Single player only, heavily story driven first-person shooter(FPS). Your plane crashed into the sea but you survived and swim to a nearby island. On the island, inside a building there is a submarine ball thing that takes you to an under water city where some nasty things have happened. Time to find some guns and shoot some nasty peop… errr things!

Release Date

August 2007.

Pros

The story is very very good. From start to finish it is good all the way.

The graphics are top notch. Even though I have to play with the lowest graphics details, it still looks great.

The main sound effects and the ambient sounds are very good. They really give the game a very good atmosphere. Everything from the gun shots and zapping people with electricity to flowing water and people’s footsteps sound good. The voice acting is also top notch.

Surround sound is evident with the Logitech G35 and it sounds very good.

The Vita-Chambers are a nice little feature that works like save points or check points in other games. If you pass a Vita-Chamber and die later on, you get resurrected in the last Vita-Chamber you went passed. Unlike other games though, the game continues from when you died. So all enemies killed will remain dead and all ammo used will not be refilled. The other difference is, that your health and Eve power is only at half when you are resurrected. Although some people complain that this is cheating, I think it is a fantastic idea that saves you from reloading everytime you die. And for those that complain, there is a very easy solution, DON’T USE THEM.

Has a good assortment of guns, ammunition types and you can also upgrade your guns. The guns also behave as expected with recoil and accuracy differences.

Apart from guns, Bioshock has got this thing got Plasmids. Plasmids are like drugs that you take to give yourself special powers like shoot lightning, start a fire or use telekinesis. You could say it is like taking drugs to get Force(Star Wars) powers.

There is also a good RPG type element in the game. As you progress you can upgrade yourself to be better at certain things like hack machines better or increase overall health or be more resistant to fire.

The AI for Bioshock is quite good. The enemies know how to hide and even go and heal themselves if injured badly. Although good, it is not the best I have seen. Sometimes you can just wait for them and they will keep coming round the same corner and then retreating back when they get shot.

Although there is no tutorial, each feature of the game is introduced slowly as you play through the game.

Cons

There are no cons! Bioshock is just simply brilliant!

Other Points

This is the first game I have played with high level profanity in it. Although it does fit the game well, some people might not like it.

Bioshock is a single player ONLY first person shooter. I do not think this is a bad thing though because it is a very well presented single player first person shooter.

This is not a simple run and gun game. Ammunition is in short supply and there are many things to do like hacking machines, upgrading your self with different abilities and looting dead bodies and containers. You can also used hacked turrets to take care of the enemies which saves your own ammunition.

I read that there are two and a half endings. Why half an ending? Apparently two of the endings are very similar and so does not really make a proper third ending. I have only finished it once so I don’t know what the other one and a half is like.

Biases

Reviewed version 1.1 of game.

I really liked Serious Sam, all the Doom games and Quake 2.

I also really liked Alien Vs Predator, Soldier of Fortune 2, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky, Rainbow Six, Rogue Spear and Call Of Duty 4.

I also liked Battlefield 1942, Delta Force and Spec Ops 2.

I have not played System Shock or System Shock 2.

I have completed the game once.

DRM

For the Direct2Drive(now Gamefly) version, the game must connect to the Internet to activate on first startup.

Patches

1.1 – Added an option to turn off the Vita-Chambers. Also a field of view fix for widescreen displays, although I didn’t notice any difference. The Direct2Drive(now Gamefly) game now comes pre-patched to v1.1.

Retail v1.1 patch can be downloaded here.

Minimum Requirements (as stated on Gamefly)

Minimum OS: Windows XP (SP2) or Windows Vista
Minimum Processor: 2.5GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent
Minimum Memory: 1.0GB RAM
Minimum Graphics: Pixel Shader 3.0 compliant video card with 128 MB RAM and floating point frame buffer blending
Minimum Hard Drive: 7.0 GB free hard disk space
Minimum Sound: 100% DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card

Computer Played On

Core 2 Duo 2.16GHz
2Gb RAM
ATI Radeon X1600 256Mb RAM (laptop version)
Logitech G35 headset and/or Realtek HD Audio(no idea what model) with Altec Lansing ACS41 speakers or Logitech ClearChat Premium PC Headset.
Win XP Pro
Graphics settings are set to whatever I feel comfortable with playing on this PC. They are usually not set to the highest settings. All screenshots are taken with my settings.