Bioshock review! With Spoilers!

Bioshock is probably the most well thought out First Person Shooter I have ever come in contact with. The storyline is epic and the ideology of Ryan (the creator of Rapture) is a very nice portrait of how elites think and how their ideas drip down to the lower masses and infect them as well. You hear Ryan speaking of "Parasites" AKA poor and then when you fight the citizens of Rapture they have fallen victim to his crass elitism. The game mechanics are truly remarkable and filled with an almost endless amount of variety

. Weapons can be upgraded, Plasmids (Super Powers) can be upgraded, ammo can be invented, things can be hacked, and so on and so forth.

Flashbacks are common and it gives the player an uneasy feeling that they aren't being told something. There are hints within the NPC dialogues that something isn't what it seems and as the story unfolds twists and turns arise that can only be found in some kind of 1940's radio broadcast.

Now the graphics are wonderful. Problem is that because my game has no CD/DVD to read off of there is a lot of frame rate loss in the loading areas. Most of which are at doors when the frame rate drops significantly. The atmosphere of the game is remarkable and you really need a super charged computer to work this game properly. So if you have a PS3 or XBOX360 I would advise you to buy the console version because it doesn't run too well on PC.

The game has this early 1900 feel to it. Neon lights, retro futuristic architecture, even peoples accents come from the early 1900's. Except instead of playing a noir detective in New York your playing a stranger in an underwater city filled with insane people.

Disclaimer!! Spoilers!!!

So I have to admit that after Andrew Ryan died the games story took a nose dive. I don't know what it was really; maybe the voice actor of Andrew Ryan was so good that the other guy "Atlas" Frank Fontaine couldn't really match his performance. All in all, I have to hand it to them, it was a good twist in the storyline though but it just lost a lot of momentum. Andrew Ryan's elitist voice going on and on about parasites and the tyrannical hand of government really filled the game with his insane ideology and I like how all the people of Rapture were conditioned over the time they spent there to think just like him. I think towards the end of the game Frank Fontaine said it the best. "Everyone who came to Rapture thought they were going to be captains of industry but they forgot that there is always someone who has to scrub the toilets" Andrew Ryan catered to the elitist class and Fontaine catered to the poorer classes. They both used their social class to fight one another and in doing so, destroyed each other, the city, and were all driven mad while doing so..