Bioshock

I finally got round to installing and completing Bioshock recently. It is an excellent game - a blend of an interesting concept and storyline, good gameplay and wonderful design and graphics. The premise is that you find yourself the only survivor of a plane crash, and upon descending in a mysterious bathysphere, you enter an immense underground city called Rapture. Rapture was meant to be an utopia - the dream of one man who wanted to live free from the restraints of government, religion and ideology. Like all utopias, however, it had begun to consume itself from within, and you find yourself in the midst of a civil war pitting two factions intent on gaining control of Rapture.

To control Rapture, you must control 'Adam'. Simply put 'Adam' is a substance that allows an individual to alter his/her genetic code. This lends for interesting gameplay options, as injecting yourself with Adam gives you special abilities such as the ability to emit fire or electric shock, to freeze enemies or even create a swarm of bees that will attack any foes. Defeating your foes is thus a mixture of using these special abilities to harass/stun/temporarily disable them, and the conventional arsenal of machine gun, shotgun, pistol, grenade launcher and wrench (instead of the classic Half-Life crowbar). However, your special abilities don't come free, and you have to constantly replenish your stock of 'Eve' which grants you the ability to use these powers.

The main beauty of the game comes in its design - a rich pastiche of art deco and art nouveau grandeur coming apart at its seams. Every aspect of the game is incorporated into this, including the weapons (think mafia style machine gun and sawed-off shotgun). There is a quite stunning level of detail, from the folding door elevators, to 1930s style bar counters, that literally transports you to a new world. The use of shadows, lighting and sound also ensures an experience which is often unsettling and eerie.

What really sets Rapture apart is the depth of the storyline which is myriad, rich and very detailed. A clever little device where your character can pick up tape recordings left by the inhabitants of Rapture allows you to find out many of the intricate details of its fall from paradise, even as the main plot is slowly being unraveled and revealed. There is also a wonderful and rather twisted little gameplay element that will challenge each gamer's ethics - 'Adam' itself is generated in the bodies of little girls called 'little sisters' - the question is do you 'harvest' them, gaining the maximum benefit and growing correspondingly stronger, or do you 'save' them, releasing them from their bondage as genetic containers, but gaining less benefit in the process?

In sum, Bioshock is gorgeously designed, richly detailed, and an excellent game all the way through. My only complaint would be that the final boss was just not very challenging, which was a bit of a come done, especially given how multi-faceted the rest of the game was. But that would be a very minor gripe in an otherwise excellent game.