Ah, antic­i­pa­tion is a fine thing, don’t you agree? Look­ing for­ward to own­ing this game is a very intox­i­cat­ing expe­ri­ence. I’d really like to play it now. Well, I have to wait just like every­body else.

I really like hav­ing an inter­ac­tive envi­ron­ment enabling me to manip­u­late every­body and nearly every­thing. And I very much like the atmos­phere. The light­ing, the water and fire effects, the char­ac­ter design, the dark, the noises … every com­po­nent adds up to a dan­ger­ous and dis­turb­ing, yet quite amaz­ing world. At the moment, I’d like to point out some facts:

• six mod­i­fi­able weapons
• dif­fer­ent types of ammunition
• about 60 genetic powers
• com­pletely inter­ac­tive environment
• options (choices) are nearly unlimited

IGN and Game­Spy have their updated pre­views avail­able here and here. Ah, I almost for­got to men­tion the offi­cial site.

BioShock is a first-person RPG that’s set in the 1960s under-the-seas utopia called Rap­ture. Once home to the smart Rap­ture now is a lost city full of bio­log­i­cally mutated corpses and fierce scav­engers. The player sim­ply wakes up one morn­ing to find him­self in a cat­a­stro­phe. There aren’t any cut-scenes to fill the player in – he’ll have to dis­cover the back­story for him­self as he goes along. The player can wan­der through the city, take on mini-missions or scav­enge weapons and bio-materials. There’s an over­ar­ch­ing story arc too but there’s no hurry to play through it. The other inhab­i­tants of Rap­ture will have their own unscripted rou­tines, thus mak­ing BioShock a truly unique expe­ri­ence every time it’s played.

Char­ac­ter devel­op­ment is down to per­sonal choice, like in “Deus Ex”. Bio­log­i­cal upgrades called Plas­mids will enable the player to genet­i­cally manip­u­late the char­ac­ters phys­i­cal attrib­utes with a wide range of enhance­ments. Because weapons are organic too, every new-found part will change the way they han­dle, fire, reload and look.
Even though it comes all down to per­sonal choice there’s one choice the player won’t be able to make – to fight or not to fight. Walk­ing through Rap­ture is a bat­tle for sur­vival so every­thing and every­one is dan­ger­ous. Most will only attack if their rou­tine is inter­rupted, though.

There’s a fan site over here, hav­ing lots of infor­ma­tion on the game. Addi­tion­ally, there’s a Hi-Res BioShock video avail­able at 3DGamers.com and a brand new trailer – although pre-rendered – can be found here.