Review: Bioshock The Collection

G’day there guys and gals!

In the early days of the original Xbox 360, I was introduced to E3, with the following year being my first. To the veterans that would remember, the original 360 came with several trailers for particular titles on them. One of them, for my console, was the Bioshock reveal trailer. It was the first real taste of a gory, in-your-face game for me. Many had gore, sure, but none to the level of drill-drilling-through-a-guy’s-hand level before.
Ever since, I have been a fan of Bioshock, and to this day, own the titles on several platforms and even have a Bioshock flask with one of the original game’s quotes on there. Nearly a decade later, we have Bioshock The Collection, a remaster of the three titles in one single package. As with many other titles that are released as ports to the new consoles, this does not live up to the hype of the remake for the original Bioshock, but it is well worth it for a returning fan or a newcomer into the series. To avoid spoilers for newcomers, all games will be briefly described.

First and foremost; Bioshock. Players take control of Jack, a young man who is innocently enough flying over the Atlantic Ocean when his plane crash lands in the middle of the ocean. Finding refuge in a lighthouse, he notices that there are many hidden things under the sea and without option, dives head first into the city of Rapture.
The marketing for the Collection was mostly focused on the remaking of the original Bioshock, and admittedly, I wasn’t as impressed as I expected to be. Don’t get me wrong, the people at Blind Squirrel Games have gone to a lot of work to polishing the title, but it’s nothing more than that: a polish. The textures look much better, the lighting and themes are much more balanced, but the game itself isn’t without faults. As I have said in the past, when a player begins to count how many times a fault occurs in a title, something is definitely wrong. I experienced twelve audio glitches, where the audio doubled itself or more in an audio file or mid-conversation, and several times in the game did I find unrendered textures stuck in normal mapping mode. By far the most annoying was an issue with the Big Daddy’s movements, where standing too close would cause vibrations in the screen. This is a normal event, due to their large size, but these vibrations would often break textures during this vibration and show the bright red objects underneath the render.
All that set aside, the audio and sound effects are incredible good, character models look impressive, especially Andrew Ryan, but majorly stay the same, and of course, the legendary story and gameplay still remains intact. The game also features a Museum, where players can walk around an open area and explore the more unknown facts about the game, its development and the character’s trial phases. This couples alongside Documentary films you can unlock by finding at pivotal moments in the game, such as your first Big Daddy sighting up close, the fate of Ryan and so on.
If you’re looking for a Gears of War Ultimate Edition level of remaster, I warn you now, you will be disappointed. Graphics and tone is improved greatly, no doubt, but nothing on the level of games releasing in the new few weeks.

On to Bioshock 2. Set ten years after the events of the first title, players take control of Subject Delta, one of the first Big Daddies of Rapture. Mysteriously reawakening after his death, he discovers Rapture as truly become a ruin, and firmly under the ruling thumb of Sofia Lamb. Dying slowly, Delta must find a way to find his now adult Little Sister, Eleanor, before their distance takes its toll.
Admittedly, Bioshock 2 has, and will always be, my personal favourite in the series. And while being the more unpopular in the franchise, it seems that this is where the least amount of attention is spent, due to its bugs galore.
Lip syncing in the first level is completely off, especially with the first conversation with Lamb after reawakening, game freezes in loading screens occurred around five times during my playthrough, and many more during overriding save slots, where many crashed the game itself, or froze for almost twenty seconds. Once again, the vibrations from Big Daddies corrupts the game, but in a worse way, as each step from every Big Daddy in Pauper’s Drop and Inner Persephone overrode my controls and caused idle drift with my character. However, this is not where the glitches end, and in the sake of time, I shall limit my own.
Houdini Splicers reappearing near mines causes them to disappear, in few airlocks I received random damage from the water, Eleanor glitched while following me in Inner Persephone (and this happened with NPCs running up stairs particularly), and usually when these were fixed, the game froze indefinitely, with most ironically being linked to using the Fire plasmid. This short list doesn’t also mention the many subtitle glitches, the lack of audio glitches where they’re meant to be there (especially in Minerva’s Den) and so on. But I digress.
Bioshock 2 does offer a little more of new music to the background, which sounds fantastic, not to mention the minor details like the incredibly fast load times in between levels, vending machines’ audio glitching out due to age, and so on.
The game itself still plays fantastically, with the same sound effects, musical score and look of the original, but it is truly a shame that the bugs take centre stage.

Finally, we come to the beloved Bioshock Infinite. Set in 1912 (forty six years before Bioshock 1), players take control of Booker DeWitt and his drive for a single task; bring us the girl and wipe away the debt. He discovers Columbia, a floating world fifteen thousand feet high in the sky, and discovers the air may not be as clean as it looks.
Luckily for Infinite, there weren’t that many bugs to report, with the only mentionables being music in the level overlapping the loading screen on every occasion, screen tears in evelators loading, unrendered lens flares in Lady Comstock’s memorial, and items thrown by Elizabeth having no flying animation heading towards Booker, except the health packs. Coins and Salts will spin, but will noticeably stay in mid air and suddenly warp into Booker’s hand. Due to its more recent place in the series (the game only being barely three years old), there haven’t been any graphical improvements in the titles, or any improvements that I can see, although the game itself still sounds, looks and plays incredibly well, truly holding up against time much like its predecessors.

In the short of it, even as I write these words now, I find it hard to properly score this title due to how much I love this series. If this were a brand new title, for a series I had never played before, it would be well worth a 6/10, or perhaps even a 5, but due to my past knowledge, I cannot fairly give it a fresh score.

In writing my notes for this review, the idea came to me; much like in the first two Bioshock games, the idea of a “Great Chain” is mentioned, where all must pull together.

And it got me thinking. If a loop breaks in a chain, do you blame the loop? No, you break the chain. The chain is broken, not just that single loop. So in my eyes, Bioshock 1, 2 and Infinite are not broken. Their stories, their gameplay, they are not at fault. The chain is, and the chain sadly is Bioshock The Collection.
At the asking price, I must say to fans and newcomers alike; be warned, these ports are still incredibly buggy. If you can muster through the asking price and all the bugs for three terrific games and all their story based DLC, then I would absolutely recommend this game to you.
It has its faults, but the games are well worth your time.

Bioshock The Collection: C-

This game is out now for the standard price of $99

Review: Aot Wings of Freedom

G’day there guys and gals!

It has never been a secret that I am a huge anime fan, and I will admit, that this release has been the  hardest to review from a neutral standpoint. Attack On Titan: Wings of Freedom follows the first season (one OVA and the smallest of hints at near current events manga wise) of the anime throughout the Attack Mode of the game. Players can expect to play as Eren, Mikasa, Armin and Levi primarily during this campaign mode, while your character choice becomes optional in the Expedition Mode; a near freeroam mode where players can undertake optional tasks and objectives throughout the world.

As any fan of the series can tell you, the record of AoT titled games has been incredibly lax and disappointing. Many buggish, unfinished or simply disappointing. Wings of Freedom is a refreshing new look on the series, and it certainly blows the previous titles out of the water.

Story wise is told mostly directly from the anime; while large sections of scenes are missing (Most notably the training/court hearing scenes and other long exposition parts of the anime) or replaced with narration and text, fans should have no problem picking up where the game leaves off, while newcomers may get lost in the world and its lore. To that, I would highly encourage you to read the manga or watch the series beforehand. To those unfamiliar with the lore, Attack on Titan is based in a world where humanity is on the brink of extinction, hiding behind three large, circular walls keeping their greatest threat at bay – the Titans. However, out of nowhere, a Titan larger than any other suddenly appears and destroys the wall’s gate, allowing them to flood in, as another Titan destroys the inner gate, forcing humanity to flee behind the second wall. The story primarily follows Eren Jaeger, Mikasa Ackerman and Armin Arlert as they join the military with three varying goals in mind, to only discover human has got more skeletons in the closet.
The two newer parts (a hint towards Ilse’s Journal OVA and the epilogue) add more background to the Scout Legion and their journey beyond the wall both during and after the events of the first season. By now, the story has been told to death, but is still enjoyable in its different forms and comes off at least revamped and fresh, showing both remade scenes directly inspired by the anime and new, more in depth scenes.

The game’s biggest strength is by far the gameplay. Players control their characters through their device known as an ODM, allowing them to swing and soar through the air via cables attached to solid objects in order to kill Titans by slicing at their nape. The controls, admittedly, take a LOT of time to get used to, but players will turn into Titan slayers with ease once mastering this system. Entire maps are destructible and a falling building due to a sudden-crashing Titan will force you out of the ODM animation and cause you to fall, the exact same for a failed hit on the enemy. Players will instantly start seeing familiar maps and maps with similar layouts, but this is excusable due to the sheer amount of detail, not only in the characters, but the world, its destruction capabilities and the mass amounts of titans.
In saying all this, gameplay does get stinted after a while, even to the most veteran of fans. To be blunt, the gameplay can be boiled down to a few objectives in each mission; protection route, score limitations, target takedown and movement specifics. This also applies to the side missions, where characters will require your help to give out supplies, save civilian, escort to a safezone or simply kill the titans around them. These tasks feel truly heavy handed by the time you repeat missions, secure zones and play in the Expedition Mode. And while players can also (SPOILER ALERT) play Eren in his Titan form in specific missions, past this the mode only lasts for approximately 30 seconds during freeroam, the same amount of time as the assistance option from followers. Titan Vs Titan NPC is incredible and is utterly fun to destroy buildings while slaying titans at a whim, but fighting main characters (hint hint) at the end is a huge disappointment. The final boss battle with Eren Vs *redacted* and those alike earlier on, are incredibly short, even on harder difficulties. Players will have no problem finishing off said opponent before the in-game narration is over. The best battles are human Vs Titan Boss, as the stakes get much harder; limbs are incredibly harder to dismember, all of them will fight back much more ferociously and have natural armours that need to be worked around to attack and so on. It’s here that the game does shine, but these missions only appear twice in the game.

Musical score is completely brand new and none of the original soundtrack makes a comeback. While this may sound depressing, I enjoyed the new sound to the series, although I was disappointed in being unable to scream/sing the opening lyrics. Voice acting is very well done, as the original Japanese cast makes a return to record new lines for the series. I am disappointed with Eren’s titan roar (it sounds more like a dad roaring like a lion to his kids with the sound of gravel rustling in the background) to be fully honest, but otherwise the cast did well, especially Romi Park as Hange. Sound effects were just as good and sound crisp and clean during the gameplay and cutscenes. I gush over the shrill sounds of the blades extracting, the collapsing of buildings and the Titans themselves.

As previously stated, this title has been incredibly hard for me to personally detatch and review with an open mind and thoughts, and I have been fairly critical on this title. The gameplay is tricky to begin with and slowly does become to stale slightly, the voice acting is good but off, and the ending itself is incredibly lackluster and disappointing. While there were a few physics issues here and there, I did not experience any crashes or bugs during my playthrough.
With all this in mind, as I write these words, I must remind you all of the previous titles in this IP. Without a doubt in my mind, AoT: Wings of Freedom is by far the best title in the franchise thus far and makes some brilliant contributions. This is an absolute must-own for fans, and for those looking for a gruesome bloody game with spiderman-like manoeuvring, you may want to consider picking this up for yourself. A well-crafted and fun addition to the popular series.

Attack on Titan: Wings of Freedom – 8/10

This game is out now for the standard price of $80