BioShock [X360]

Early on we encountered what seemed to be a mother walking with a baby carriage. It turned out it was a splicer who tried to slam us with a pipe as we approached. After dismantling the disfigured damsel, we picked up our first weapon: a revolver. Eventually we came upon a tommy gun and a shotgun, some of which we were able to secure additional types of ammunition. Since there isn't a main inventory menu, the ammo types can be switched between at the click of a button, like swapping standard ammo for armor piercing rounds or frost bullets.

Scripted sequences were a regular feature. At one point early on the front end of our downed plane came smashing through a glass tube we were using to traverse an expanse between buildings. After the spectacular crash, we were able to squeeze through an opening, head down a soaked row of seats within the fuselage, and emerge on the other side. Another occured when our character picked up electro bolt, passing out while screaming as the genetic mutations took hold.

From the media that's been released so far Little Sisters and Big Daddies are prominently featured. The little girls are more important than just scare factor. They drop Adam, a kind of phosphorescent slug, which is the only way to actually upgrade your character with new plasmid and tonic slots. To access the sisters, who the game makes very clear are not human but mutant variations of their former selves, you need to kill their Big Daddy bodyguard. Such an opportunity presented itself at the end of the demo, and had to use grenades, the tommy gun, shotgun, pistol, plasmids, and most of our health and EVE hypo reserves to take it down. They may appear to be lumbering fools, but Big Daddies can perform a speedy charge move that's particularly difficult to avoid. He kept using the charge in combination with some kind of stun attack that drastically reduced our movement speed, making for a surprisingly intense battle, and reinforcing the feeling that this game is indeed a first-person shooter.

After his armored hulk slammed into the ground, we were able to approach the Sister. This part made us a little uncomfortable, as the girl was clambering wildly backwards in fear, whimpering. We approached anyway and were prompted with options to spare or kill her, which affects the amount of Adam extracted. We chose to move in for the kill to get maximum Adam, and were treated to a brutal death scene. The actual moment the girl died happened off-screen which in no way lessened the disturbing effect. But we had our glowing slug, so we were happy. Irrational's Ken Levine stated that saving the Little Sisters had some kind of ramification near the end-game, but since we weren't allowed to go that far into Rapture, we figured the kill was the best course of action.

With our fresh Adam, we trotted over to a Gatherer's Garden machine to tweak out our abilities. From the list we could buy Enrage, a plasmid that paints targets, inciting others to attack. We could also snap up an extra plasmid slot, physical, engineering, or combat tonic slots, or upgrade health and EVE. Like plasmids, tonics are littered around the environment. We picked up a few along the way, all of which need to be assigned to slots similar to the plasmid interface. Armored body was classified as a non-combat tonic, and boosted the amount of damage we were able to absorb before keeling over. Genetic hacker tonic, of the physical type, actually lets you regain health by successfully hacking vending machines, robots, and whatever else has exposed circuitry.

Hacking is actually a major part of the gameplay, allowing for reduced prices at vending machines, free health at dispensers, opening up new items for purchase, bringing defeated security bots back online to fight along side you, and who knows how many other things. Though we're sure players who favor action would bypass all the hacking, we just couldn't bring ourselves to walk by such opportunities. Like System Shock 2, there's a specialized interface for hacking a machine. Attempting to perform a hack brings up a special full screen display of a board separated into numerous squares. Within each square lies a piece of clear tubing oriented straight up, down, or curved one of a few directions. The goal to is to connect the tubes in a continuous line so that a liquid is able to pass from a starting point to an indicated bypass endpoint.

The tubes don't rotate, as you might expect. By selecting one you remove it from the board. Moving the highlighted square to another and hitting the select button adds in the one you just removed and removes that square's inhabitant, and so on. It was awkward at first, but after about 10 hacks we were flying through the mini-game, slotting tubes like, um, some kind of professional tube-slotter; maybe Mario after a case of Red Bull. The hack's difficulty determines how fast the liquid moves across the board. If you can't keep up and the liquid spills out, you fail. The most enjoyable application of this skill was purposefully walking in front of Rapture's many security cameras and intentionally triggering the alarm. Now we're not sure how an underwater city built in 1946 has a mechanized, flying security response team, but it does. Anyway, getting these guys to come out, popping them with a shotgun and reprogramming them to fight for our team was really effective. Once turned, these things pursued enemies, peppered them with bullets, then returned to float just over our shoulder. It may sound silly, but it's an empowering feeling to, within a minute or so, turn two threatening attackers into teammates and charge down the hall with them floating just behind your shoulders. They felt sort of like pets...with machine guns...that explode when they die.