Bioshock: the first of its kind

The first thing to note about Bioshock is the setting of the game itself, Rapture. Rapture is a city built under the ocean, deep in the uncharted abyss where those with ideas for inventions the rest of the world couldn’t handle can get on with their work. The city is quaint as players first see it, a 1920s American city missing only the streets, filled with subway walkways linking everything together. However, it is soon seen that Rapture is far from perfect and has, in fact, taken a lot of wear and tear, leaving it like the destroyed remnants of a city, except the people who destroyed it still lurk around every corner.

The second innovation that set Bioshock apart from other games was Plasmids. These were powers developed in Rapture that needed to be injected to activate, and used a substance called ADAM, found in deep sea slugs to work. Players can send out a swarm of bees, shoot fire, ice, electricity, and even wind from their fingertips. Without the restrictions of the real world, the people of Rapture kept taking more and more of these plasmids until they all went insane with the desire for more, causing them all to try to kill each other for the rest of their lives.

Bioshock’s story was a joy to play and completely different in the way it explored the different parts of Rapture. As they progressed, players built their Plasmids and became serious threats to everyone around them, but the best part was the big twist at the end of the game. This twist is what made Bioshock the first of its kind, as it brought the entire story full circle and showed players just how much power people can have over someone.

Bioshock’s overall gameplay was pretty standard FPS, but the addition of Plasmids made it more enjoyable, as players didn’t have to use weapons if they didn’t want to. To secure more Plasmids, players needed to capture the Little Sisters, girls who harvest ADAM, the basis of all Plasmids, from the corpses of Rapture. Each Little Sister is guarded by a Big Daddy, a huge monster that has been genetically programmed to want nothing more than to protect the Little Sister from him. These monsters used drills and rivet guns to attack the player and other enemies known as Splicers. When Big Daddy was killed, players had the option to either save her, sending her through a tunnel to safety, or kill her and extract the ADAM themselves. Both forms gave the player ADAM, but saving Little Sister resulted in slightly less.

The choice to save or kill the Little Sisters forced players to choose to be good or bad for once and avoid being left out. While this had been introduced to players before, it was everything else in Bioshock and this choice being made is the first of its kind, a unique first-person shooter with a different take on weapons, morale, and history. The game inspired a sequel in Bioshock 2, but the developer of this first game recently released what it considers to be the true sequel in Bioshock Infinite, a very different game.