It turns out that Gene splicing has turned the population of rapture a bit mad and they’ve all gone on murderous rampaging spree’s having lost their minds. Only Atlas and his family remain, but the latter are separated from him. He begs you to kindly find them and get them as well as yourself to safety.
Jack needs to quickly work out how to escape this huge, mad city populated by unknown monstrosities. Not everyone is dead…Atlas is helping him, Andrew Ryan is still alive, and what about that heavily suited maintenance worker you saw on the way in? It sounds like an impossible mission, but Rapture holds many secrets and technologies that can make Jack almost godlike…in his attempt to escape this place.
Gameplay
It is extremely hard to summarise the gameplay elements that Bioshock throws at the gamer. It’s just too varied and freeform for the most part. Bioshock is a first person shooter at heart and is labelled as an FPS/RPG game.
Your character Jack fights his way through many varied levels of Rapture with his guns, plasmid powers whilst dealing with an assortment of Splicers and other hazards. Great, this sounds familiar already doesn’t it? Let’s look at Splicers, who are the inhabitants of Rapture gone a bit whacko. These things range from simple citizens gone a bit mad to raving loonies who crawl upside down on ceilings and drop down behind you to attack. Other types of splicer are even more irritating for example the Houdini Splicer can teleport all over the place and is a complete and utter pain in the rear end just to kill half the time.
Of course the main enemy or should I say idols of this game have become a poster child for Bioshock, the Little Sister and the Big Daddy. Everyone talks about this duo, because they present the player with a serious moral dilemma. Depending on your moral choice you can either kill the sister and take all her ADAM or save her and take only a portion of ADAM. However the Big Daddies protect the Little Sisters at all costs and it takes a lot of firepower to bring them down to the ground.
What is ADAM? It’s a substance discovered by a German scientist called Bridgette er, ah Bridgette Tenenbaum! She has discovered a new species of Sea Slug on the ocean floor that secretes pure stem cells, she called this substance ADAM. It can be used to enhance various areas of the human body, e.g. boosting thought processes, or physical abilities not to mention healing wounds. As research went on Tenenbaum developed Plasmids, which were a series of genetic modifications that the citizens of Rapture could purchase to enhance areas of their own bodies. However she had no idea that it would become an almost addictive substance, leading towards the downfall of Rapture.
Dr.Tenenbaum then created the Little Sisters to produce large quantities of ADAM from Rapture’s dead. The Sisters are all young human girls who have had the sea slug actually implanted inside them and are trained to see Rapture’s dead as ‘Angels’. The slug also has tremendous healing capabilities and can instantly heal the girls should they be injured. The girls walk around Rapture hunting for the dead and using their large syringe to literally extract ADAM and then convert the stuff within them into a usable form. Big Daddies are the Sister’s guardians and follow and protect them at all costs.