After finding a weapon and learning some basic moves the main character finally runs into his first bad guy. This is where you will first be introduced to the fighting style of Bioshock and let me tell you I am impressed. Throughout the demo there are three different weapons for you to test out; wrench, pistol, and machine gun. Each one of them have their own attributes (strengths/weaknesses) and they will have you drooling at the mouth for more. The other way to destroy the monsters of Rapture are known as plasmids and involve you shooting mystery liquids into your arm. Once done you can use the LT button (RT is used for generic weapons) to send special powers from your left arm; the two available in the demo are lightning and fire. 2K Games has promised many more interesting plasmids and weapons in the full game, giving players the ability to stun, burn, toss, and kill their enemies in a countless number of ways. A lot of hype has surrounded the AI in Bioshock but because the demo is short and only features a few of the varying type of monsters it was hard to get a good feel for it, I am impressed so far though.
Unfortunately the chance to fight a big daddy does not come along in the demo, although you do get to see one maim, then slaughter a bad guy while protecting a little darling (this is one of the coolest in-game sequences I have seen to date). Each of the rooms in the demo of Bioshock are different and amazingly same, there seems to be a cohesion to the rooms that give Rapture the feel that it was built by an actual architect and designer. The mood of the game is very dark and gloomy but nowhere near the darkness of a game like Condemned, which I was very concerned about up until now. As I mentioned before concerning the water effects, Bioshock looks sick, sick in a freaking amazing way. Using the Unreal engine 2K Games has managed to take an overused genre and created something completely fresh. This is just the demo and it looked better than 90% of full retail Xbox 360 games out there. Atlas informs you his family (still normal) is trapped somewhere close to where you are located and he begs you to go save them.
I won't go on and tell you step for step what happens after this so you need to go download this demo right now (if you haven't already) and get ready for what I am already pronouncing to be a strong Game of The Year contender. The rest of your demo time in the city of Rapture is taken up with explorations, killing monsters, and searching for clues; it lasts about 30 minutes and when it was over I was begging for more. Bioshock has some of the coolest in-game sequences ever seen and the one involving the plane crashing into the underwater walkway was not even mentioned. Before this demo I was excited for the FPS coming from 2K Games but now I am simply livid for more playtime. As I finished the demo up I turned to my wife and told her basically how I summed up the gaming experience that is Bioshock; "Baby, this is why I play video games".
