Developer: Irrational Games
Publisher: 2K Games
Genre: First Person Shooter
Rating: M for Mature
Number of Players: 1
Release: August 21, 2007
Platform: Xbox 360, PC

Bioshock Gallery

The first person shooter genre's been more of the same for a long while now.  Pick up gun, run around, throw a grenade, shoot people, reload, hide to recover health/shields, rinse and repeat.  It doesn't happen too often when a FPS poses moral issues and asks the player to make a decision further than what route to take in a battle.

Then came along Bioshock.  When the game was first announced at E3 2006, the lofty clames by both then Irrational Games and the title's director Ken Levine made many members of the gaming media, as well as the public, pretty skeptical.  We'd heard it all before from different developers with promises of unlimited replayability and a deep, engrossing story that dealt with some heavy subjects.

Could there be any possible way that a game in the straight-forward first person shooter genre actually deliver on those promises?

Gameplay
As soon as the game starts, your character, Jack is involved in a plane crash in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean during 1960.  It's not long at all before you stumble upon a way down into a city built on the seabed known as Rapture.

The controls to the game are pretty run of the mill for a first person shooter, so if you're familiar with that, the learning curve shouldn't be too large.  There's only one firing mode for every gun but the reason behind that is because the left trigger and left bumper deal with the use of your plasmids and the selection of them.  My only complaint concerning the controls is the lack of a block button when using your wrench.  After playing Condemned, another 2K game, I found myself trying to block against blows from a Splicer attacking me, only to have activated my plasmids instead.  This wouldn't be a problem if the Splicers couldn't block your attacks.

And boy will you learn to love your plasmids and tonics.  Plasmids are these serums that re-write the DNA structure of Jack, allowing him to do many things, like shoot lightning from his fingertips or unlesh a swarm of insects towards his enemies.  One of the first times you use this in battle, you're taught pretty bluntly to use the "one-two punch" by zapping someone and then hitting them with your weapon.  That example is just one of the many ways to incorporate the plasmids into your combat.  So while dealing with the Splicers and Big Daddies of Rapture can be a sometimes be a daunting task, these potent babies are sure to level the playing field a bit.  Tonics work similiarly, but instead of being able to call upon a different tonic and use it instantly, tonics are constant modifiers to your character.  Tonics have a wide range of uses in the game and can make you impervious to some kinds of attacks or make hacking much easier.

Hacking is another nice gameplay feature in Bioshock.  Throughout the game your character will run into many different machines in Rapture.  Some of them will be helpful like vending machines, while others will be out to harm you.  Hacking is done by way of a simple puzzle where you must make one tube from the starting point to the finish.  If you fail, Jack either gets zapped or the alarms can go off, sending a couple sentry bots your way and making things that much harder for you.

Yet to talk about Bioshock's gameplay devices and not mention the Big Daddies and Little Sisters is borderline criminal.  These two character types are the stars of Bioshock and the things in the middle of it all.  Big Daddies are the hulking guardians of the Little Sisters.  In the first trailer shown at E3 2006, the Big Daddy is shown in attack mode, but only after the character tries to attack a little girl.  More often than not, you'll hear their voice and footsteps before you see them.  Generally, these behemoths will leave you be, only slapping you to the side if you're in their way.  If you get too close to the Little Sister it's protecting, you'll be greeted by the Big Daddy getting in a stance and roaring in your direction with an arm mounted auger spinning wildly.  Fighting these protective giants also proves to be a challenge, as they're also very quick for their size.  These fights are where creative uses of plasmids, along with your arsenal of weapons, will make the fight a bit more manageable.

Little Sisters are what used to be cute little girls, before they turned into pint-sized harvesters of Adam.  Adam's the substance you need to upgrade your abilities and survive in the world of Rapture.  Aquiring the Adam, however, becomes a pivotal part of the story, as you're thrown with a decision of whether or not you will save the child and only get half of the Adam you would have normally gotten or harvest all of the Adam and end up killing the girl.  The developers even wanted to drive home the point that it's just a little girl by making them do things that regular children do, like sing songs to themselves and skip around.  When you're about to make your first choice on whether or not to save the girl, as you walk up to her she looks up at you and tries to quickly crawl away in fear.  It's things like this exact choice that makes the game different from a regular first person shooter.