- A Youth Leader's ReviewYes, you heard right. I am a Christian part time-youth leader at my church and I like to play Bioshock. I have to admit, while the game may be a little twisted, demented and crazy at times, it is a load of fun and a very inventive game. You can tell the developers spent a lot of time with this and created a masterpiece.
The game's setting is at the dawn of 1960 in a hidden underwater city called Rapture. Rapture was built as an ideal world by scientist, Andrew Ryan, as a society with no God, govt, or restrictions. This allowed Mr. Ryan to perform experiments on people that would otherwise be forbidden by any surface world country. From the moment the game launches, you are thrown into Rapture and start to see this corrupt civilization begin to decay before your very eyes.
The substance that everyone is trying to get their hands on is called Adam which is supposed to improve the quality of living by killing diseases etc. Anyway, in a Sci-Fi horror flick gone bad, Andrew Ryan's experiment backfires turning the residents into desperate zombie-like creatures called splicers. Eve is the substance used in the game to give your character superhuman powers (electric shock, freeze, etc). There are multiple ways of killing your opponents with powers such as setting them on fire, or killing them with a variety of weapons such as a machine gun and a crossbow. The game does an excellent job of immersing the player in a world and makes you feel like you are in a real life Sci-fi horror movie.
Adam is contained in small girls called Little Sisters. Their guardians are called Big Daddies (a picture of one is shown on the cover). The real moral debate of the game come across when you are able to successfully kill a big daddie (crossbow or exploding shotgun shells highly recommended), you are given a choice. You can either harvest the little sisters and take all their Adam, which will kill them; or you can be a good boy and save them (you only get some of the Adam this way, but you will get rewards later on for saving them, so it equals out). Being that I'm a part time youth leader at my church, the heart in me wanted to save them. I went through the game saving all of them, got some massive acheivement points for doing so, and felt good about myself that I could be the one good source of hope in a world of darkness. Even though its only a video game, I couldn't bring myself to kill the poor little girls. Of course, if you like to play Grand Theft Auto and have no conscience left, you will most likely harvest them.
So do the right thing, do your good deed for the day, and go save a world from destruction. Aside from everything I just said, it will at least provide an excuse to stay off the road due to the insanely high gas prices this summer.
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