OMG a pipe puzzle, what's that all about?
There are a fair amount of items to pick up on your travels; the aforementioned first aid-kits and EVE-Hypos, but also ammo, weapons, food and even cash, which can be spent on hacking security bots, without having to complete the fairly mundane hacking puzzle. In this demo you'll encounter a number of security bots, both flying around and on the ground. They can be disabled by electrocution and then you'll be able to hack them, meaning that they'll fight any enemies with you, but first off you need to do a tedious puzzle game, which has been seen in numerous games in the past (Pipe Dream on the Atari ST springs to mind) and involves rotating pipes in order to make the liquid flow through correctly to the end of the circuit. If you've got the cash, you can just pay for it to be hacked without having to do this ridiculous task. I did hope that this mini-game would change when you disable more bots, but was surprised to find that it's the same mini-game over and over again. Nevertheless, hacking bots will hopefully only be a small part of Bioshock, but why?So, although I'm not jumping out of my seat with enthusiasm for Bioshock, I am still really looking forward to seeing if Irrational can push the genre forward. Bioshock is a great looking game, which oozes atmosphere and has a story that I really want to know more about. The demo doesn't show any real signs of the interactive environments that we've been promised – yeah so you can flush a toilet, use a telephone and smash a lock of a gate with your mallet, but we have been promised an unprecedented level of interaction and player-driven choices in the full-game. The demo does leave you desperate for more, but also slightly confused as to why the game has been receiving 10/10 scores. Hopefully, we'll find out the definitive answer when the game arrives at the end of August.
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Click for larger imageNOTE: REVIEW COMING SOON - I WAS SO WRONG ABOUT IT BEING A STANDARD FPS UNDER THE SURFACE.
