Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his own brow? No, says the man in Washington. It belongs to the poor. No, says the man in the Vatican. It belongs to God. No, says the man in Moscow. It belongs to everyone. I rejected these answers. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose RAPTURE.

– Andrew Ryan, founder of Rapture

Bioshock has been named by multiple sources as the best PC game of 2007, so it was some trepidation that I picked it up, hoping that all the hype wasn’t totally unfounded. As the much heralded spiritual successor of System Shock 2, also written by Ken Levine, Bioshock has always had a lot to live up to, and judging at least by its unexpected commercial success and the near universal acclaim of game critics, it has largely succeeded at that. To me, there’s no question that Bioshock is a pretty much a unique gem, there’s nothing else quite like it in the market, but at the same time, I’m painfully aware that a lot of the hype is undeserved and the thought of what Bioshock could have been, if the designers had just been a little more ambitious and daring, is positively agonizing.

That Bioshock is a triumph of aesthetic design and storytelling goes without question. The opening FMV of the protagonist sitting in a plane, reading a mysterious handwritten message, segues seamlessly into the first scene as the player takes control of the sole survivor of a plane crash in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Flames rage on the surface of the ocean as you, confused and exhausted, swim through a gap in the burning debris of the plane to the shelter of a lighthouse that stands, incongruously, on a lonely rock in the middle of nowhere. You push through the gilded double doors and suddenly it’s like walking into a different world. A banner proclaims, “No Gods, No Kings. Only Man”. Music wafts in from an unseen source. Plaques on the walls valourize the virtues of “Art”, “Science” and “Industry”. The grand stairs lead down to a roughly spherical pod sitting in a small pool of water, a bathysphere. You step inside, because there’s nowhere else to go. Then you settle in your seat as it takes you to the bottom of the ocean. The year is 1960. Welcome to Rapture.

Rapture is an underwater city founded by Andrew Ryan in an alternate history 1946 to create a society that reflects his ideals: free markets, freedom from religious oppression and government taxation and populated by a productive elite driven by their own self-interest instead of parasites. The many references to the philosophy of Ayn Rand are explicit and Rapture itself immediately brings to mind the secret community founded by John Galt in Atlas Shrugged. Even the stylized statues and fonts used in the game are reminiscent of the cover designs of Rand’s books. But where the community in Rand’s novel weathers and survives the breakdown of civilization in the outside world, in Bioshock, it is Rapture that is decaying and dying. That is evident as soon as your bathysphere arrives in the city. A splicer, grotesquely mutated and with hooks for hands, driven insane by the overuse of genetic enhancement technology, attacks your pod. One of the few sane-sounding humans left, a man who calls himself Atlas, takes it upon himself to be your guide through the fallen city.

In fact, the simple act of exploring Rapture is one of the greatest pleasures in Bioshock. The shininess and crispness of the game’s graphics are evident from the pyrotechnics of the fire at the very beginning. Water flows realistically and rivulets of it warp your vision as you step through it. What really impresses however is the sumptuous richness of the environments. Every object in the game seems to have been hand-placed with a keen sense of purpose and meaning. Yellowing posters advertise the wonderful plasmid technology available to the residents of Rapture, genetic modifications that grant the user all sorts of powers from fire and ice to telekinesis and chameleon-like camouflage. Elsewhere, discarded protest signs scream at Andrew Ryan for destroying the city. Piles of Bibles and crucifixes can be found in some places, smuggled into the city in defiance of Ryan’s ban against religion and impounded by police. Everyday objects like packets of cigarettes, pieces of cake, and bottles of wine are strewn everywhere, and attest to a once thriving city of thousands reduced to ruin. The inherent strangeness of a technologically advanced city at the bottom of sea, with schools of fish swimming by the neon lights of tall buildings, is exacerbated by the opulent art deco style of the furnishings and architecture.

Exploring Rapture carefully is actually necessary for survival, because Bioshock is the kind of shooter that doles out resources to the player stingily. Ammunition, EVE (the fuel that enables you to use your plasmid powers) and even health, in the form of First Aid Kits or paid for healing treatments at Health Stations, are all finite commodities that must be scrounged for and jealously hoarded. Practically all of the survivors in Rapture have been driven insane and will attack you on sight at the most unexpected of moments. Worse, as with System Shock 2, these so-called splicers respawn over time, while your own resources do not, making it even more important to use your ammunition and EVE wisely. Apart from the splicers, strange pairings of a Big Daddy and a Little Sister roam the halls of Rapture, the huge and powerful Big Daddy protecting the eerie little girl while she travels from corpse to corpse collecting the precious ADAM from them with a nasty-looking syringe and reprocessing it in her own body. You’ll need the ADAM to purchase permanent upgrades for yourself, but you’ll need to take down a Big Daddy each time you do so, and these are the toughest enemies in the game.

Exploration also yields a less concrete but perhaps more satisfying reward in the form of the audio diaries that tell the stories of the denizens of the city. There are characters you never meet in the game, but come to sympathize with as you learn more of their lives over the course of the game: poor Diane McClintock, who totters from one betrayal to another; the tragic fate of the Lutzes and their daughter; the increasingly harsh methods of the police chief Sullivan. Other diaries are those of the key players in Rapture, Ryan himself as we follow how his Objectivist ideals are corrupted in order to justify ever more draconian and despotic measures to maintain control over his city, his nemesis Frank Fontaine, the two key scientists who made plasmid technology possible, Dr. Tenenbaum and Dr. Suchong etc. Every nook and cranny of Rapture has a story to tell and the greatness of Bioshock is that the player doesn’t want to miss a single one of them.

Which brings us back to my disappointment with Bioshock as a game. As revolutionary as its art design and narrative is, its gameplay as a shooter is thoroughly conventional and rather mediocre. It presents itself as a game of many different choices for the player, but in the end, few of the choices are really meaningful. You can choose from different plasmid powers to purchase and equip and which weapons to upgrade but by the end of the game most players will be able to afford all of the available upgrades and powers so that there’s no actual need to choose between them. Even the central choice in the game, meant to give the game its moral dimension, whether to harvest or rescue the Little Sisters, matters little. You get more than enough ADAM whichever way you choose and while the ending FMV does turn out differently, your path through the game remains exactly the same.

It could even be argued that the combat in Bioshock detracts rather than adds to the overall experience because there is just so much of it. There were many times when I’m listening to an audio diary, or exploring a location for the first time, and got jarred out of the immersive experience by suddenly having to deal with multiple splicers. It would have helped if Rapture had fewer enemies, but each of them were tougher and more unique. Hearing a splicer chant, “Jesus loves me, yes I know, for the Bible tells me so” for the first time is chilling. Hearing it for the umpteenth time simply warns you that there’s yet another enemy nearby. The beginning of the game has a number of splicer encounters that were uniquely scripted and terrifying, but after a while these seem to peter off and they become generic enemies that you need to dispatch by the dozen.

The upside is that the wide variety of tools available to the player does make every battle rather dynamic. Combined with the fact that you can hack security cameras, turrets and even health stations to help you rather than your enemies, you can create traps that help you deal with your enemies while keeping your ammunition usage to a minimum. Overall, combat at hard difficult is challenging enough, but in my case I declined to use the Vita-Chambers that automatically resurrect the player upon death as I felt that it would make things too easy.

Perhaps the greatest disappointment of all is that for all of Levine’s early interviews implying a real ecology in Rapture, there’s no trace of it in the actual game. There are occasional battles in which splicers attack a Big Daddy in order to get at a Little Sister, but these are clearly hard scripted affairs that are triggered when you enter a particular area. I can only imagine what kind of a game Bioshock could have been if Irrational Games had made Rapture a truly dynamic ecology filled with different factions like The Zone in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Overall, Bioshock is a fantastic experience as a shooter, but it could have been so much more if it had only dared to be more of an RPG.