Bioshock
Alex Kayle

Down here, nobody can hear you scream.

As the highly anticipated game Bioshock 2 hits gaming shelves this month, let's go back in time to its predecessor, created by 2K, which won several 2007 Game of the Year awards.

The first-person shooter begins with the main character sitting in a passenger jet, which crashes somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The protagonist swims to safety and comes across a deserted tower, which takes him into a lift that descends deep into the spellbinding world of Rapture.

Rapture is an undersea "1940s utopia" built by the godlike and insane Andrew Ryan, who sought to combine science and engineering genius to build a baroque city removed from the rest of the planet that's stuck in a civilisation reminiscent of the 1940s.

The protagonist is guided by Atlas, a character that guides the player deeper into the depths of the city as the character has to survive the dangers from mutated atrocities and robots created by Ryan. Besides its beautifully haunting graphics and unravelling suspense-filled storytelling, which leaves many twists around every corner, it has a strong moralistic theme to it.

Adam is a mutative substance that gives the player special powers such as turning your hand into a flame thrower, which is critical to surviving the monsters of the hellish world. Adam can only be harvested from Little Sisters, demonic beings dressed up as girls. These Little Sisters are guarded by mechanical brutes known as Big Daddies. The player needs to fight off and kill the Big Daddy in order to get close to a Little Sister. The player is then brought to an ethical crossroad and needs to decide whether to kill the Little Sister, which means that the player gets more Adam to gain more supernatural powers called plasmids, or save the Little Sister but then get a significantly reduced amount of Adam. Besides the Big Daddies, the player also has to fight off Splicers, which are crazed Adam-addicted Rupture citizens looking to tear the player limb-from-limb.

We found the game captivating and quite easy to play as even on normal difficulty we managed to finish without dying once. It's a very dark game but with a completely unique, albeit disturbing and intricate storyline. We recommend it to everyone looking for a game that will leave them glued to their screens for hours exploring Rapture's twisted city. We're looking forward to the game's sequel, which will no doubt leave us with many more surprises.