BioShock

BioShock
Companies	Irrational Games, 2K Games, Take-Two Interactive
First release date	Aug 21, 2007
Original platform(s)	Windows, Xbox 360
Current official platform(s)	Steam
Freelook FPS
A prettier, more accessible, and necessarily shallower spiritual successor to System Shock 2. It's beautiful to look at, with an inspired and so fully realized style that you can look at any screenshot and instantly know it came from Bioshock. Every aesthetic choice is masterfully chosen to serve the world and atmosphere, and the plot told mostly retroactively through scratchy audio recordings and in subtle visual details is compelling and imaginitive. Light RPG elements give breadth, if not depth, to gameplay, as your options for fighting the crazed denizens and lumbering guardians of Rapture can become overwhelming rather quickly. In spite of its many excellent points, there's a big missed opportunity; unavoidable combat drives the game, but the game is excessively generous with checkpoints, abilities, and items scattered around. This eventually robs the game of much potential suspense, tactical depth, and undermines its own moral choice system by making the short-term rewards of "evil" redundant. The console-oriented "remastered" edition on Steam is buggier and its graphics are barely improved from the old edition running on the highest settings on a modern PC. Fortunately, it comes bundled with the old version.
Key people	Ken Levine, Garry Schyman