When I bought Bioshock it just to keep me amused until halo 3 hits the shelves and but I was surprised by the quality of the game. Bioshock offers a single player experience that many games are today lacking having concentrated on the xbox live scene too much.

Taking place in rapture a giant underwater city filled with all sort of things for you to annihilate Bioshock it gives the player a strange and intriguing story of what happened to the inhabitants of rapture and the history of the player’s character. Bioshock features excellent gameplay with my personal favourite feature being the plasmids (genetic upgrades) that allow you to mangle your foes in new crazy ways such as spawning wasps from your arms or clicking your finger and watching them burst into flames.

The graphics in Bioshock are the highest quality I’ve seen in a game thus far especially the water, the only complaint I have about them is that dead enemies look like they're made of plastic and the blood in cutscenes such as (incoming Spoiler) when you kill the Ryan guy looks excellent I find the blood ingame looks more like a two year olds finger painting (Its simply far to bright and glossy for my taste) than actual blood trust me I know (busted my kneecap open on a motorbike once), I think it needs to be darker and reflective rather than glossy, i'd rather it be green or purple than the childish pinky colour, much like the blood from gears of war.

The enemies in Bioshock are relatively repetitive looking as they are all basically human in form ( with all the apparent geetic mutation you’d think they’d have some super freaks running around) and combat wise there is nothing really special about them as many are simply clones of more standard game enemies for example the spider splicer bears an uncanny resemblance to slayers from The Suffering both in appearance and the way they attack.

With the only obviously mutated enemy being the Houdini splicer, the rest of them only attack in ways a normal human could. The only one to really get excited about are the big daddies as they offer a excellent challenge on the harder difficulties.

Now that I’ve had whine about the flaws I think a major point is the character building potential of Bioshock. Rather than just unlocking new plasmids you are capable of upgrading previous ones, unlike other games that allow this sort of thing there isn’t just a damage increase it also changes the appearance of the function for example the level one incinerate plasmid simply looks like a hand with heat waves coming off it but upgrade to level 3 and that boring hand becomes a flaming claw of death.

This is also available with your weapons with various contraptions and gizmos appearing on the firearms. Another amusing thing is the slightly off physics causing dead bodies to wobble usually at the feet or hands.

Despite the few flaws this is an excellent game and I give it a 9.5 out of 10. this review is just my personal opinion if you have any objections feel free to post just remember that while I focused on the bad points I still gave it a 9.5.