BioShock (Xbox 360, 2007)

Bioshock takes place in 1960, in the utopian city of Rapture. Created by one man’s visions about a perfect society, where every man and woman owns himself, where petty politics and economy won’t corrupt the people. The key point? It’s completely under water. Like a living, breathing Atlantis it stands on the seabed in the Atlantic Ocean, housing thousands of inhabitants.

One night, an airplane crashes into the Atlantic Ocean, and as the lone survivor, you find yourself stranded by a lone Lighthouse. Entering it, you find a bathysphere that takes you on a descent into Rapture, the best city on earth.
But something is wrong in the once idyllic city of Rapture. Deformed, hideous mutated beings run rampart throughout the cities, the population is nowhere to be seen, and the city is falling apart bit by bit both internally and externally, with evidences of a power struggle that has destroyed the city. Soon, your trip to Rapture becomes a fight for survival.

The story of Rapture is fantastic. Hands down, this is one of the best stories and presentations in a FPS game to date. As you venture through Rapture, you’ll gradually piece together it’s past and what caused it to destroy itself, while at the same time getting plenty of twists that are highly effective and surprisingly stunning revelations. Coupled with the morality issues you face throughout the game, Bioshock takes a hold of you psychologically and doesn’t let go, even after completing the game.

As well as being a well told story with great characters, setting and events, Bioshock also manages to be quite disturbing. It creeps into your head and heart and doesn’t let go. It’s the small things that makes this game so exceptionally creepy. A woman’s dead body can be found..just near a cute teddy bear. A dead couple lies together on a bed with a picture of their lost daughter. Pictures spread around displaying various attempts to improve the human nature..and to remove it’s symmetry can be found. The details are astounding, and helps immerse you into the game, and just like a great game should do, it changes you. Bioshock is an experience, that after 10 hours I find myself extremely happy to have experienced.At it’s core, Bioshock is a standard FPS game. However, it does have a few twists and turns that lifts it up above most other games.

As any normal FPS game, you’ll get your standard weapons, including the blunt melee weapon, the accurate but weak pistol, the powerful shotgun, the weaker machinegun, the Grenade Launcher and so on. These can be modified with several types of ammo (for example, you can change to special anti-personnel ammo for the pistol, or heat-seeking rockets for the grenade launcher) It is advisable that you learn to use these weapons well, as they are weak and good against various types of enemies, and they also work differently with various types of Plasmids (they being power-ups that will genetically modify you in all kinds of ways).

Bioshock is one game that lives up to the hype. It only has one flaw, which is that it sometimes becomes a little stale at a few points, but it always picks back up. There’s not much else to say about the game than I haven’t already said. It looks fantastic. It sounds fantastic. It plays fantastic. The combat with the huge amount of plasmids and weapons makes combat incredibly fun and varied. The game is pretty much everything it could be and exceeds it and will remain one of the great new classics of gaming.