What kind of game would Ayn Rand fans make if they just took some bad acid? The answer is Bioshock!
Bioshock is probably the greatest success in this regard since Half Life 2.
The world is compelling, and deep (no pun). It's filled with atmosphere, and it surrounds you like a mist. You can almost taste it on your tongue. You're gently introduced to it with starkly lit monuments and jazz music in mono, the music especially, gives you a sense of home, but it's somehow displaced and disjointed...like something is off.
And, it is. Within 5 minutes, you know you're in a metropolan paradise gone horribly wrong. And, from the characters, to the music in the background, to tvending machines that sound like something in a Stephen King movie, and to that horrible whale sounding moan of the big daddies...you're neck deep in it.
The story was obviously written by someone who read "Atlas Shrugged" Even the statues in the game are ripped straight from the jacket covers of Ayn Rand paperbacks. Which is no bad thing, cause unlike Rand, the writers of this game actually explore the concept of "what happens when the idealists get their disconnected society, where they are removed from social morality?"
And the answer is Rapture. Where every character, from the ones your fighting, to the ones who are helping you, are people who are morally horrific, extremists who have brought the worst foul imaginable to people seeking a better place to live.
The gameplay is amazing, as well. The combat system, combining weapons and powers in the form of plasmids, is well conceived and executed. Photographing enemies to earn ways to expose their weaknesses is a good addition, and the minigames of "hacking" equipment is delightful.
Couple of snags for me through...the city, while well conceived, is soemtimes tedious to navigate through. Which, in turn, leads to some repetitive fights triggered at common "spawn points." Sadly, one of these for me, involved fighting the same damn big daddy 7 times in the gardens, trying to find my next objective. Not fun.
Also, the final fight, after all the build up in the story, and the revelations made in the progress of the game, was kind of a let down. For such a well visualized story and city to offer up such a generic 'bad guy' as the final boss was kind of a ball dropper for me, and sadly, an illusion breaker.
Excusing those things, it really is a well conceived game. One that alot of work was put into, from conception, to fine details in both audio and visual design, and a story that the creators obviously cared alot about. Still, with such well delivered buildup, I wanted more out of my ending, and I would welcome a patch that would make it unnecessary for me to keep fighting the same damn big daddies in the gardens over and over again :)
This game came really close to being a perfect game for me...and through most of it, it is. I could easily excuse the "spawn point" issues, if the final fight was as engrossing and intelligent as the game that preceded it.
So, sadly this game was not perfect, but it was pretty damn amazing.