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Is BioShock truly the next step in the evolution of the first person shooter? Find out in our full review.

Back at E3 2006, a little game company known as Irrational Games (Now unfortunately named 2K Boston) displayed BioShock, the spiritual successor to the widely loved System Shock series. Their ambitious goal was to completely redefine what it means to be a first person shooter. It’s been over a year since we’ve first laid eyes on BioShock, and now we finally get the chance to see whether the FPS genre truly has been flipped on its back. The verdict? I don’t know about BioShock completely redefining the genre, but the one thing that is for sure is that BioShock is one hell of a ride that should not be missed by anyone.

While the gameplay of BioShock is fantastic, and we’ll get to that shortly, special emphasis must be put on this game’s story and setting which are among the best that video games have to offer. The game kicks off with a bang as your plane suddenly crashes into the middle of the ocean. Lucky for you (or at least it seems lucky at the time) there happens to be a lighthouse not too far away from the wreckage. As you enter the lighthouse, the doors suddenly shut, the lights turn on, and you’re greeted by a giant banner that reads “No Gods or Kings, Only Man”. You make your way to a bathysphere, pull the lever, and kiss your normal life good-bye as you make your descent to the underwater metropolis known as Rapture.

Rapture was originally designed as a utopian society filled with the brightest minds of the 1940s. Its creator, Andrew Ryan, was looking to create a city where people could utilize their maximum potential without being brought down by the weaker or less intelligent members of society. They even developed plasmids, which could genetically alter and enhance an individual to make them smarter, faster, stronger, and even give them special powers.

Something went wrong though. When you arrive in Rapture, several years after it was originally created, you don’t find a thriving city full of intellectuals. Instead you find a city that is falling apart under its own weight. Those “brightest minds of the generation” have now become nothing but genetically enhanced psychopaths called splicers, plasmids have become weapons of destruction, dead bodies pile up around every corner, haunting messages are written on the walls in blood, and water pours in from cracks in the wall as if the ocean was looking claim it for its own.