As I sit here in a rather dark office this Tuesday morning, I am wracked by the temptation to not only to turn the lights on and aid my straining retinas, but also to simply tie up this review inside a paragraph and get back to my third run-through of BioShock. Repeatedly typing ‘it’s bloody good, go buy it now’ would probably a) get me fired and b) make most of you throw cans at my head, but it’s really all you need to know. It’s the best game I’ve sat in front of since Half Life 2, the best FPS game to hit the Xbox 360 and the most atmospheric title you’re ever likely to find. Of course, this is the weekend that Jay decided to go on an epic camping expedition, meaning he’s missing all the fun. For shame, eh?

For shame indeed. By now I am sure that most of you know what BioShock is about, where it’s set and who the main protagonists are, but for those who’ve not been caught up in the wave of hype it’s only fair that I divulge a little info. You play the part of Jack, a man who survives as his plane tumbles into the ocean a mere swim away from a looming, empty lighthouse. Upon entering the lighthouse Jack finds himself whisked downwards in a bathysphere to a crumbling seabed city called Rapture, a haven built for society’s elite by one Andrew Ryan. Things in Rapture aren’t quite so chipper anymore, sadly, and having become acquainted with a mysterious man on the other side of a transistor radio Jack is led deeper and deeper into the city to discover the skeletons in its cupboards.

These are no ordinary skeletons, however, and they are most certainly not contained in normal cupboards either. As I touched on in my preview of BioShock last week, Rapture is a wonderful, richly detailed world inhabited by some of the strangest, most disturbing enemies you could possibly imagine. With the story set as the rest of the world was welcoming in the 1960s, the city you find yourself in is a marvel of Art Deco design ideas, with the ostentatious columns, decoration and flashing neon signs splashed liberally around the place. Huge staircases are laid with rich red carpeting, people’s apartments are littered with quirky furniture and period advertisements for Rapture’s out-of-control plasmid industry are plastered on numerous walls. It really does feel like a little piece of history trapped in an underwater bubble, and the further in you venture the denser the atmosphere becomes.

It’s not just the city that provides the canvas, either. Rapture circa 1960 is a city falling horribly behind the times, and falling apart at the seams. The Splicers – the population of the city who have gone mad through genetically engineering themselves with plasmids – lurch around in their period clothing, weeping and shouting out to anyone nearby. BioShock’s creative director Ken Levine supposedly based their horrific facial distortions on post World War 1 plastic surgery efforts, and one look at a Splicer up close is more than enough to confirm this as the case, with their desperate attacks showing just how close to the end of their tethers they have gotten. Much as with the city around them, the inhabitants themselves are rotting away. Sometimes you find them curled up in a corner sobbing; sometimes they stalk the corridors talking to themselves. Heck, on one occasion you even find a pair ballroom dancing. If the structure of Rapture presents a fascinating picture of paradise gone wrong, the living, breathing population provide the colour.

But this isn’t the greatest part of BioShock. Sure, it all looks wonderful and is jam-packed with an amazing mixture of the bizarre and the beautiful, but it’s the gameplay running through the spinal column of the whole thing that excites most. Far more than just a shooter with an extremely pretty face, the game allows – heck, practically begs – you to tackle things a number of different ways, testing out various tactics and seeing which way of playing suits you the best. Rapture is a true sandbox experience and it’s highly unlikely that any of you reading this review will experience the game in anything close to a similar manner, with the combinations of weapons and plasmids and their various uses too many to number.

Ah yes, the plasmids. These are, in effect, BioShock’s magic element, allowing the player to fire electric bolts, flames and wasps amongst other things from their left hand. This not only allows you to target, harm and hinder enemy Splicers in plenty of unique ways during your many encounters, but it also allows you to interact with the city in a number of different ways, be it setting fire to an oil spill to cut off a potential route of attack or using electricity to stun turrets and cameras so you can hack them and turn them into allies. It turns each area into a place where you can experiment with a number of different tactics, and although some are better than others in terms of dealing with your enemies you never feel penalised for trying something a little off the beaten track.

The way in which you gain these new powers throughout the game is also suitably well dealt with, blending itself into the genetic supermarket storyline of the game. The game rarely resorts to the tactic of leaving crucial plasmids scattered in suspiciously convenient places, and even when it does the story and the setting mostly cover for their presence. Spread throughout Rapture are a number of vending machines called Gatherers’ Gardens that allow you to purchase new or more effective versions of plasmids, as well as offering you the chance to increase your initial slot allocation of two so you can have more ‘on the fly’ options rather than having to rely on their being a plasmid-swapping Gene Bank located nearby all the time.

This in itself brings up the conundrum of whether you wish to buy that new, expensive power up or get a few extra slots so you have more choice from your current options. As well as combat plasmids you can upgrade your character with a number of Gene Tonics which increase your hacking speed, melee attack power and running speed amongst a whole load of other things, and combining, purchasing and opening new slots for these will also give you a heck of a lot of choice as to how you want your character to be. Whether you fancy an awesome hacker with plenty of magic abilities or a quick character with brutal strength or anywhere in between, the chances are with the right purchases and discoveries that you’ll end up with Jack being tailored to just how you’d like him.

Hold on a jiffy, though. You can’t just go waltzing up to those vending machines and throw your dollars at them to get that fancy new Incinerate plasmid, or that extra combat Gene Tonic slot. Whereas other vending machines allow you to part with your hard earned for ammunition, medical kits or Eve Hypos (BioShock’s ‘mana’, which is depleted with plasmid use) and the like, Gatherers’ Gardens currency is ADAM. This, the most valuable of assets in Rapture, allows its inhabitants to splice their genes with more and more plasmids and tonics, and obviously this is crucial to your growth and progress throughout the game. Problem is, you can’t just find ADAM lying around – it needs to be extracted from corpses, and Rapture’s way of harvesting this is with seemingly demonic, altered girls known as Little Sisters who are vessels to the ADAM-consuming sea slug. Hence, to get to the ADAM, you have to get your hands on one of them.

Problem number two quickly arises as soon as you try and do this. Letting little girls wander around a dangerous city alone isn’t the greatest of ideas, so each is accompanied by a Big Daddy. These are huge, hulking monstrosities dressed up in some pretty heavy-duty diving gear, and each will make no bones about completely wiping you off the face of Rapture should you try to attack. Thus, you are left with the tricky proposition of taking down a Big Daddy should you wish to get your hands on the Little Sister, and this is by no means an easy task. Far from the lumbering, cumbersome beasts they look like, each is massively quick on their feet and insanely strong, meaning you’ll need every ounce of power and skill you have to defeat them. You could actually choose, should you wish, to ignore them completely and leave them be – after all, they are the only things in the game that don’t want to rip you to pieces if you leave them alone. However, taking this route will leave you desperately short on new powers and having to rely on ammo reserves, which are sparse and rather expensive.

Having got through the Big Daddy, the game presents you with yet another choice. Each Little Sister can be killed and the sea slug within harvested to gain you most ADAM and hence open up more powers, or they can be rescued and turned back into normal little girls, which is the more moral choice but one that only rewards you with a fraction of the precious ability-enhancing fuel. The choice is entirely yours and your actions do affect how the game concludes to some degree, which on top of the vast amount of combat and ability-enhancing options serves to add even more replay value to the thing.

Yet, there’s more. There’s the research camera that allows you to take photos of enemies in return for upgraded abilities against them and new Gene Tonics. There are the U-Invent machines, which give you the chance to mash together all sorts of items that you have discovered to make new Gene Tonics and ammunition unavailable anywhere else. There are the audio diaries you find scattered around in the strangest of places, each telling the story of a few of the inhabitants of Rapture right through to their conclusion and each adding layer upon layer of detail and understanding on the plot. There’s the big twist in the middle, which will change the entire way you think about Jack’s situation. It’s epic stuff from start to finish, and to complete it fully – to get a complete sense of Rapture and the events there – you will need to spend a good deal of time exploring. At no point does this ever become a chore.

But, it’s not quite perfect. It comes frighteningly close, but there are a few issues that do somewhat detract from the experience, although none seriously enough to spoil the game. The hacking mini games, in the form of a version of Pipe Dreams where you must swap tiles on a grid to complete a pipe and allow liquid to flow from one point to another, begin as interesting diversions, but in latter stages of the game can get a little frustrating even with hacking Gene Tonics installed. With the right progress in the right area of the game you can automatically hack various things eventually, but the annoyance until that point does increase.

Other than that, small graphical glitches do rear their head. Splicers and Big Daddies occasionally fall through scenery and walls, and in the case of the Splicers often end up twitching indefinitely, leaving you with the occasional odd moment where one appears to be waving you goodbye after you’ve smashed their face in with a wrench. Occasionally you come across jets of water leave some pretty normal looking splash textures amidst what otherwise is possibly the best representation of H2O yet, and standing alongside some jets of the stuff does leave an ugly texture line across your screen.

Still, it’s splitting hairs really. As an interactive experience, BioShock will play you like a musical instrument, casually flicking you between emotions as you discover new facts and truths about Rapture and why you are there. Should you wish to run through with all guns blazing and complete it as quickly as you can then there’s still very much for you to see and do in a whole number of different ways, but if you are so inclined then you will merely be peeling a strip of skin off a very juicy orange.
Visually and sonically it drips with atmosphere, providing you with an authentic early-to-mid 20th century feel amongst all the freak-show bizarreness spread throughout. You can’t help but want to scratch as far under the surface as you can.

Hence, it fully deserves the score you see below. BioShock is not a first-person shooter in the normal sense - it takes what previous Irrational Games title System Shock 2 (well worth a search of eBay for, folks) did and throw you into a hugely mouldable first-person adventure, with the possibility if you wish to mess around with the environment to turn things to your advantage and relieve you of the need to use your precious ammo. There’s an avalanche of combinations and techniques to discover and use, most of which I have not mentioned to allow you the pleasure of coming across them for yourself. Simply put, BioShock is a masterpiece of design that you simply must play as soon as you can. If you need a 360, buy one. If you need a better PC, upgrade. With all that said and done, would you kindly go straight to the nearest shop and buy a copy as soon as you can.