once we were all filled with saves from 1, I found to my horror that I could no longer save in 2. Quite a nuisance, but in the Switch version that doesn’t happen and the three games are separate.
Since we are talking about physical versions, we remind you once again that BioShock: The Collection on Nintendo Switch requires 31 GB of free memory in physical form. Get yourself a MicroSD! And I am also pleased to find that you can buy the three games separately for € 20 each , while the collection is € 50. So, in case you want to skip BioShock 2 evenly, you can. You won’t have my respect, but you can.
To sum up, that Nintendo Switch will never be the definitive version of BioShock: The Collection, both in terms of performance and price, but it is not important. For a few seconds, as I thought about this review, I doubted my old “it’s always good if classic games from the past come to Switch”. But it was only a moment, given by the cosmic pessimism of recent months. That third party games, 18+ and great masterpieces arrive on the Nintendo console is more important than ever, and stigmatizing if there are no more cross-platform games with the next generation of consoles. Who says then, sorry? So I’m happy to say that another one of my favorite video games of all time is playable, to quote a long-forgotten adage, “where, when and with who you want”.
