The true strength of the game, however, lies in its intensity of experience. Notably, characters can selectively enhance their bodies with mutagens, allowing them to gain Telekinetic powers, grow an armoured carapace, shoot bees from their hands, and so on. The design makes use of some elements taken from Computer Role Playing Games, though to a lesser extent than its predecessor System Shock 2. BioShock is an unusually accessible First Person Shooter considerable effort has been spent on making it easy for mass market audiences to understand and play. The game's plot is strongly linear, using a variety of subtle cues and explicit instructions to guide the player through the story. The player soon becomes involved with the conflicts of the surviving factions, and must fight their way through the ruined city to survive.

The resulting Objectivist Utopia, however, rapidly fell victim to civil war, as an anarchist society based on rational self interest degenerated into a Hobbesian struggle of all against all.

In the game's back story the discovery of a mutagen extracted from a previously unknown species of sea slug allowed Rapture's inhabitants to develop Psionic powers and create specialized human variants by Genetic Engineering. On entering Rapture, however, the player finds themselves immersed in the fragments of Ryan's broken dream the city is falling apart and overrun with biologically enhanced Monsters. This metropolis, an apparent response to Plato's Atlantis, was built by the charismatic ideologue Andrew Ryan in 1946 as a sanctuary for followers of Ayn Rand's anarcho-conservative Objectivist philosophy, allowing them to secede from a world that denied them absolute freedom. After swimming to a nearby island, the player can discover a bathysphere and descend to the secret underwater city of Rapture. The game begins with the player character, Jack, in the middle of the Atlantic in 1960, having survived an airplane crash. Platforms: XB360, Win ( 2007) PS3 ( 2008) Mac ( 2009).īioShock is a First Person Shooter, much influenced by System Shock 2 ( 1999) (see System Shock).

System shock bioshock map comparison