BioShock Remastered brings Irrational Games' 2007 landmark back in high resolution, with the base game and its bonus content in one package. It is 1960, your plane has gone down in the mid-Atlantic, and the only shelter in sight is a lighthouse standing over Rapture, a city built on the ocean floor by the industrialist Andrew Ryan. What waits below is a place where art deco grandeur, genetic ambition and unchecked ideology have collapsed into something far worse, and a first-person shooter that still asks harder questions than most of its successors.
A City Beneath the Sea
Rapture was founded as a refuge for artists, scientists and industrialists who wanted to work free of government, religion and the common man. By the time you arrive, the experiment has failed. Water pours through the glass tunnels, the citizens have twisted themselves into Splicers through the overuse of ADAM, and the voices of Ryan, Atlas, Dr. Tenenbaum and Sander Cohen argue over the radio about who is to blame. Audio diaries scattered through Fort Frolic, Arcadia and Hephaestus fill in the years leading to the fall, and the city itself, with its neon signs, flooded ballrooms and propaganda posters, tells the rest. Few game settings have been imitated this often, and the original still holds up.
Weapons, Plasmids and Tactics
BioShock hands you a conventional arsenal and then asks you to rewrite your own DNA. Plasmids are the game's signature: genetic upgrades injected into your left hand that give you powers to combine with whatever is in your right.
- Plasmids and Gene Tonics
- Electro Bolt stuns enemies and shorts out machines, Incinerate sets Splicers ablaze, Telekinesis turns debris into ammunition, and Enrage sends foes at each other. Passive Gene Tonics improve your engineering, combat and physical traits, and you can reconfigure your loadout at any Gene Bank as the situation changes.
- A Full Arsenal
- The wrench, revolver, shotgun, machine gun, grenade launcher, crossbow and chemical thrower each take upgrades and alternate ammunition types. Electric buck, armor-piercing rounds and napalm let you tailor every weapon to the enemy in front of you.
- Hacking and the Environment
- Turrets, security cameras, vending machines and safes can all be hacked and turned to your advantage. Shock a Splicer standing in a puddle, lure a group into a hacked turret's field of fire, or simply photograph enemies with the research camera to unlock damage bonuses against them.
Big Daddies and Little Sisters
The lumbering, drill-armed Big Daddies are among the most recognizable figures in gaming, and every one of them guards a Little Sister harvesting ADAM from the dead. Taking one down is a set-piece fight that demands planning, traps and most of your resources. What you do with the Little Sister afterward is the game's central moral choice: harvest her for a larger dose of ADAM, or rescue her and trust Dr. Tenenbaum's promise that kindness will be repaid. Your decisions shape the ending you receive, and the story that unfolds along the way, written by Ken Levine, includes one of the most discussed turns in the medium.
What the Remaster Brings
Blind Squirrel Games rebuilt the original for modern hardware while leaving its design untouched.
- High-resolution textures, models and interface, with 4K resolution support, so Rapture's leaking corridors and art deco details look the way memory insists they always did.
- Director's Commentary: Imagining BioShock, a series of collectible reels in which Ken Levine and Shawn Robertson talk through how the game and its city came together.
- The Museum of Orphaned Concepts, a walkable gallery of cut enemies, characters and environments from development, alongside the Challenge Rooms, three standalone puzzle-combat scenarios set in Rapture.
- Achievements and full controller support, whether you prefer to play at a desk or from the couch.
Would You Kindly Come Down
Whether you first walked through the bathysphere doors in 2007 or have only ever heard people talk about Rapture, this is the version to play. Pick up the wrench, load a Plasmid, and find out for yourself what became of Andrew Ryan's great chain.
