SEQUEL TO BIOSHOCK! Info inside!

After what has seemed like eons, we finally got a chance to see the successor to Bioshock.. Fans of that game won't want to miss this.

By Brad Shoemaker and Andrew Park, GameSpot

Posted September 18, 2007 6:43 pm ET

LOS ANGELES--As enormous fans of the open-ended gameplay and unsurpassed atmosphere of the 2007 Irrational first-person role-playing game Bioshock, we were floored to finally see Irrational's next game, JungleGym: Crysis, in action. Irrational's general manager Ken Levine was kind enough to give us our first look at the game itself at the office today, and we were frankly thrilled to find that the dynamic gameplay possibilities and outright creepiness of Bioshock will almost certainly be equaled (if not surpassed) in JungleGym. In short, if you liked Bioshock, you're going to love this. Our updated impressions, with new notes, are below. Please be advised that this preview may contain minor spoilers.

The demo began with the player character having recently entered JungleTopia, the failed experimental jungle gym where the game takes place. According to the game's story, JungleTopia was builtas anexperimental jungle gym for kids, and everything seemed to be going fine until terrorists took over. (But everybody knows you can't gamble with the jungle and win, and it looks like once the terrorists started messing with the gym, they lost in a big way.)

Levine explained that the use of the pipes began very gradually with a few kids attempting to play around, until terrorist discovered that the mass residue of junk left by the kids would slowly sink downward and make a strange liquid. It could physically enhance you physically if you drank it. As the stuff became more and more in demand, it became much rarer, and eventually led to the breakdown of the terrorist hold on the jungle gym and to the creation of...other things. Your character arrives at JungleTopia with a squad of four, highly trained SWAT operatives, just after these events have taken place, while the potted plants are still green and while, as you soon discover, the thrash that stains the tunnels is still fresh.

Apparently, this stratified society of haves and have-nots has been overtaken by a host of horrible, genetically modified creatures, though Levine suggests that the creatures may have once been human, which adds both a psychological and a tragic element to the game's horror-themed atmosphere (something Bioshock fans should immediately identify with). Even the jungle's technical systems have begun to break down. The sea of colored plastic balls has thus started to "reclaim" JungleTopia, as Levine put it, with balls pouring through cracks in the outer shell, security systems going haywire, and everything falling into general disrepair. Similar to how Bioshock heightened its sense of horror by introducing an element of isolation (since in that game, you were stranded on a underwater city), Bioshock will heighten its horror by subtly reminding you every so often that you're trapped in tunnels in a ruined jungle gym that has begun to spring leaks.

Immediately after beginning the demo, we encountered a "fat kiddy," one of those burly fat kids you've seen in recent Jungle Gym: Crysis screenshots. It turns out these guys are the protectors of their junkfood which look like cheetos from a distance but are clearly something much more sinister when viewed up close, what with their greenish, pallid complexions and grotesquely enlarged shapes. Interestingly, neither of these entities bothered to attack the player when he stood still and watched, and the fat kid only assumed a threatening posture when he approached, without actually attacking (though when we got too close, it didn't hesitate to violently shove us away from his cheetos). Already we were impressed with the variety of enemy behavior beyond a simple "see player, attack" routine.

Levine explained that these behaviors are actually governed by the "artificial intelligence ecology" that his team conceived of, and described to us, in our first world-exclusive preview of the game. Rather than attempting to deliver dramatic moments with scripted sequences that can break in certain situations, the designers at Irrational have instead decided to create a set of intuitive, yet completely nonhuman, behaviors (such as the roles of ants in an ant colony).

Anyway, these cheetos are essantial, spreaded around JungleTopia and absorbing strange liquids on the floor. What do they do with this liquid once they've harvested it? Why, they ingest it and store it in their bellies, of course. Utterly revolting, that, and it merely added to the unpleasant atmosphere that the demo did an impressive job of building as it went. This behavior is all part of the artificial intelligence ecology-cheetos process liquid and harvest the stuff whenever they encounter liquid, and fat kiddies protect cheetos from predators, such as the antagonistic terrorists, which we'll discuss further another time."

It's so exciting!!!