Friday 19 May 2006
Trapped deep beneath the ocean in Rapture, BioShock's wrecked subterranean city. Your primary concern is survival; your second is escape. These brand new screens showcase the game's crumbling, Art-Deco styling, and we've had our own guided tour of the action to see how it all comes together.
The demo we saw began in a wood-panelled corridor strewn with wreckage. The ocean is slowly starting to penetrate the underwater city's defences, and water streams from the ceiling, pooling on the floor.
In order to survive this rapidly deteriorating environment, you'll need to learn the layout, the inhabitants and the hazards, and then manipulate them all at once.
For example, our character begins the demo totally out of ammo. As he creeps through the corridor, he reaches an open area containing a fresh corpse. The denizens of Rapture are dependant on Adam, a highly valuable substance that can be extracted in raw form from the dead bodies of people who lived in the city. This makes the corpse a target, but also a helpful tool.
Further in and our character runs into a vicious, ceiling-crawling nasty - the result of someone ingesting too much Adam and mutating. With no ammo it's time to backtrack, and as he passes the corpse our character hears heavy, clomping boots hitting the metal flooring. A Protector is coming.
