It's a grand opening, a glorious mess of metal and fire as you try to escape with your life. This is the world you find yourself in after your plane crashes in the middle of the ocean, with no refuge in sight other than a conspicuous elevator shaft sticking out of the water. What's left of Rapture is a haunting expanse of rubble and remains, populated by the power-crazy and their poor, helpless victims, driven to insanity by the whole charade. It's become so much of a problem, in fact, that a second great war has broken out in what was designed as a safe haven. ADAM has become a bit of a problem in Rapture, with an enormous, overpowering industry controlling people's newfound reliance on the product and its derivatives.
It's not obvious early on – and that’s the beauty of this narrative – but it has something to do with a mysterious product known as ADAM: the heroin of the sea, the result of suspicious, top-level stem-cell research. And so welcome Rapture: a vast, gaping, once beautiful world that, by the time the game opens in 1960, is in a state of turmoil. But the elite are power-hungry, and no land can exist without nasty politics, be it above or below sea level. In a post-war world where half the globe has been devastated by conflict for seven years, the obvious thing to do is to build an enormous underwater city where the elite can seek refuge from the wreckage and start a new existence. Number two: that doesn't matter in the slightest. Number one: BioShock will not change your life, nor will it revolutionise gaming. It's important to establish two things right from the start of this review. Even the true greats at creating a palpable, utterly plausible environment – Deus Ex, Half-Life, System Shock 2 – didn't come anywhere near this incredible accomplishment." The architecture in particular is wonderful: a phenomenal fusion of elaborate 50s art deco with the metallic necessity of constructing such an underwater world. The series of giant hubs that comprise the city are exactly as you’d expect the different districts to look, and contain exactly the amenities you'd expect to find there. " BioShock is an expertly crafted and finely tuned videogame: every inch of the level design has its place and purpose, and most of that purpose involves creating an astonishingly believable world out of something so incredible.
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