The Argonaut

Issue date: 10/18/07 Section: Entertainment

Bioshock for the XBox 360

As soon as your plane crashes into the ocean, you get an instant feel of a hopelessly dark new shooter.

As you descend into the depths of Rapture, an underwater secret city built by Andrew Ryan and his army of free-thinking artists, scientists and doctors, you get a glimpse of the scope of the city and the creative artwork worked into the game.

At first the game feels hopeless with death ever waiting around each corner, especially on the harder difficulty settings. As any good shooter starts, you have but one weapon - the always deadly, always red, monkey wrench.

As you continue though the game, you find more weapons like the simple revolver, Tommy gun and shotgun. All feel fresh out of an old mobster movie, but in Rapture they are all bases for upgrade. Bioshock has reintroduced a popular feature among gamers, with this upgradeable weapon system.

Vending machines offer ammo along with snacks, other vital upgrades to your simple weapons. In addition to weapons, you also are introduce to Plasmids, gene-altering super drugs that give you abilities such as electroshock, winter blast and incinerate.

When you couple these abilities to the environmental factors the game offers, it becomes the ultimate satisfaction. If someone is in a leaking saltwater puddle, hit the puddle with an electro-bolt and watch your enemies frizz and frazzle till they drop, or even better hit an oil-slick with a flame blast and watch the whole room sizzle.

Game play feels like a bad zombie flick. Every time you think you have cleared an area of baddies, there are more creeping and crawling into where you have already been.

Let me introduce the scariest character in the game, "little sisters." These little girls hop and skip around Rapture draining genetic material from the dead with these huge freaking needles.

But that's not the worse part, they are all guarded by the "Big Daddies." These slow moving guardians are quick to kill in defense of the little sisters. Most carry bolt cannons and large drills on their left hand that when they back you into a corner is there way of making you into another corpse.

Overall this is an instantly satisfying shooter with a great replay value and its disturbed and surprising story line. The mini-game for hacking vending machines and turrets is simple but still fun. It became a little addiction of mind to hack everything, and it really pays off in the long run.

In HD this game looks and plays well. Enemy types and weapons balance each other.

The game is just plain fun to play. But the only thing it doesn't have is a multiplayer, but that doesn't take too much away from this title at all. My score out of 10 is a 9.3 for this new shooter.

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