BioShock (Xbox 360, PC. 2K Boston, 2K Games)

It’s very rare that a game manages to successfully evoke a genuine sense of time and place, especially within an entirely fictional framework. BioShock sets its narrative in Rapture: an undersea utopia gone spectacularly wrong. A city that upon first sight appears majestic and inviting until BioShock’s compelling story begins to unfold and the reality behind the imposing statues and tall buildings quickly unravels before your very eyes. BioShock’s intro is one of the most jaw dropping we’ve ever seen. Beginning on an ill-fated plane journey, you wake up underwater struggling to make your way to the surface. Emerging from beneath the briny deep, you’re surrounded by bright orange flames and the disheartening sight of your plane gradually sinking out of view. The only place to go is the gigantic, foreboding black tower nearby. Apprehensive, you swim towards it. Who knows what waits for you within? It’s a humdinger of an opening that has you instantly immersed from the very second the game begins and the ensuing, serpentine plot is enough that you’re certain to be hooked throughout.
The strongest element of BioShock is its uniquely bold visual design. Utilising Epic’s much vaunted Unreal Engine 3, 2K Boston have crafted a solid and believable, intricate art deco styled nightmare filled with incidental details like 30’s styled propaganda posters, neon store fronts with twee slogans and haunting melodies of old, familiar songs. There are scenes of corrosion and desolation almost everywhere you go – exposed pipes spike out through cracked, rotting tiles, corpses lie against walls covered in thick, congealed blood. The devil here is most definitely in the details. With every surface of Rapture encrusted in filth or rust, the textures are so rich and tangible that you can almost taste the decay. BioShock is a visual tour de force and candidate for best-looking game on 360.

Walking around Rapture is simultaneously awe-inspiring and patently unsettling as hideously disfigured inhabitants known as Splicers threaten to pounce at any moment. Given that they too have had the same horrific graphical attention lavished upon them, they are truly terrifying – leaping towards you, screaming with fixed grimaces upon their clownish, surgically altered visages. Thankfully there’s plenty of weaponry and a steady supply of ammunition lying around in every crevice, desk drawer and cupboard in Rapture meaning that you’re seldom ill-equipped. Unfortunately, while this makes BioShock a lot of fun to play, it slightly drains the air of dread that pervades from the outset. After all, there’s always a checkpoint activating Vita Chamber where you can respawn an infinite number of times. Having the additional luxury of being able to save anywhere means that you’ll virtually never have to play through the same situation twice. While it keeps frustration to a minimum, (which is a very good thing) it does make finishing the game a breeze, even in hard mode (which is kind of a bad thing). You can purchase items like Medikits and Eve Hypos to replenish your plasmid powers, bullets and more from strategically placed vending machines. You’ll also come across U-Invent machines where a variety of scavenged items can be transformed into useful ammo and gadgets. Hacking said vending machines through a puzzle-based mini-game lowers the prices so you can save those hard earned dollars stolen from the still-warm corpses of anyone unfortunate enough to have been clubbed to death by your trusty wrench.
Central to BioShock’s premise is the acquisition of special abilities courtesy of power-ups called plasmids. Dual wielding plasmids alongside your conventional weapons quickly becomes second nature and makes you feel incredibly powerful. There’s a wealth of different abilities to discover, which you can upgrade later in the game to devastating effect. The best ones we found were the electro shock, incinerate and telekinesis, which are pretty self-explanatory from their names. Head and shoulders above the others though is the insect swarm which gives you the ability to cast armies of killer bees from your hand. Nasty. There are also downloadable plasmids available on Xbox LIVE meaning that there’ll always be scope for replaying the game, even if it’s just to see what new havoc you can wreak.

Invented by Rapture’s twisted founder and reprehensible wizard behind the curtain Andrew Ryan, plasmids are gained by accumulating a substance called Adam. Adam can be harvested from the macabre Little Sisters who roam the environments guarded by colossal, menacing Big Daddies who protect the Little Sisters at all costs. That’s where BioShock’s fundamental choice comes into play. Do you kill and harvest the Little Sisters for more Adam, therefore becoming more powerful at a much quicker rate, or do you rescue them and choose to build your powers slowly, gaining less Adam but potentially reaping greater rewards later on? It’s a no-brainer of a choice if you ask us. It quickly becomes apparent which is the better option dispelling any illusion that your selection has any kind of effect on the story. There’re two endings - a good and a bad one. You can probably guess which choice leads to each and which is the more rewarding. The choice that you ultimately make however will tell you a lot about your moral values (maybe). However, there are enough absorbing tasks and unpredictable plot twists to keep you occupied that you’re never really fully aware of BioShock’s (admittedly tiny) flaws until you’ve finished the game and had time to reflect on the journey that you’ve just taken. And playing through BioShock is indeed a journey, an intense experience that has few peers.
No other game in recent memory possesses the same brand of slow-burn psychological horror permeating every room, every passageway and every hall. BioShock doesn’t scare in the traditional sense; it quietly crawls under your skin and confronts you with unsettling scenes such as a couple lying in a lifeless embrace on their bed or a conventional family surrounding their TV set as static illuminates their grotesque, decomposing bodies. A game like Resident Evil would have you jump out of your skin as they spring at you, but BioShock doesn’t do cheap scares. It aims for something higher - it messes with your head. There are even moments that are scarily surreal, seemingly lifted from The Shining. A pair of Splicers gracefully dancing the foxtrot while a gramophone plays a crackling old record being one such instance. Setting them alight with your flamethrower just makes things worse though, which is where BioShock’s combat options come to the fore. You can play through BioShock in any way you like due to it’s flexible and varied system which allows you to upgrade almost every aspect of your character. It’s surprisingly in-depth; offering almost RPG levels of self-improvement such as quieter footsteps for stealthy wrench assaults, better hacking skills, stronger plasmids, better weapons, extra resilience and so on. Theoretically, you could play through without firing a single bullet; so plentiful are your options. You can set traps, enrage your enemies so that they fight one another, hack security bots to fight alongside you or even hypnotise Big Daddies to protect you instead of the Little Sisters. You don’t always have to torch your foes or shoot them in the face. The possibilities are vast and another reason why BioShock stands up as such an accomplished work of genius.
BioShock is an incredibly ambitious title, which more than delivers on its initial promise, managing to entertain and enthral from start to finish. Consistently surprising, shocking and eminently, compulsively playable, BioShock stands head and shoulders above any 360 title you’ll play this year. And even though the majority may argue that Halo 3 was 2007’s definitive 360 title, we enjoyed BioShock more. Even though it has far less features than Halo 3 (the lack of multi-player being a minor blow), BioShock possesses such scope and abundant imagination that for our money, it’s the finest game of 2007 and a bona-fide masterpiece.
I choose…Rapture! - 10/10