Description
BioShock is considered the spiritual successor of
System Shock 2 and mixes first-person shooting with role-playing elements. In the year 1960 a plane crashes in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean with you as the only survivor. You have the apparent luck of resurfacing in front of what looks like a door to an underwater complex. Without hesitating, you enter the door and soon you are taught that this is the city of Rapture, a paradise of free will build in the 40s by Andrew Ryan, visually and socially inspired by objectivism of Ayn Rand. However, even before you assimilate all this new information, the descent to this supposed paradise ends and you only see ruins and chaos. Learning about the destiny of Rapture will be now your main motivation while you have to survive to the horrors that the free will can create.
A sci-fi plot based on a social system that fails is not the only thing
BioShock shares with it predecessor, as many features of its gameplay and even elements of Rapture are easily recognizable in
SS2.
Bioshock is an FPS, but with many elements that make the gameplay more complex than just shooting your enemies while advancing in the game. In addition to the usual, and not so usual, fire and melee weapons, the main character can use "plasmids", genetic tools created in Rapture that can give superpowers, like telekinesis or fire throwing, to those who use them. The enemies are also more complex, in the sense that they do not always go after your character to kill him. Most of them are inhabitants of Rapture, victims of the bizarre experiments performed in the city and empowered themselves with plasmids. There are also security devices that you can use for your advantage or creatures with symbiotic relationships like the "Big Daddies" and the "Little Sisters" and many others to be discovered. All of these features and some abilities of interaction with the surrounding give the player many ways of facing each situation.
The entire game takes place in an underwater setting using an improved Vengeance engine, a heavily modified version of UnrealEngine3. Rapture is in ruins, you can see that everywhere you go and water is the key to all this. Water is what surrounds you and the city all the time and what slowly devours it with you inside. The water also helps building the dark atmosphere of Rapture the same way genetic engineering (and underwater architecture) helps establishing the sci-fi bases of the plot. Both, the setting and the plot are completed with many 50s furniture and propaganda, à la the
Fallout series.
The Xbox 360 and Windows version were released simultaneously. A PS3 port was only announced afterwards and was released more than a year later. There are no graphical improvements, except for the "horizontal plus" widescreen option that was introduced through a Xbox 360 patch. The cut-scenes are also in a higher resolution. A new addition is the Survivor Mode with a harder difficulty level.
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Trivia
The hacking mini-game (which can be performed on a variety of devices including safes, security cameras, item dispensers, robots, etc.) is basically a slightly altered version of
Pipe Dream.
