BioShock

The first-person shooter genre is easily one of the most popular styles of video games, and to look back over the past several years, some of the biggest titles of all time and "game of the year" awards have been for games of the FPS genre. Half Life, HALO, Half Life 2, F.E.A.R., Deus Ex, HALO 2, all have been critically lauded and made tons and tons of money. Not only because they are fun as all get out to play, but each one of these games has managed to raise the bar in one way or another for the genre. Half Life for its movie-like approach to gaming, Deus Ex for the added RPG elements, HALO for its heavy sci-fi storyline and engrossing character. Well, Bioshock is going to be one of those games that will sell really well because it, too, adds new depth to a genre many felt would be stagnant a couple of years ago and it is really a pleasure to play.

The time to be an Xbox 360 owner is now. And this is the perfect start to what will be a very popular 3rd and 4th quarter for 360 owners. Like Steven Hopper says in his article http://wii.gamezone.com/news/08_15_07_03_14PM.htm games heat up as summer winds down. In fact, with this title, Blue Dragon and HALO 3 all coming out in Aug. and Sept. the other systems will be hard pressed to match the kind of numbers that I suspect are going to be happening for the 360. Quite simply, this one, two, three punch are going to move some systems this season.

"Have a little electrically charged buckshot, pal!"

Ok, so enough pandering, what is so great about this game? Alright, so in the game (and I promise not to ruin any of the surprises of the game) you play as a man on an airplane that just happens to crash in the ocean during flight. As the sole survivor, you are treading water, pretty much swimming in flames from the wreckage when you spot a tower protruding from the murky depths. Swimming to it, you discover an elevator and since you have no other course of action, you ride it all the way down. As your ride comes to an end, the proverbial hornets nest is effectively beaten open. And as completely amazed you are you are disturbed that much too, because before you lies the city of Rapture, complete with underwater skyscrapers and a completely functioning city. But before you can even get your wits about you, a strange attack occurs and you quickly discover that all is not well beneath the sea.

Big Daddies, little sisters, mutated citizens, Adam, eve, psychopathic geniuses, a disturbed megalomaniac, nature defying abilities, strange mechanical devices and lots and lots of water are only some of the things you will encounter while trying to escape the city. Bioshock is a full blown, in-your-face gaming experience that will have you testing your own mettle and challenging you to look at video games in a different way. One, because the game truly provides you with options on how to approach the game, and two, this is a thinking person's action title.

"There is something really wrong with that girl."

The look and sound of the game has a very retro look to it, since the game takes place in the past, and Rapture was created for a large group of forward-thinking individuals (think scientists, doctors, artists, geniuses) the devices and other objects are things that simply never existed, but if they had, then this is what they would look like given the look of technology from the period. The visuals are incredibly detailed and totally in place, electrical tubing and pipes have that brushed copper look to them, fat rivets keep the city from being crushed in on itself and sea creatures swim away when you walk up to the glass to get a better look. The majority of the population in Rapture has embraced the genetic improvements that have been made available to them and are now paying the price. Think of this game as much a survival horror game as any other you may have played, but instead of zombies, the primary baddie you face are called splicers, people who let the vanity of increased beauty and power betray them and now wear masks to hide their disfigured faces. But they aren't your garden-variety baddie; remember the city is filled with pretty smart people who wanted to make a better life for themselves, these are intelligent creatures, who's minds have been as disfigured as their bodies, and they want you dead.

The game's graphics seem to really make you feel like you are in a slowly decaying city. The water effects are incredibly fluid, and I know, water graphics have been good for a while, but the water is as an important a character as anyone else in this game. It shimmies in the dark and flows off of staircases forming impromptu waterfalls. Walk under it and your vision blurs like it would in real life. A character gets knocked down in it and the water splashes with correct physics, it's absolutely breathtaking. The same goes for the lighting effects, flames dance around as if it were video recorded and not programmed. Flames lick at the oil on the floor igniting a splicer and encasing them in pure light. This being a thinking individual, they run around trying to put out the fire.  A huge, hulking, iron-encased man picks up enemies and throws them with insane strength, the body slumps against the wall with a sickening bend and then walks over to the already dead man and begins drilling into him with an industrial boring drill, blood splays everywhere. A little girl repeatedly stabs a downed man with a weirdo looking syringe, pulls it out to examine its contents, and then sticks him again. The game has visuals that are both beautiful and terrifying and all the while, you can't stop looking. The architecture of the city itself and the intricacies of mechanical devices that both help and hurt you, all incredible.

"And in this corner, weighing in at 485 pounds, BIG DADDY!"

Now since the game is a first-person shooter, you will be happy to know that it controls very well. The game nudges you a tad for some auto aiming but not so much that it takes away from the challenge. The use of both bumper buttons to toggle through the weapons and unnatural abilities you acquire is a pretty good innovation. The jump button isn't used as much as in other games of this type, so it's placed a bit out of the wheelhouse on the "Y" button. Of course, the triggers fire the weapons. Now, I know this has happened in other games, but you can hack the steampunk-esque devices and turn them to your advantage. The citizens of Rapture have money and when you frag them, you can loot their bodies for items and cash. The cash is used at the vending machines scattered around the city, hacking these machines enables you to buy items you may not have otherwise been able to purchase and makes items cheaper for purchase as well. The hacking aspect of the game is actually a mini-game that involves you moving pieces of pipe so that slowly (or fast) moving fluid will go from point "A" to point "B". It's pretty clever and depending on how difficult the hack is, the fluid moves at different rates of speed. You can hack plenty of items too, turrets, cameras, health stations, making them yours helps you and hurts your enemies.

Bioshock's real meat and potatoes deals with a chemical injection called plasmids, plasmids are a creation of Rapture and quite frankly it scares you because injecting them repeatedly makes you wonder if you aren't slowly mutating yourself into one of the splicers. These plasmids are mysterious and ugly in their application; however, they enable you to do some pretty fantastic things. Use the electric plasmid and you can shock your enemies with the flick of a wrist and then whack em' with your pipe wrench. Use the fire plasmid and ignite that group of splicers standing in the puddle of oil or unleash a swarm of bees from your veins to attack your foes (really kind of sick). The point is, you can begin to experiment on yourself with the injectable creations found in Rapture. Injecting yourself looks pretty gross and I'm sure feels none too good as well. Doing these experiments allows you to really get into the game as much or as little as you want. Sure, you could play the game like a standard shooter and pretty much blast your way through the game, but that really isn't embracing all of the nuances that the title has to offer. Coming up with new and innovative ways to dispatch your foes is really a wide-open decision. And with the sheer amount of weapons, upgrades, injectable powers, and combinations of all, you could literally take out an enemy 15 different ways in the same situations. You can even enrage your enemies so bad that they kill one another. Or hotwire a flying turret to act as your bodyguard while you roam the halls. The game is limited to your own imagination and you can play it several times trying things so wildly different that it feels new and fresh each time.

"Where's the bat signal?"

The audio portion of the title is also something to behold. When you communicate with other citizens via shortwave radio, the crackling and starchy sound of the voice is so authentic sounding you would swear they were really talking to you. Of course, it helps that this is a perfect example of what good voice work sounds like. The city's founder and king of the loony's is a man named Andrew Ryan, a man frustrated by the constraints of conventional thinking he went off an made his utopia, which is disintegrating much like his sanity. His honest-to-goodness paranoid character sounds like he's already past his breaking point and he's holding it all together by sheer will. An exceptional job of character development, and of course, credit must go to a really unique plot that keeps you wondering just what the dickens is happening. Other voices are also top notch, but it's not only the voices, it's how they are projected. Sneaking around the medical wing, you can hear the echoes of a demented surgeon barking out orders of a botched surgery, so creepy, so good. The ambient noises also bring so much to the game, the creaking of an unimaginable weight bearing down on the structure, the skittering of splicers scavenging corpses that are lying everywhere, heck, even the little creepy girls working in tandem with their massive protectors, it's so natural sounding and really fills out the game. Those players with a big surround system can really become enveloped in the sounds by really cranking it up. 

While wandering the rooms and hallways, you are indeed trying to accomplish a goal; granted it's a goal that changes on the fly and your decisions on how to handle some of the obstacles also makes the game ripe for replaying. The folks at 2K made things their way and it works. Instead of save stations, all you need to do is walk past a vita-chamber and it steals a sample of your DNA. Then if you die, a clone of yourself picks up where you left off. Meaning, if you are fighting a particularly tough baddie, you may die a couple of times to defeat him, all while he never replenishes health, since the entire fight and cloning are in real time (this isn't explained so much as it is implied). And when you fight you will, like I said, use all sorts of supernatural, injectable abilities, but don't forget the Tommy guns, the shotguns and other modern weapons. Sure it's nice to freeze a bad guy and then shatter them with the wrench, but sometime a head shot with a machine gun is what is best. But keep an eye on all your stats; your health, your plasmid ability and ammo is essential for survival. You find lots of first aid kits and syringes lying around or on a dead body, but I remember turning to my brother-in-law about two hours into the game and exclaiming "I bet I have missed a ton of stuff," and I was right. Referring to the map helps, but more often then not, opening that desk or looking around a dead-end corner will result in something found. Either way, the game has so much to find I honestly think it's impossible to see and find it all in three attempts.

Gameplay: 9.8
Smooth controls, a hint of assistance with the aim, a combination of thinking and action, the game could quite honestly become it's own genre, the TPS, thinking-person shooter.

Graphics: 9.6
Second only to Gears of War, and a close second at that. The intricacies of the machinations, the character models, the really freaky-looking locations, blood scrawled on the wall, bodies floating in the water, it is a freaky filled work of art. This is my favorite 360 game, and I have a lot of 360 games.

Sound: 10
You simply will not find a game with finer audio. From the murky and creepy background noises to the spot-on voice work, there simply is no better game on any system in any genre that sounds better then this.

Difficulty: Medium/Hard
You have your work cut out for you if you play it on the hard setting, and even if you try it on the medium setting. The game really forces you to think, and to think fast. Whether it's how do I stop these five lunatics from cutting me up and using my body for their own use or hacking a security system so it will help me gain access to another part of the level, the game throws curveballs at you left and right, it's fantastic.

Concept: 9.9
For a FPS, this one is pretty far out there. I'm serious, I didn't ruin any of the "holy cow, I can't believe that just happened" moments that you will experience. And I say experience, because this game is an experience. Cool plot and original ideas are plentiful here.

Overall: 9.8
I am really tripping out right now, I didn't know what I was getting into when I popped this into my 360. Folks, if you need another reason to buy an Xbox 360, then consider this the best reason to do so. Easily the best game I have played on any of the newest generation of systems. If this isn't game of the year, I will be shocked.