Bioshock is a singular shooter. At the beginning it looks a little as a horror survival, the dark ambience and the fact that you can store health rations and “eve” syringes. Eve is like mana, that your character spend to use skills similar to magic, but that are in fact genetic improvements. Soon after the beginning you can see why this is a shooter, although an uncommon one.
This game happens in a submerged city that you found seemly by accident after your plane crashes in the middle of the sea. The society in this city is some kind of libertarian utopia that went bad, resulting in its destruction. There we can find many places collapsing to the ocean around, and its inhabitants, the splicers, which are the result of genetic modifications by a substance called ADAM, designed to improve humankind with supernatural powers, but that in the end made its users lose their minds. The splicers are aggressive and attack you on sight.
As you progress, you find the little sisters; little girls with super regenerative powers that you can kill to either get ADAM or take ADAM from their bodies in small quantities letting them alive. Depending of your decision about them the end game changes. These girls suck ADAM from dead bodies with syringes, while being protected by the bid daddies, a big mutant holding mechanical weapons. As you progress through the game, you learn that they both are educated and genetically designed to behave as they do.
You are constantly receiving direction from both a woman that takes care of the girls and thank or reprimand you according to your actions towards them, and a man, which appears to be in distress and wants you to kill the man who idealized this city, Andrew Ryan. As you learn about the city it is very interesting the political views expressed by Ryan, he is some kind of a social Darwinist, which sees the modern government as the means to rob the best from their work to sustain the parasites.
As your approach him is harder and harder to see him as an evil villain, he is more of a idealist. He built this city under the water because he knew the governments from the rest of the world would never let a free society exist like that. The great plot twist you learn is that you are an assassin specially trained to kill Ryan for his ideas, even though his failure already condemned the city. Our character is trained in such a way that is impossible for him to act in any other way, hence Ryan famous phrase “a man chooses, a slave obeys”.
It’s a very interesting game, specially the way the plot develops, murking the validity of our efforts. The only negative point is about the character death in the game. There is no real consequence, we are just spawn back into the fight, this takes away a lot of the challenge the game could pose. In this case they should have had a more traditional approach, with death meaning the necessity to try again since the beginning.