You know this is coming, don’t you?
After talking about difficulty and graphics, I’ll talk about enemy AI in Bioshock now.
There are two types of enemy in Bioshock: Splicers and Big Daddies.
The Splicers are former Rapture inhabitants that used a little bit too much Adam (genetic modifier). They look like zombies, but they can talk, and not dead.
They act stupidly, running directly to a person welding a shotgun with a lightning-shooting arm, Not hiding from a Big Daddy Killer, keep talking and alerting you about their location, and so on.
People complained about this.
I disagree with them.
I saw them fighting among themselves for a stupid reason. I heard them talking to themselves. I watch them trying to take out my Big Daddy bodyguard. Pretty much what they do is lurking around, spotting you, die.
No, they’re not cooperating with each other. When you fight a number of them, you can expect the fight to be a little demanding, not because of a good cooperation between your enemy, but pretty much because you have a grenade waiting to explode near your feet while hiding from enemy fires and suddenly, another enemy dropped from the ceiling. That is screwed.
If you’re wondering what my point in the last two paragraph is, here it is: YES, THEY ARE STUPID.
Anyway, In my personal opinion, I think those guys are supposed to be stupid, they are junkies in need of a fix. When you really need that little Adam fix, you’ll act the same way. Trust me on that one. I have a very credible source. So, I think that their AI is fitting to their role nicely.
In the other hand, The Big Daddies are pretty much gentle giants. They don’t attack you if you don’t bother them. But If you do, you will be surprised. These gentle giants are strong, stupidly strong. It takes about a dozen point-blank shotgun blasts to take them down. And some of them moves very quickly, which makes it very hard.
But strong as they are, smart they are not. You can defeat Big Daddies using the game’s environments. All they do is chasing you, shoot/drill, repeat. You can use proximity mines, security cameras and bots, even a Big Daddy Bodyguard to make things easier.
On this case, I say that the Big Daddies don’t need to be smart either, they are strong enough to be challenging, and every fight you have with them will be tense.
It seems that with this post, I have declared myself as a Bioshock fanboy. oh, well…
