I had an opportunity to chat with Ken Levine a couple of years back, when (what was to become Bioshock) was at the game proposal stage. Being a great fan of System Shock 2 (and Irrational Games, now 2K Boston), I was really excited at the opportunity to meet Ken and also talk to him about their (then) upcoming projects. I remember that I liked the whole idea (especially the eco-system AI), even though I was not terribly impressed with the setting of the game.

So, a few years after the fact, Bioshock comes out and it looks great. As usual, the atmosphere is completely unique, the mood is carefully crafted through good dialog and a good premise. It would have been impossible for me to imagine the game we got when I first heard about it - so, good work, Irrational.

Irrational has always benefited from the extraordinary writing talent of Ken Levine, and Bioshock is no exception. Here is a game with a fairly adult theme, cleverly written dialog, intricate backstories (gleaned through recordings you find) and a very interesting world to wrap around all that. Some people say that Bioshock is too much like System Shock, but in my book that's perfectly fine - besides, even though the game mechanics are the same, that's only half of an Irrational game:- the rest is the brilliant atmosphere, and that one is brand new for Bioshock.

On to my impressions on the game: Some people didn't like the somewhat claustrophobic layout of the levels, but I found that to be perfectly plausible for the environment. The enemy challenge was good enough to keep me on my toes, and even to jump a little bit when a new splicer showed up. This game has such a varied game interface (from weapons, plasmids, environment interaction), that it's really hard not find something to do that you will enjoy.

And the story propels you forward, at least until a point. I could see the Atlas twist in the story from miles away, and I didn't like it that I kept on doing what I was told by Fontaine after everything came to light. I thought that the story outline weakened after the first twist, but the quality of the dialog carried it through to the end.

The whole "do-you-save-or-do-you-harvest" the little sisters was presented rather poorly. You are presented with the initial choice whether to kill or save the first little sister even before you understand the value of Adam (you basically have to kill the girl on the word of Atlas that this thing called Adam is something you really need). You are never in such dire need of Adam that you have to reconsider your original choice (mine was to save the girls):- I would have liked to be put in a position where I needed to choose between survival and killing ONE girl (even if you save all the rest). Overall, I think the two paths (kill/save) were not different enough to make the choice meaningful.

Also, BioShock doesn't have nearly the resource management challenge that the original System Shock had. There is always a lot of ammo, health and Eve everywhere. I must say I liked the resource scarcity in System Shock- it gave the game that feeling that you are always fighting for survival with your last breath, last bullet. I can understand how they would relax that aspect of the game though: I imagine Bioshock was meant to appeal to a wider audience (a wise choice).

The game does a brilliant job of simplifying the user interface to the game features, which was one of the major problems for System Shock 2.

Overall, I enjoyed this game and would recommend it to anyone. If it doesn't really stand out in the quality of the gameplay it delivers, it at least delivers a lot of it, and a lot of variety in how to approach the gameplay. It's as much a toy that you poke as it is a game, there is a good novel in there as well, and you do ultimately get the feeling that its story has some underlying importance beyond providing a backdrop for the game.