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