Product Reviews

This is one of those games that changes the perception of what games should do. BioShock's story unfolds in Rapture, a city built 50 fathoms beneath the waves. Andrew Ryan, the self-styled architect of Rapture, intended to build a place where the greatest of humankind could escape the tyrannies of land-based religion and political power. But the society you now find beneath the waves is far from the Utopian ideal. Rapture has become a diseased wreck, populated by a host of unwelcoming residents, and your task is simply to survive your unplanned visit.

Rapture is built to a grandiose vision. Art deco detailing rubs shoulders with prim Victorian design, and the effect is that Rapture feels like an abandoned museum which is inexorably being engulfed by the sea around it. Authentic period music echoes through the abandoned corridors, and the incongruous buzz of catchphrases and marketing slogans emanating from vending machines and billboards constantly distracts the attention. It is all too easy to lose concentration and end up wandering Rapture's halls open-mouthed in awe, but your reveries are likely to be short-lived, because the locals are far from keen on 'tourists'.

Splicers are your constant companions. Once human, these inhabitants have overdosed and mutated their bodies to the point of monstrosity. Maddened by their biological abuse, they patrol Rapture in a psychotic fug, and while many are easily despatched in traditional zombie style, others are much more deadly. Some bloodthirsty splicers can move with superhuman agility, clinging to walls and shooting jets of flame from their fingertips. They also serve as a warning, because you too can abuse and mutate your DNA in order to return and repel their attacks, while wondering what long-term effect the powerful mutating Plasmids will have on your own body.

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a safe place, then, and certainly not a place for children. BioShock is rated 18 to keep real ones out, but all too many are inside the game already. The Little Sisters, escorted about by their hulking bodyguards - the giant, diving suit-clad Big Daddies - look and sound much like innocent little girls, but they're far from childlike. They patrol in a constant search for Adam, Rapture's precious genetic currency, which they leech gruesomely from the freshly deceased. Your relationship with them isn't simple, either. To obtain Adam for yourself, you must first kill the Big Daddy, which is no mean feat given their resilience, and then make a moral choice. Do you harvest the Little Sister, obtaining maximum Adam but killing her in the process? Or do you salve your guilt by rescuing her, albeit for a lesser reward?

And that draws us on to the truly distinguishing aspect of BioShock: choice. Unlike in other comparable games such as Half Life 2 or F.E.A.R, here you don't feel that you're being led from one set-piece to another. Instead, there's a constant sense that you have a free choice of what to do and how you want to do it. By facing you with boundless decisions, whether replacing one of your special abilities with another, upgrading your arsenal of weaponry, or puzzling how best to tackle a particularly tricky section, the game constantly reassures you that you're at the helm. If you want to go in guns blazing, you can, but chances are that along the way you'll discover a myriad of different ways to tackle the same problem - and, best of all, one that'll save those precious bullets for when you really need them.

If, like us, you've tired of the endless supply of brain-dead shoot-'em-ups and tepid adventure games, BioShock could get you excited again. It does, at least on the surface, resemble your average PC shoot-'em-up: there's the inevitable array of guns, a health bar at the top left of the screen, and the all-important blunt instrument, in this case a wrench, with which to whack people when you run out of bullets. But BioShock is more than just an accomplished homage to such classic PC titles such as Deus Ex, Thief, System Shock and the Half Life series. The quality of the scripting, character development, visual design and sound engineering all conspire to redefine what we should expect from a great movie, let alone a game. And, in achieving that, BioShock has done something very special indeed.