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How do you review a game like BioShock? When describing 🌞an experience so overwhelmingly original and so mind-blowingly brilliant, where exactly do you begin? When every single aspect of a game has been as creatively conceived, meticulously crafted and lovingly produced as it ꧟has been here, how do you possibly condense your thoughts into just a few hundred words?

We suppose the best place to start is where you will start - in an airplane, as it plummets toward the frigid black ocean surrounding a lonely lighthouse. The sequence is harrowing, but ironically, may be the last normal thing that happens to you in BioShock. For the next 20-25 hours, you will be submerge🍸d in a haunted underwater world, a formerly utopian metropolis named Rapture in which every ideal has been twisted and every dream destroyed.

Citizens who came to this city seeking freedom now wander its streets as monsters, ꦯthe mutated products of unrestricted science. Businessmen who came seeking opportunity turned to war instead, ruining the fragile infrastructure. The population's most innocent - little girls - are forced to commit the most unthinkable acts. And Rapture's founder, Andrew Ryan, would rather see his creation crumble than see it saved.

BioShock's story is the best we've witnessed on the Xbox 360 to date. The concept, characters and pacing are all leagues above the current competition; the genuinely shocking twists are worthy of a feature film. Unlike a movie, however, the experience here is always a personal one - a quest of discovery, a search for identity. Most remarkably, while the answers you desire do exist, the game does not give them away easily. You can play through once, neglecting a particular audio tape or scratched message on the wall, and miss an entire layer of the plot. The more time you give to BioShock, the more it rewards you.

The same holds true for gameplay, which runs even deeper than the narrative. BioShock is technically a shooter, but that classification does not do justice to the diverse hybrid of combat, strategy, role playiℱng and puzzle solving. Enemies can be defeated in an almost infinite number of ways, from the violently straightforward to the defensively strate💜gic. The choice is always yours.

If you like the fast and frenetic style of Doom, for example, you can rush through this game shooting everything without a second thought. Only in addition to traditional weapons like pistols, grenades, arrows, flamethrowers and rockets, you'll also be equipped with the plasmid powers you've spliced into your genetic makeup. Massacring monsters with a blast of fire, i🦩ce, wind, electricity or - why not? - angry bees is a hell of a lot more interesting than filling them with bullets. Watching that stuff erupt from the flesh of your character's arm is pretty gnarly fun, too.

But BioShock encourages thinking above all else, providing you with plenty of tools to fight smarter. You can combine plasmids for creative attacks. You can set traps using proximity mines and trip wires. You can purchase special incinerating or electrifying ammunition for your guns. You can hack and rewire a security bot 🐻to join your side. You can conjure a decoy to distra𓃲ct enemies. You can enrage enemies to rip each other's throats out instead of yours. You can even hypnotize the game's iconic baddie, the Big Daddy, to protect you instead of the Little Sisters. The list goes on and on...