Bioshock is one of the most satisfying and beautiful looking FPS games of all time.

Bioshock is a science fiction first person shooter that takes on some features of a role playing game (such as the ability to power up your weapons and powers) that takes place in the year 1960. When the game first begins, you are on an airplane, looking through the eyes of a man named Jack, who is talking about how his parents told him how special and unique he was when he was little. After he finishes his little monologue, the airplane suddenly crashes into the middle of the ocean.

When you open your eyes, you are under water, surrounded by pieces of the airplane and the other passengers' personal belongings. You swim to the surface to find the burning wreckage of the plane and you notice a tower not too far away from where your plane crashed. As you enter this tower, the lights come on to reveal a very large, red banner that says, "No Gods or Kings, only Man."

You continue down the path to find an elevator that takes you into the depths of the ocean. As you descend deeper and deeper into the ocean, the creator of this city known as Rapture, Andrew Ryan, is projected onto a wall in front of you, giving you a short speech about why he created this city. When his speech ends, the wall comes down the reveal the stunning under water, 1950s city glowing with beauty and style.

As you are taken into the city, you see various creatures of the deep ocean swimming between buildings and very large armored creatures walking inside of the protected paths between the buildings. From here, you are introduced to the horrors that have happened here, and the genetic enhancements known as Plasmids which alter your DNA to give you the power over things like electricity, fire, and ice. Welcome to Rapture, the under water city from Hell.

The gameplay in Bioshock is not totally original but it mixes a lot of things that have been done before that have never really been used together in such a way. It takes a lot of ideas first used in the System Shock games and mixes them with RPG style features such as the ability to power up your weapons and powers and puts it in a 1950s under water environment. The idea may sound silly in theory, but in practice it makes for incredible gameplay and fantastic story telling.

The arsenal of guns in Bioshock is pretty average in the beginning of the game; you get your basic shotgun, magnum, and melee weapon (a wrench), but as you go through the game, the weapons become much more creative; you start to find different ammo types for your weapons, such as anti-personnel and armor piercing bullets. Later in the game, you find more types of weapons (the ones that don't just shoot bullets), but I'll leave those for you to find.

You also get genetic enhancements called plasmids which alter your DNA to give you the power to shoot various things like electricity, fire, and ice from your finger tips. These powers are great for stunning your foes in order to get a good hit on them while they are incapacitated. You can upgrade your powers to do more damage or have longer lasting effects by buying upgrades using what is called ADAM, which can be taken from the little sisters who are guarded by the very large creature known as Big Daddy. You have a choice between harvesting or rescuing these little sisters after killing their guardians; harvesting the little sisters gets you more ADAM and makes the game much easier than rescuing them, but rescuing them gets you gifts and upgrades from the little sisters. There are also two endings to the game, depending on whether you decide to harvest the little sisters or rescue them.

Bioshock has some fantastic graphics, but at times it seems like it's pretty excessive with the bump maps. The faces of the characters look a little off because of the heavy bump mapping and it kind of kills the life-like feeling of the game. But since most enemies have masks on, that isn't really that big of a deal. Other than that, the graphics are fantastic. As stated before, the style of the game is done perfectly, if there really was an under water city from the 1950s, I'm pretty sure it would probably look something like that. There really isn't much else to say about them since there is only really one problem with them.

The story of Bioshock is very strong and very well done. Throughout the game, you figure out missing pieces of information about yourself and the other supporting characters who speak to you through the radio. If you aren't big on following the stories in a game, you can still play this and appreciate it for its fun factor. To me, this means that it was done right.

As stated before, Bioshock uses ideas from other games and mixes them together in a way that has never been done before. This makes for very original gameplay and very cool storytelling. For me this is one of the main selling points of the game.

Sadly, despite the multiple endings of the game, there isn't much replay value since the only thing that changes is the ending. The entire game is just about the same up to the ending whether you rescue all of the little sisters or if you harvest all of them.

Overall, Bioshock is a definite buy if you can run it at least on medium settings on your PC. It's a very fun game that re-enforces the idea that while looks don't make the gameplay, they can very much so enhance it. If you don't like this game, I don't think you should playing video games.