It's all about Choice...

You don't have much choice during the opening minutes, to be fair. The eerie lighthouse is only a minute's swim away, and the fiery wreckage of the plane you were travelling in is slowly sliding beneath the waves around you. And so you stumble upon the incredible city of Rapture, an art deco-styled undersea utopia, created as the platform from which mankind's greatest would have shaped humanity's glorious future. Would have, if everything hadn't gone a little bit wrong. Stumbling in to Bioshock's world gone mad, you soon find yourself aiding, and aided by, the voice of a man called Atlas, who communicates with you through a shortwave radio. Atlas introduces you to some of the backstory - genetic experimentation gone wrong, a populace gone mad with power - and to your first taste of the genetic material known as Adam in the form of a plasmid power-up.

I'm covered in bees!

Plasmids - genetic superpowers acquired throughout the game - form a large part of your arsenal in Bioshock (supplementing the usual shooter complement of pistol, shotgun, machine gun, rocket launcher, etc…), and are an absolute riot to boot, as you shoot electric bolts, ice or wind from your fingertips, or incinerate with the click of a finger. Your choice. My personal favourite was bees. I saved them for the enemies that really wound me up. Firing a fistful of bees into an assailant's face isn't the quickest way to kill it. But it is very, very funny.

Enemies mostly come in the form of the terrifying Splicers, former Rapture residents gone crazy over the very powers you're toying with. And occasionally, the already-iconic form of a Big Daddy. These monstrous, diving-suited horrors stomp around the complex protecting Little Sisters, scary genetically-altered girls who scavenge Adam from corpses. No hopscotch for these moppets. You need their Adam to increase your abilities and progress, you're told they're not human anymore anyway and you're given a choice - Harvest them, obtaining a massive boost of Adam, but killing them in the process, or Rescue them, obtaining half the Adam, a "Thank You" and the vague promise of a gift from one of Rapture's last remaining human inhabitants. Your choice.

A wealth of possibilities

Each area provides a wealth of possibilities for progression with Bioshock presenting itself as a series of stunning set pieces, each with a thousand random ways they can play out, and each begging you to add a little human creativity into the mix. Creativity…or perversity. In this way, Bioshock also delivers a step forward for so-called "emergent gameplay". Rapture, its contents and its inhabitants (mechanical as well as organic) are so alive - and the effects they and you can have on your surroundings so varied, that half the time you'll be trying new ideas out to see if they work as you'd imagine they would ("Yes, I can set that random corpse on fire an use my telekinesis plasmid to blast it into those explosive gas canisters and take out that Big Daddy.") and the other half you'll be agog as things you didn't forsee unfold around you.

Thus the inventive combat and the real-feeling physics provide an incredible "sandbox" experience, where experimentation just for its own sake can be endlessly rewarding, but where Bioshock goes from an amazing tech demo to the legendary game it will be remembered as is with its story, it's look, sound and feel - its overall aesthetic. It's hard to elaborate quite how real Rapture feels - how complete, how detailed, how defiantly imaginative and yet utterly believable. Graphically there's nothing close around at the moment, the sound design team need a medal and the writers and actors who tell their shocking and twist-laden tale (which hinges around, you guessed it, the concept of Choice) do so with a deft talent that Hollywood blockbusters rarely match.

Look, just play the most enthralling, imaginative and thoughtful masterpiece of 2007, or don't. Hey, it's your choice.

GAME's Verdict

• Bioshock displays boundary-bothering graphical and sonic grunt.
• Fire or Ice? Rescue or Harvest? It's all about the choices.
• Incredible story brings Rapture and its denizens to life convincingly.

• At around 25 hours first time it's longer than most games but doesn't feel like enough time in Rapture's amazing world.

Review by: Jonny Austin
Review Published: 29.08.07

A blockbuster game in the dead of summer? Shocking!

Arguably the biggest release on any format this August and the finest summer gaming sizzler in recent memory, Bioshock is packed with promise and prestige. Indeed, developer Irrational Games brings to Bioshock the renown of acclaimed PC shooters System Shock and System Shock 2, making Bioshock a long-awaited spiritual sequel to what old-skool PC players consider two of the most immersive, scary and downright shocking titles ever made.

Bioshock is billed as the ‘shooter 2.0’, and with good reason. Its gameworld, Rapture, is an undersea utopia-gone-wrong, once the home of humanity’s brightest and best, now a shocking 1960’s dystopian hell lined with biogenetically mutated monstrosities stalking its submerged hallways. Pushing visual and aural boundaries within this chilling setting, ‘evocative’ would be a mild word to describe Bioshock’s phenomenally atmospheric fiction.

Lumped into the first-person shooter genre because A) It’s viewed in first-person and B) firearms are largely the weapon of choice, Bioshock actually promises so much more than your archetypal run-and-gun game.

I don't think this is Portland Bill's place

At its outset, Bioshock sees the player scrambling from the wreckage of their crashed, sinking plane, swimming to an eerie lighthouse and discovering the path to Rapture within. Swiftly following this, a series of jump-inducing set pieces set the pace in its opening sections, coupled with a distinct lack of ammunition and the introduction of terrible bio-altered people-turned-monsters known as Splicers – all combining to imbue the claustrophobic, constant foreboding feeling you’d expect from being trapped in a crumbling undersea city.

Bioshock’s world of Rapture is a city built on bio-engineering, and Bioshock itself is a game built on the moral choices arising from this real-world political hot potato. A thinking man’s shooter in every sense, Bioshock presents its own genetic gameworld ecology, and offers players the choice of becoming a genetic monstrosity themselves, or ploughing a more crafty route through Rapture’s perilous innards.

The cause of Bioshock’s genetic mutations, which include abilities like shooting lightning, freezing enemies and telekinesis, is a bio-altering serum called Adam, housed within hypo needles called Eve – but it’s getting these which will form Bioshock’s most compelling remit.

Harvesting Adam will mean taking it directly from Little Sisters, freakish young girls whose role in Rapture seems to be to horde the dangerous genetic material – and getting to them will mean going through their bio-engineered guardians, the Big Daddies. Hulking, diving-suit-wearing protectors, Bioshock’s Big Daddies will destroy anything coming within a few feet of their allotted Little Sister – including you.

You’ll need to use your wits, whatever ammo you can scrounge, and your already-existing bio-engineered powers to defeat both Bioshock’s Big Daddies and deadly Splicers – and often, a combination of all three. Indeed, as more skills open up throughout Bioshock, you’ll be able to hack computers, upgrade your weapons, even direct Big Daddies and Splicers to fight each other with some extraordinarily open-ended gameplay possibilities, in a quest to get to the creepy Little Sisters.

Barely human?

Doing so, however, presents Bioshock’s big dilemma, thanks to two mysterious, conflicting influences. Contacted by an enigmatic Irish man named Atlas, and by Rapture’s own architect, Andrew Ryan, players will be given an ultimatum; save the Little Sister, as Ryan requests, for very little Adam, or very graphically strip away her entire Adam supply, sending shrieks of genuine terror around Rapture as the defenceless, dread-filled infant screams her last. She’s barely human anyway, reasons Atlas – and you need the Adam for yourself.

But what if he’s wrong? What if, deep down, the bio-altered Little Sisters are still human? And wouldn’t Adam make you less human too? Moreover, who is Atlas? What’s his agenda? And why does Ryan think saving the Little Sisters could benefit you? The answers to these questions and more await in Bioshock’s epic, immaculate, mesmerising underwater August adventure.

Preview by: Mark Scott
Preview Published: 01.08.07