Bioshock Remastered (2020) review

When I was in high school, Bioshock felt just about as good as AAA gaming could get.

A polished pinnacle of design and aesthetics, the first game in the series went all-in on an instantly-iconic setting and embraced themes, ideas and imagery that went slightly beyond what other AAA of its time offered. It had fun gunplay that emphasized exploration and experimentation. It was a shooter that encouraged you to make interesting decisions and find ways to take advantage of your abilities, your opponent’s weaknesses and the environment around you. 

While all of the above are pretty compelling on their own, it was the ways in which Bioshock weaved all these different threads together – a feat often credited to so-called gaming auteur Ken Levine – that’s stuck with me. At the time, the game managed to feel cohesive and cinematic without coming across as overly-shallow or scripted.

In 2020, my perspective on all the above – especially Levine – gas changed, but Bioshock, which is now available on the Nintendo Switch, hasn’t.

Happy anniversary

For those too young to remember it, Bioshock was a science-fiction first-person shooter released in 2007 that saw you venture below the surface of the sea to the underwater dystopia of Rapture. This city was built atop the flawed objectivism of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and powered by Adam and Eve. These two addictive substances gave you the power to alter your own genetics and bestow yourself with fantastical mutations like the ability to throw anything from lightning bolts to bees at your enemies. 

Without veering too close to the game’s iconic story moments, the premise of Bioshock puts you on a path to topple Rapture’s despotic ruler and escape from the half-flooded metropolis. It’s a blend of survivor horror, immersive-sim and first-person shooter.

If you like any of those things then you’ll probably enjoy what Bioshock has to offer. That was the case with the original game and it’s much the same case with the new Switch version of it.

One of the more interesting details worth touching on here is that, while other Switch ports like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt or Overwatch have had to make severe or significant compromises in order to run on Nintendo’s handheld, Bioshock Remastered hasn't. The original game launched on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 and the hardware here is more than capable of running doing it justice.

That being said, neither the original Bioshock nor its sequels look as good you likely remember them. As visually-rich and crisply-detailed as your memories of the first time you played Bioshock might be, the reality is that it hasn’t aged all that well when it comes to graphics.

Of course, the upshot of this is that squeezing them onto the Switch’s smaller LCD display doesn’t feel like that much of a downgrade. What’s more, while standards for fidelity have changed since the first came out, the sound and environment design here go a long way to helping keep the game’s rich sense of atmosphere and tension intact.

The Bottom Line

If you’re wondering whether Bioshock runs well on Switch, fret not.

Irrational Games’ subversive shooter just might not look as you remember but, otherwise, this is a perfect port. If you’re ready to return to Rapture and don’t mind sacrificing a little bit of immersion for portability, the Nintendo Switch version of Bioshock Remastered is easy to endorse.

These days, many modern AAA games commit the crime of being too big. Even smaller releases nowadays are loaded with long-tail challenges and post-launch content designed to keep you coming back.

Bioshock predates this trend and, upon revisitation, there’s something refreshing about that finite sense of scope. Sure, Bioshock 2 and Bioshock: Infinite exist but the story here stands on its own. Levine and co. know when to let the curtains fall and the credits roll.

At the time it was released, Bioshock felt like the pinnacle of what gameplay, art, writing and sound design could achieve by working in unison. While gaming has moved beyond what this game offered on all these fronts, the fact that the Switch can recapture that appeal feels so much more like the future of gaming to me than any amount of teraflops promised by the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X.