a game review by Daniel Roberge


Bioshock is a game that wastes no time in making an impression; after a brief voice-over that raises more questions than it answers, you find yourself in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the burning wreckage of an airplane. The only visible hope of survival is a mysterious tower, gateway to the dazzling underwater city Rapture. As soon as you step out of the bathysphere, it is clear that something has gone badly wrong; the magnificent architecture and high technology (for the time, the game is set in 1960) is giving way to the pressures of the sea, and any humans you see are desperate, insane, and strangely altered ....

While the true story of Rapture and the calamity which is slowly destroying it is laden with spoilers, a few facts are made clear very early and are important for understanding the core mechanics of the game. Following the Second World War, wealthy industrialist Andrew Ryan, fearing the depredations of powerful governments, realized his vision of a libertarian utopia at the bottom of the ocean in the form of the city Rapture. With the serendipitous discovery of a gene-modifying agent, dubbed ADAM, in a species of sea slug and the freedom of Rapture's scientists from the bonds of "petty morality", the secrets of genetic engineering were unlocked decades ahead of
time, and soon virtually the entire populace of Rapture had modified themselves with these new wonders.

The Pandora's box opened by the discovery of ADAM provides the basis of both the game's plot and this shooter/role-playing hybrid's character customization system. Various genetic tweaks, termed 'plasmids' and 'tonics' do everything from increasing your character's speed to allowing him to shoot fire from his hands. These enhancements can either be found or bought from vending machines for ADAM, and it is here that the game's vaunted 'moral choices' come into play. With the breakdown of social structures withing Rapture, the flow of ADAM into Rapture has come to a halt. Thus, the only source of ADAM is from the corpses of genetically modified humans, which are quite abundant. This ADAM is concentrated and purified by mutant little girls called Little Sisters, who wander Rapture and gather ADAM under the guardianship of the gargantuan, resilient Big Daddies. The moral dilemma of Bioshock is this: once you defeat the Big Daddy and the Little Sister is under your power, do you harvest all of the ADAM in her body, killing her in the process, or do you excise only the parasitic ADAM-collecting modifications, restoring her free will? Killing the Little Sister earns twice the ADAM as saving her, so your solution to the dilemma reflects on your survival as well as on your moral character, making this an interesting, if not especially nuanced, ethical choice.

The gameplay of Bioshock is quite open, permitting a variety of different styles of play. While it is possible to play Bioshock as a pure shooter, less twitchy players will appreciate the ability to subvert the mechanical defenses of Rapture to their own ends, and to distract their enemies with some of the more passive-aggressive plasmids. As a shooter, it is quite competent, with a nice variety of weapons, but not as deep as a dedicated shooter such as Gears of War. The various mechanisms of the game work together very well, allowing the sum to be greater than the whole of its parts.

Overall, Bioshock brings the Xbox 360 one of its most compelling and absorbing single-player experiences, from start to finish. Along the way, it finds ways to subvert even the most experienced player's expectations, including a truly startling plot twist about halfway through. While it is not as deep, long, or challenging as PC stalwarts such as its spiritual predecessor System Shock 2 or the chillingly prophetic near-future masterpiece Deus Ex, it succeeds in most of its ambitions, and is one of the best video games of 2007.

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