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