If you were to ask 100 avid FPS gamers to list their favorite shooters from the past decade or so, there is one series of FPS that probably won't feature as much as it should - System Shock. Despite being an excellent RPG/FPS hybrid, unfortunately System Shock just never truly found its potential marketing wise, coming up short against the heavy weights such as Doom, Quake and Half Life across the life span of its two releases. After being acquired by Take-Two Interactive in early 2006, Irrational Games, developers of the excellent System Shock 2, set about taking the FPS/RPG genre by storm once and for all with a title known as BioShock, which is claimed as the "spiritual successor" to the System Shock series. Despite this hefty benchmark and the hype that surrounded this title pre-release, it is safe to say Irrational Games, or 2K Boston/Australia are they are now known, have finally found their place in the sun with BioShock.
First and foremost, unlike most FPS/shooting games these days, it must be made clear that BioShock is a single player only experience. This is a questionable decision by 2K as
it obviously puts immense pressure on the single player story mode not to mention throws out a freebie way to enhance the game's replay value, but it won't take long into the game's spectacular single player experience for you to forgot all about this omission, as you find yourself completely engrossed into the world that is 'The Rapture'.
The Rapture at first is not a very clear entity to understand. Is it a place? is it a belief? is it an economic and social system? In many ways, it is all of these. The Rapture itself is an underground city created by self proclaimed genius Andrew Ryan to escape the Capitalist, Communist and Religious ways of the above ground world, creating a way of life and social structure that truly frees man to live life and excel. Well, that was the theory anyway, because as you'd expect in such an ambitious project, The Rapture is not all that it's cracked up to be, and things start to make a turn for the worst.
Set in the late 1950's after a plane crash in the open sea, your character survives the impact but finds himself gasping for air and dodging the flaming remains of the downed flight. As you make your way through the rubble in the water, you spot a mysterious tall and skinny building like structure in the distance planted on a minutely sized island barely wider than the tower itself. With nothing but destruction and open deadly sea behind, you move forward and enter the structure, curiously poking around as you descend into the earth and find what seems to be a pod. You enter, pull down on the only lever you see, and begin your journey deep under water into the world of The Rapure, only your arrival couldn't have come at a worse time.
The Rapture is in chaos as you arrive, although you're not initially privy as to why, and the game does a good job of creating and maintaining the expected confusion at the start of the game as you are abruptly introduced to this self destructing underwater world. However, the mystery does not last for long, as you team up with a citizen separated from his family via radio link, and start to uncover the secrets and factors at play behind The Rapture's troubling times. While I don't want to delve too deeply and spoil any part of the storyline, the major force behind the fall of this world comes from one source - 'Plasmids'.
Delivered to the body in the form of a large syringe, plasmids are basically 'insta-powerups' allowing you to do things you definitely wouldn't otherwise be able to do, such as launch fire at an enemy, use telekinesis to throw objects around a room, temporarily freeze enemies in their tracks, or make enemies mad with rage so they attack one of their own while you spectate safely from a distance, to name but a few. It isn't hard to imagine a society gone crazy with powers such as these, is it? In any case, to survive in this world you must fight fire with fire and experiment with the plasmids yourself, granting you these and many more abilities. Your repertoire of powers develop over time and you largely have a choice over which powers you possess and which you're best at, although this isn't done in a traditional RPG sense based on experience, but rather through a direct control method with a slight tweak - rather than just letting you pause the game and access a menu to acquire new powers or rearrange your accessible powers, you must interact with carnival like themed machines within the world of BioShock to control most of the RPG elements in this game, such as the "Gatherer Garden" to acquire more plasmid slots and other goodies, the "Gene Back" to change which powers and abilities you are currently equipped with, and more, all of which are a nice touch that help to keep the game's atmosphere that much more authentic.
To say these plasmids influence the way you play BioShock is a massive understatement - in fact, after finishing this game, you'll probably wonder how other FPS games manage without them. While some powers such as the telekinesis can be seen in other games in the form of "gravity guns" and the likes, the amount of unique powers you can obtain in this game and their influence on how you play it is astounding. Maybe you want a freeze an enemy and then smash him to bits with your wrench? You can do that. Maybe you want to electrocute a bunch of baddies as they step over a pool of water? Easy as pie. Maybe you just want to launch a gas cylinder at someone? Sure, why not. Then you can use that enemy's dead body to launch at someone else. There are even a few remote based powers as well, such as the ability to launch a ball of contamination at an enemy that makes them vulnerable to gun turrets and security bots/cameras, or, as mentioned above, the ability to temporarily instill blind rage within an enemy who then proceeds to attack the closest person. The amount of ways to tackle any given situation in this game is amazing and definitely the strength of the gameplay.
Outside of the plasmids, there are more RPG elements to this game, and these come under the label 'Gene Tonics'. These upgrades come as either physical related to enhance your strength, engineering related to enhance your ability to deal with security and other systems, and combat related to enhance your fighting skills. Gene Tonics are much like plasmids in the way they can be acquired and in the way you can change which are active, but they are definitely much more secondary in nature, as they are not powers you can simply call upon any time you want, but rather minor upgrades that are always active when equipped. Never the less, secondary or not, they're just another part of BioShock that enhance the gameplay experience and grant control over strengths and weaknesses to the user, although when you look at the big picture, the way in which RPG fundamentals have been implemented in this game are probably not evident enough to bring up the RPG/FPS genre tag - it is definitely more of a shooter/action title with some RPG elements sprinkled on top.
One major difference between the gene tonics and plasmids is only the plasmids have a life force, which is known as 'EVE' and, as such, you must be careful not to overuse them or you might find yourself stranded without effective ways to defend yourself. You will usually find enough EVE laying around however, particularly if you make sure to search every object you come across like desks and shelves or if you make sure to visit vending machines regularly, so supply for your powers is not often a huge concern. On the other hand though, ammo for your guns very often is an issue - in fact, most times you'll be lucky to have 10 rounds in any given gun. What this does is it creates a very stringent feel to the gameplay that almost forces you to get friendly with your plasmid based powers, which really enhances the combat experience, forcing the creative juices to start flowing, particularly when you have more enemies in front of you than bullet rounds.
The guns on offer themselves are not overly surprising featuring the usual classics like a handgun, shotgun, machine gun etc, but where BioShock impresses here is with the depth in customization. Each weapon usually has a few possible ammo types each of which have their own strengths and weaknesses, 
such as the anti-personnel handgun rounds which work great against people enemies, but not so great against well armored enemies, which tend to be more effectively defeated using the armor piercing rounds, or better yet, some sort of explosive in your grenade launcher. On top of the large array of ammo types, guns can also be upgraded whenever you come across a "Power to the People" machine, enhancing everything from accuracy and damage to clip size and recoil, which is just another one of BioShock's handy little customization options.
When you combine the plasmid and basic weapon systems, the end result is combat gameplay that is truly unique, and that is saying something in this day and age of FPS gaming, where originality seemed like a thing of the past. BioShock was touted as a game where no two gamers would have the same exact experience, and while at times it seems the game does try to subtly suggest ways to tackle situations and hence I imagine a few solutions are much more popular than others, this randomness remains largely true. What's best is, thanks to the aforementioned ammo issues and the control over your powers, getting out of some situations really does require some serious thinking,and thanks to the quick save and load functions, you can feel free to take a lot of risks where as in a checkpoint save system, you may have been far more conservative. In my opinion, this was a great design decision as it unlocks much of the game's potential as long as you actively try to push the boundaries.
The gameplay in BioShock, however, is definitely not perfect. It's close, but there are still a few areas where the game doesn't quite excel as much as you'd hope, the first of which is enemy AI. While the game is definitely a challenge in more ways than one on the medium and hard difficulty settings, it does not exactly feature the brightest baddies you'll see in a shooter. I can't really pinpoint any specific area where the AI is lacking per se, but during a normal gaming session, you may witness oddities such as robotic reactions, field of view inconsistencies, and general behaviour quirkiness that doesn't quite live up to the game's otherwise authentic feel. This isn't a huge issue at all, in fact in some cases the AI is pretty good such as when hurt enemies will look around for health packs or stations to use, but don't expect an overly intelligent battle with most of your enemies, as they tend to rely more on numbers and power than smarts.
This leads to another issue with the enemies - their lack of variation. From start to finish, you're really only shooting the same types of baddies and this can start to wear a little thin, particularly when they continuously use the same sort of attacks over and over again that can create a pattern feel to the combat. Perhaps even more disappointing though is the enemies in this game never seem to throw your medicine back at you - i.e. they never seem to use many plasmid abilities of their own. Considering the plasmid powers in this game are regularly touted as highly accessible for anyone - hell, that's the reason why The Rapture has taken a turn for the worse in the first place - it seems quite odd you don't go up against enemies who can use your same abilities. While some of these abilities obviously wouldn't translate very well from a gamer-friendly gameplay standpoint (like being frozen and then smashed for a quick game over), it's still a bit of a let down enemies couldn't be a bit more dynamic.
