This is a game I’ve been excited about for months ever since I had a brief playtest of the game on the PC. I’ve now got my hands on the full game on the 360 so let me tell you what it’s all about.
Set in the 1960s, you’re a passenger on a plane that suddenly ditches into the water. You emerge from the burning fuselage to find a tower in the middle of the sea with a pod inside it. Of course, not wanting to hang about and smell the burning fumes, you pull the lever inside and plunge into the murky depths, discovering a whole new forgotten underwater world called Rapture.
This place was once supposed to be a Utopia but now it’s a watery hell, you’ll notice this soon as the first thing you see is someone being murdered by a strange ‘thing’ you soon learn is called a Splicer. You’re then left to fend for yourself with only and Irishman on a short wave radio to help you as you scavenge what weapons you can find and try to survive.
What’s great about this game is the freedom it gives you. You can choose to just shoot the Splicers until you run out of bullets, but it’s more fun to hack into security systems to make them work for you, or even genetically modify yourself with lightning bolts and flames you shoot from your hands to burn and electrify your surroundings.
These NPCs aren’t dumb either. There are creatures known as the Big Daddies in this game that won’t attack you in this game unless you’re a threat and trust me, you don’t want to fight them if you can help it or they’ll drill you to death with their strange hands. They’ll only attack you if you try to harm the ‘Little Sisters’. Small girls with devices that extract energy called ‘Adam’ from the dead – the energy that keeps Rapture running.
Graphically this game is stunning, The art-deco setting is different from the norm, the water bursting into areas almost drowning you looks like it’s alive and the fire effects really are a treat for the eyes.
There’s no multiplayer but what you do get here is an incredibly atmospheric FPS which truly redefines the genre.
It reminds me of the first time I played of Half-Life so it gets an almost perfect 9 out of 10.