The greatest compliment that can be paid to BioShock is that it elevates gaming as an art form to levels previously unattained. At the helm of the project as creative director is the cofounder of Irrational Games, Ken Levine. As the man behind such highly revered titles as Thief: The Dark Project and System Shock 2, Levine’s name has since become synonymous with exemplary storytelling in games. True to form, Levine has created a universe for BioShock that is horrifying, mesmerizing, and entirely visceral.

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At the epicenter of BioShock is its inimitable setting: a dystopian deep-sea metropolis called Rapture in the year 1960. Others have compared the storytelling in the game to that of Orwell’s, but there’s a decided Conradian undertone throughout, as Andrew Ryan, Rapture’s objectivist founder, becomes the gaming generation’s own ‘Mr. Kurtz.’

Ryan built the city of Rapture as an elitist utopian society and attracted the brightest doctors, engineers, scientists, inventors, and artists with promises that they would be able to practice their work unbound by “petty morality.” It was to be a place without conventional law or organized religion. The only law was the word of men. The only religion was wealth and power. “It wasn’t impossible to build Rapture at the bottom of the sea,” asserts Ryan. “It was impossible to build it anywhere else.”

But something went horribly wrong along the way. Its citizens abused their new freedoms. Addiction to “Adam,” a chemical compound that rewrites a person’s DNA and provides superhuman abilities, became rampant. Addiction gave way to all-consuming greed, which inevitably gave way to civil war. The population descended into madness and Rapture began to consume itself from the inside.

The game begins not long thereafter, with the lead character, known simply as “Jack,” inadvertently entering into the city after a downward plunge in a bathysphere. The hellhole Rapture has descended into is strictly the stuff of nightmares. Graffiti written in blood adorn the walls. Fires rage in some areas of the city, while others are completely frozen over. Once magnificent edifices lay in ruin. Glass-enclosed walkways between buildings begin to creak, buckle, and finally burst under the pressure of the sea. Each locale within the city is a spectacle to behold, meticulously combining period-style art deco and futuristic steampunk to awe-inspiring affect. No two rooms in the city are identical and almost everything is interactive and searchable, giving the gamer the impression that Rapture is a place that may have once been actually inhabited by humans…and not merely created by a game studio outside of Boston.

Some of Rapture’s more notable denizens survived the city’s fall and are present in the game as either allies or enemies (or a profound mixture of the two). Early on in the game, the player gets his hands on a two-way radio that keeps him in constant contact with a survivor of Rapture named Atlas. Atlas lessons the player in the city’s deep history and provides objectives on the stated path of eliminating Andrew Ryan.

Other significant personalities include Dr. Steinman, who can be encountered in the Medical Pavilion. Once a brilliant cosmetic surgeon, Steinman was later inspired greatly by the abstract work of Picasso and began performing horrifying facial reconstruction on patients when he no longer had any interest in traditional beauty. Dr. Tenenbaum was interned in concentration camp during the Holocaust at a young age, but quickly showed great medical prowess. Nazi surgeons and researchers quickly took interest in the Wunderkind and soon she was assisting them in performing experimentations on her fellow occupants. Fort Frolic, Rapture’s entertainment district and ultimately the game’s most enjoyable and memorable level, is home to Sander Cohen, a comically eccentric yet violently psychotic thespian. Cohen is the show-stealer, whose digital persona presents a performance that exceeds in both range and depth that of most real-world film stars.

All these characters left diary recordings scattered throughout Rapture, which the player can obtain and listen to so as to gain insight into the rise and fall of Rapture. From a design standpoint, the recordings leave the flow of gameplay unimpeded by eschewing audio for text.

The most intriguing and deeply unsettling characters in the game are the Little Sisters. Conditioned in a controlled environment from infancy to be harvesters of Adam, these demonic children carry massive needles used to extract the substance from the corpses strewn throughout Rapture. The counterpart of every Little Sister is a Big Daddy, a bio-mechanical monstrosity outfitted with deep-sea diving suit whose image has already become iconic to the game.

Big Daddies act as the protectors of the Little Sisters. Attempt to impede the work of a Big Daddy or Little Sister, and expect to face the overwhelming wrath of these mechanized brutes. While the Big Daddies won’t initiate an attack against the player, you’ll often find them engaged in battle with other Rapturians who have overstepped their bounds. You can use these situations to your advantage, either by waiting it out for the foes to destroy or severely injury each other and then moving in to finish them off, or avoiding confrontation altogether by slipping by unnoticed.

The styles of the Big Daddies vary from level to level. There’s the Bouncer, whose massive drill will shred anyone who stands against him, and Rosie, who carries a riveting gun as a weapon. For such massive brutes, Big Daddies move deceptively fast, lumbering along behind the Little Sisters whilst at ease, but pounding the ground as they lunge toward you with great rapidity when enraged.

Irrational made a conscious design choice of making the player unable to interact directly with the Little Sisters the same way he interacts with other characters in the game. The Big Daddy assigned to the Little Sister must first be eliminated and then the player must directly approach the diminutive gatherer. A menu appears, asking the player if he wishes to “harvest” or “rescue” the girl. The choice is left up to the player each time, but Tenenbaum, who presents herself early on, urges you not to harm the “Little Ones,” and provides gifts in exchange for your benevolence. The game’s menu informs the player how many Little Sisters appear in the present level and how many have been either harvested or rescued. The player’s overall choices throughout the game when dealing with the Little Sisters determine which of the two concluding cut-scenes he’ll experience.

The vast majority of the enemies are collectively known as “Splicers,” the still-living but maniacally demented and unstably violent survivors of Rapture. There are several types of Splicers, including Thuggish Splicers, who will attack on-sight with melee weapons, Nitros Splicers, who hurl grenades and flaming projectiles, and Houdini Splicers, who move with great speed and can vanish into a puff of smoke only to appear behind the player moments later.

Plasmids, injections that provided almost magical abilities, fuse a role-playing element into what would otherwise be a fairly straightforward shooter, and are what push BioShock ahead into previously uncharted waters. They can be used directly in combat, like ‘Electro Bolt,’ which zaps foes from several paces removed. Or use them sequentially for added effect, most notably in the case of ‘Incinerate!’ and ‘Telekinesis,’ where the player can ignite an organic object with the former plasmid and launch the flaming projectile at an aggressor with the latter. Splicers, security drones, and Big Daddy’s can all be tricked with the ‘Enrage,’ ‘Security Beacon,’ or ‘Mimic’ plasmids into attacking each other or protecting the player, making otherwise impossible combat situations manageable.

There are three chief albeit scarce resources in Rapture: Adam, Eve, and money. Think of Adam as skill points, which can be obtained from the Little Sisters and used at upgrade stations to unlock new plasmids. Eve is the equivalent to mana in an RPG and is used as a universal force that powers all the plasmids. Money is used in a variety of manners, including purchasing Eve injections, health packs, and ammo, restoring health at certain machines, and turning off alarms.

The action on-screen ranges from composed to frenetic. All the staples of the first-person shooter’s arsenal are there, from the trusty six-shooter to the pump action shotgun and grenade launcher. Each weapon has three interchangeable ammunition types. Different ammo types are more effective for different enemies and the player will research enemy weaknesses by photographing any foe with a camera he obtains.

To minimize frustration, the game autosaves at the onset of each level, with in-level saves available at anytime via the pause menu. But a quick load after dying in combat or by any other means isn’t ever a necessity, thanks to ‘Vita-Chambers’ scattered throughout each level. Upon reaching a grisly demise, the player will respawn in one of these machines with half of his health refilled and otherwise unpunished. This gives the player a noticeable advantage when squaring off against a Big Daddy, who may take several tries to take down, but doesn’t heal himself. However, it provides no benefit when going up against smarter enemy splicers, who will use health stations to heal themselves in your absence.

There are few, if any, actual gameplay differences between the XBOX 360 and PC versions. The only real differences can be found in the interface, with the PC version utilizing a drag-and-drop functionality to navigate menus and load-out screens. Additionally, the difficulty is rebalanced for the PC version, which also forgoes the crosshair soft lock-on found in the XBOX 360 version. Players of the XBOX 360 version can enjoy points from up to 50 Achievements for hacking machines, defeating bosses, and upgrading weapons.

Without giving away too much, BioShock does incorporate a shocking revelation in the third act. The developers keep the twist so clandestine and finally reveal it with such gusto, that the game seamlessly blurs the line between the player’s and character’s own emotional involvement with unprecedented success. It’s one of several pivotal scenes where the player must temporarily relinquish control of the character so as to naturally progress the story in the direction the developers intended. This may at first seem counterintuitive, as BioShock is a game that prides itself over giving the player the total freedom to choose his own actions. But in actuality, these incidents only underscore the total loss of control the lead character, and consequently the player, is made to feel.

Few games in recent memory succeed on so many levels as BioShock. It’s not only a first-person shooter that’s as “genre-changing” as Levine himself hoped it to be, but functions as a psychological thriller that surpasses those created in Hollywood. It’s an action-RPG with a story that delves into such diverse and mature themes as Social Darwinism, the illusion of free will, and the unreliability of memory. Above all else, it’s a gaming experience unlike any other that came before it.

The city of Rapture beckons. You’d be wise to heed its call.

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