Doom Meets Myst
Bioshock is, put simply enough, a quite wonderful game - and I'm not a fan of first-person shooters. That would make a slightly over-concise review, though. Looking and feeling like the bastard child of Doom and Myst, it's engrossing and exhilarating in equal measures, ... Read review
BioShock is a revolution in the shooter genre that will forever change the expectations ... more
for the FPS. Going beyond "run and gun corridors," "monster-closet AIs" and static worlds, BioShock creates a living, unique and unpredictable FPS experience. BioSh...
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BioShock is a revolution in the shooter genre that will forever change the expectations ... more
for the FPS. Going beyond "run and gun corridors," "monster-closet AIs" and static worlds, BioShock creates a living, unique and unpredictable FPS experience. BioSh...
Postage & Packaging: free Super Saver Delivery Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours...
Advantages: Wonderfully atmospheric, perfectly conceived and designed, enormously entertaining. Disadvantages: Don't play it in the dark ...
...Myst ==
Bioshock is, put simply enough, a quite wonderful game - and I'm not a fan of first-person shooters. That would make a slightly over-concise review, though. Looking and feeling like the bastard child of Doom and Myst, it's engrossing and exhilarating in equal measures, and its appeal lies somewhere in the product of its relentless action, cinematic plotting and eerily evocative sounds and visuals.
Set in a 1960 ... ...Marvels ==
Bioshock throws you into a world of absorbing, intricate plotting - and what's more, reflects this depth and quality of storytelling in the gameplay. Rapture is a world riven by genetic warfare - the currency of the city, as much as dollars, is ADAM; stem cells harvested from deep-water sea slugs by Ryan's brilliant scientists. With the ability to not only regenerate damaged tissue but also to alter the human genome in a ... more
Doom Meets Myst
Bioshock is, put simply enough, a quite wonderful game - and I'm not a fan of first-person shooters. That would make a slightly over-concise review, though. Looking and feeling like the bastard child of Doom and Myst, it's engrossing and exhilarating in equal measures, and its appeal lies somewhere in the product of its relentless action, cinematic plotting and eerily evocative sounds and visuals.
Set in a 1960 that mercifully never came to pass, the game opens as your character's plane crashes into the Atlantic Ocean. A survivor amid the flaming wreckage, he is able to swim over to a building standing in the water. Inside, a great statue and a scarlet banner; "No Gods or Kings. Only Man."
In the basement of the building, a bathysphere - a descending pod - seems to offer the only alternative way out to swimming for it. With thousands of miles of ocean in all directions, the only way is down - into the underwater city of Rapture.
Originally conceived as a utopian paradise for the intellectual great and good by mogul Andrew Ryan, Rapture is now a broken shell of its former self. As you enter the city, you are contacted over a radio by someone who appears to be one of the few trustworthy, untainted humans left alive. Though this "Atlas" certainly has his own agenda, you have little choice but to follow his directions if you hope to work out what happened to Rapture and live to tell the tale.
Genetically-Modified Marvels
Bioshock throws you into a world of absorbing, intricate plotting - and what's more, reflects this depth and quality of storytelling in the gameplay. Rapture is a world riven by genetic warfare - the currency of the city, as much as dollars, is ADAM; stem cells harvested from deep-water sea slugs by Ryan's brilliant scientists. With the ability to not only regenerate damaged tissue but also to alter the human genome in a variety of weird and wonderful ways, it quickly becomes clear that ADAM was at the heart of much of Rapture's downfall.
For the player, this means that you have two considerable arsenals at your disposal. Firstly, one can lay hands on a variety of more conventional weapons, from the basic - a trusty wrench and pistol - to the more outlandish, including a napalm-based flamethrower. Additionally, though, when firepower isn't quite enough, you can freeze, electrocute and chargrill your opponent, or if you're not bothered about the personal touch, hypnotise another enemy into doing your dirty work - and all with a flick of your left hand.
These plasmids - syringes with ominously fluorescent contents - are acquired and upgraded throughout the game, and are enormously fun to use. They run down your supply of EVE - much like a magic meter - and as such need deploying sparingly, but they're wonderfully realised visually and add another aspect to conventional all-guns-blazing combat.
Freaky Families
Bioshock moves between story and scares, action and exploration seamlessly, but there's a further aspect to the game in the form of the moral dilemmas it poses. The Big Daddies - the iconic figures emblazoned upon all the game's promotional material - are not simply intimidating enemies. Indeed, they won't attack you unless you happen to run up and slap them in the face first. Now, who'd choose to do that to an eight-foot behemoth encased in an armoured diving suit with a drill half the size of your body for an arm? Well, you will. You will because these friendly faces are the guardians of the Little Sisters, creepy little girls who harvest ADAM from dead bodies and store it inside their own. You need the ADAM to grant yourself the powers you'll need to persuade undesirables not to mess with you, and to do this, you'll have to remove the Big Daddies from the picture. Oh, and they're deceptively fast. Enjoy firing off your most powerful weapon in their direction before running off wailing, "Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap ... !" while an angry metal-clad hulk chases you round the room.
Anyhoo, the twist is thus; you can be a thoroughly disagreeable individual and execute the creepy kid, thus gaining hefty piles of ADAM and a few guilt pangs, or you can be an all-round nice chap and extract a smaller amount of the good stuff, leaving child alive, grateful and much less creepy. What starts off seeming like an easy choice (doesn't it?) quickly becomes a tougher proposition when you realise just how much damage you'd be able to deal from that tanked-up left arm if you could only overcome your conscience.
In managing to make this a pretty difficult choice, Bioshock succeeds in one fell swoop in nailing the whole "good choice/bad choice" moral maze that the Fable games trumpeted about, but never quite pulled off.
Gaming Perfection
There are many ways of saying it, but they all boil down to much the same message. I could talk about how perfect the controls are, something that first-person games can struggle to make intuitive; I could underline just how stunning the visuals are, and how enchantingly-rendered the underwater world of Rapture is (water's never looked so good). I could rave about the pace, the voice-acting, the depth of the plot (soon to be a film) ... but there are only so many synonyms for "great".
Bioshock is a quite phenomenal game. It's the game that every other game that has you picking up a gun wants to be. It's original, it's beautiful in its art-deco dystopian shades of destruction, it's addictive, enthralling and very, very entertaining. And as I said earlier, this isn't normally my kind of game. I can't really conceive of how much this must appeal if you actually like first-person shooters. There are a few games that make it worth buying the console simply to have the pleasure of playing - Super Mario World was one, Ocarina of Time was another, and this is oh-so-very-much one too.
Advantages: Outstanding in every way. Unique atomosphere Disadvantages: Scary stuff at times
Bioshock is the critically acclaimed game from 2K Boston/2K Australia and was released on the Xbox 360 and Pc in August 2007. The developers describe Bioshock as 'the genetically modified first person shooter' and is the spiritual successor to System Shock. Bioshock is a first person shooter but also has elements of a RPG in the fact that you can gain abilities called Plasmids which alter what special powers you can use ranging from Electric Shock ... ...I would not recommend it to people with a nervous disposition. Bioshock has set new water marks with what can be achieved on a games console. I would not call this just another game, it is a work of art that has to be played to be believed. ...
dan89 06.09.2007
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of BioShock (Xbox 360)
Advantages: Beautiful environments - Rich gaming experience - Wonderful plot Disadvantages: Casts practically every other game in the genre in a bad light
...to get it right because Bioshock is a game which, nowadays at least, only comes around every so often. In my previous drafts I got some considerable distance down the page describing in great detail the underwater city of Rapture. I wanted to put you as the reader right into its crumbling art-deco environments, describe every ambient sound, convey how beautifully the Atlantic above seeps in from every fault in its failing architecture. I also wanted ... ...out, you'll have to play Bioshock to truly understand. So I'll try and get to the point…
Created at the culmination of the second world war, Rapture was intended as a haven for the greatest minds in industry, science and art. This submerged metropolis was a world where neither the ruling elite nor religious morality could stifle their progress - and where the simple minds of the masses could not cloud their thinking or unfairly benefit from their ...
Concrete_Donkey 08.09.2007
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of BioShock (Xbox 360)
Advantages: great story and unique elements to first person shooter Disadvantages: a bit short in all and occasionally buggy
...are several mechanical elements to bioshock and the game is rather inovitive in the way to hack something isnt just as simple as pression a button and waiting, a mini game opens up and you are set the task of connecting pipes from one spot to another, much like a few flash made internet games. This is good and an original way to look at this, but at times can become incredibly annoying, especially if like myself, you are very bad at it. STORY
The ... ...and brilliant plots i have ever witnessed in a game. It begins with the character you play in a plane, that later appears to crash. as a survivor you swim towards what appears to be a light house. It leads to an under sea city known as Rapture. This city was built by the freedom obsessed Andrew Ryan. He created Rapture as a way to get away from the rest of civilisation, and truely be free. along with various scientists he developed Adam (the stuff ...
salmonf1 20.01.2009
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of BioShock (Xbox 360)
Despite its lack of commercial success, the team behind "System Shock 2" ventured yet another attempt to add personality to First Person Shooters. The result is "BioShock" and it interestingly manages to simultaneously be both innovative and widely appealing. Besides allowing you to shoot fireballs and hack flying death-bots, "Bioshock"'s greatest draw is the game subtly played inside the player's mind.
***The Story***
In response to World World ... ...an underwater city designed to be an utopia. Unhindered by bureaucracy, free of morals, a man was only limited by his dreams. Science flourished, most remarkably genetic engineering, with "plasmids" allowing ordinary men to be extra-ordinary. Super-human agility and empathic links to machinery are just a plasmid away! Power, however, corrupts.
Indeed, when your avatar finds an unlikely refuge in Rapture after his plane crashes, the city couldn't ...
Magrippinho 15.11.2007
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of BioShock (Xbox 360)
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Advantages: Very easy playing, good learning curve, anyone can enjoy this game Disadvantages: Might be too cutesy for some.
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The graphics are awesome, they are brilliant not in a way like Bio-shock, but in a different way. There cute yet believable and very vibrant and colorful. It is a joy to watch this game in motion. Character design is by Akira Toriyama, the genius who brought us Dragonball and Dragon Ball Z, you can really tell his characters are influenced from Goku and Co. And the soundtrack, thats brilliant too. Something you come to expect from Nobuo Uematsu, the legendary composer of dozens of video game soundtracks, including the acclaimed Final Fantasy series. With such a stellar line up of designers and creators, you know this is going to be ...
After your plane crashes into icy uncharted waters, you discover a rusted bathysphere and descend into Rapture, a city hidden beneath the sea. Constructed as an idealistic society for a hand picked group of scientists, artists and industrialists, the idealism is no more. Now the city is littered with corpses, wildly powerful guardians roam the corridors as little girls loot the dead, and genetically mutated citizens ambush you at every turn. BioShock forces you to question the lengths to which you will go and how much of your humanity you will sacrifice...to save your own life.
![Bioshock - Limited Edition [Tin Case] (Xbox 360)- Xbox 360](http://picnicb.ciao.com/uk/78773727.jpg)
Great online play 
