Who's your Daddy!

The city of Rapture has a serious problem and it's up to you to fix it. The game starts off with you riding an airplane that for some reason goes down into the ocean, as you make your way to what appears to be land, there's fire and chaos all around you. As you step onto dry land you see an elevator going down beneath the depths of the ocean... Welcome to Rapture!

First of all I'll start off by saying I'm going to try and prevent any spoilers at all costs since the game of Bioshock actually has somewhat of a good storyline, at times predictable but all in all pretty well written and thoughtout. One of the more interesting aspects of the story is the fact you do have somewhat of a choice when it comes to the direction you want to take while making your way through the game. Depending on how you want to look at it you can either choose a path of good in which you'll be helping what're known as little sister's I'll explain these in a little bit. Or on the other hand you can choose a path of selfishness where you'll in fact "Harvest" the little sisters. Towards the end of the game the choices you make throughout the game will effect the way the story goes making for some replayability at least twice through anyway.

When it comes to the little sisters they're the center of the game in many ways, you'll gain whats called Adam from them this is a form of currency that gives you access to all the wonders of plasmids. Little sisters are protected from enemies such as you by the Big Daddies, seriously thats what their called. Big Daddies are for the most part just big lumbering body gaurds, the only time you even need to bother with them is when you need to get at one of the little sisters. Other than that they'll just generally walk around aimlessly leaving you alone unless provoked, you can still attack and kill them which in some cases isn't that bad of an idea since you can then search them and find items such as money or other little goodies that come in handy.

Cash and Adam are essential in buying both ammo for your weapons and upgrades for your plamids and other genetic enhancements. You'll also find ammo on fallen enemies and scattered here and there throughout the levels, same goes for health and evo shots. Evo is similar to health, and is used for your plasmid weapons such as the lightning bolt or the bee swarm, your evo is replensished via evo shots, when running low on the juice you'll essentially give yourself a shot and revitalize your power.

Along with Cash and Adam, you'll also find things like rubber hose and batteries laying around, by taking these items to a machine called a U-Invent you can create various items like auto-hackers, exploding buck-shot, heat seeking-rpg's and so on and so forth. Later in the game it will be required of you to mix some things together to progress through the story but not to fear it's an extremely almost too simple of a process.

There's multiple plasmid weapons ranging from a cyclone trap to an incinerate power, basically each of these plasmids can be utilized for certain situations, there's even a telekensis power so you can pick up things like propane cylinders or even bodies and hurl them at your foes. There's even some cases where you'll need the electic shock plasmid to open doors. The weapons in Bioshock, those of a more conventional nature are also well implemented into the gameplay and are just as effective in the game as the plasmids are. There's once again choice in the selection you start off with the simplist of all weapons, a pipewrench, which may seem almost worthless, but mix with the stunning power of the electric shock and it makes for quite an effective combination. You'll also gain a freezing power where you can actually freeze your enemies and smash them to pieces with the wrench or just shoot them with the shotgun till they shatter, your choice.

In this way Bioshock brings something good to the table by balancing the power of both your methods of weaponry, conventional and plasmid, the game feels well planned and put together. You can also use the surroundings as a weapon, for instance if theres a puddle of water on the floor with a few enemies standing in it throw an electric charge at the water and presto zapped bad guys, same goes for oil slicks just throw some fire at the problem.

Another cool little thing is the ability to hack things in the game, this includes anything from vending machines to security bots and cameras. In Bioshock you can hack certain things by way of a mini-game, either you can buyout some of the hacks thus bypassing the game or you can hack it, I won't go into to much detail here but essentially you have to create a connection from point A to B via pipes. Every now and then you'll also find auto hackers you can use as well. By hacking machines you make their merchandise cheaper, sometimes you also unlock things only available after the machine has been hacked. By hacking bots, they'll attack your enemies rather than you, and by hacking the cameras they'll spot your enemies and send bots after them rather than after you.

The layouts of the levels are good with a decent amount of things to go through and hide behind, not too small nor too large. There's also a little handy help/hint system just incase you do get stuck, but this won't happen too often. In addition to all this included is a map layout screen to show you just where every item of importance is. Vending machines where you can spend your hard earned cash and Adam are placed throughout the levels Adam has been explained as for the regular vending machines you can purchase health, ammo, evo, and other things along these lines. Also in the list of machines is the Weapon upgrade machine, at these little kiosk like booths you can perform 1 upgrade to a weapon, these are you typical damage amount, clip size, etc. etc, depending on what gun your upgrading.

The gameplay feels a little clunky when it comes to your standard keyboard and mouse with wheel setup, with the f1-f7 selecting your plasmids and the 1-9 selecting your weapons, it can make for a hectic time when your caught in the middle of a gunfight with a big daddy and you can't find the right key. But if you got a gamepad or even a 5 button mouse it should greatly improve this problem. Other than that the rest of the gameplay and control feels tight and spot on, with a few exceptions here and there that are easily overlooked.

The graphics of the game are great if of course you got the hardware to run it, but you can always lower the setting making the game playable on nearly any system built within the last 3 years or so. I've got nearly everything cranked except resolution which is at 1024x768 and no directX 10 support on the video card. Incase your worried about your system's ability here's a rundown of what I've got.

CPU - AMD Athlon64 3000+ 2.00GHz OC'd to 3200+ 2.10GHz
GPU - ATI Sapphire X1650Pro 512MB AGP 8x Core-594.00MHz OC'd to Core-627.00MHz
RAM - Corsaire 256MB DDRX2
OS - Window XP SP3

As you can see I don't have anything near a powerhouse and yet and still able to run the game at decently high settings, the lack of ram hurts the load times no doubt about it, usually sittin' for about a minute to a minute and a half for load plus save till playing again, but with the large amount of vram on the graphics card I can still crank the textures and get it looking pretty. So as long as you meet or beat my specs you got it made with this game anyway, they did a very good job coding this game to be extremely efficient with hardware and it shows.

Walls and floors look gritty and realistic, flashes from the guns and the effects from your plasmids look fantastic, while the glow from the 50's decor casts an eerie light throughout the city of Rapture. Water effects are just amazing in the game sporting not only realistic droplet effects but also real-time reflections, there are some bugs here and there though. You'll notice enemies "twitching" on the edge of platforms and such, also when thawing ice on a ceiling it kind of melts upwards, just doesn't look right. Once again though the pros far, far outweigh the cons in this category, as the characters and the world itself succeed in drawing you into the city of Rapture and all it's horrifying glory.

The lack of a multi-player mode doesn't really hurt the game since it's not really a game that could support multi-player there's really know good way of pulling it off.

Overall Bioshock is a great game for any FPS fan out there, it honestly feels as if it took some of the best things from other FPS's and melted them all together giving us the resulting game. It does have it's problems of course but they are few and far between, the biggest being the length it's not that short but it just seems like it cuts you off right as it's getting good, it is kind of disappointing but if you can pick it up for 30 bucks or less it's definitely worth a go.

Well I've tried to write an informative yet non-disclosing review hope it works for you readers out there.