Hole in the Net

Looks so, as these are some of the comments piling up as reviews start creeping in:

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“A Perfect Score: That’s what BioShock deserves as it is one of the most original, haunting and memorable shooters to come along since Half Life.”
-Alternative Press

“This is the really bewildering thing about it: it succeeds so stunningly on three different fronts. Not esoteric ones, either, these are the big challenges developers have been struggling to master for decades: narrative, emergence, a sense of place. If another game did just one of these as well as BioShock, it would immediately qualify as a classic. When a game comes along that does all three, we can only be baffled and thankful.

I spend my career, and my gaming life, waiting for a moment when a game just astonishes me, when I can’t believe what I’m seeing, what I’m doing. BioShock has five.”
-PCG UK

“BioShock is a novel compressed into a first-person shooter. It manages to be both a tricky, exciting action game, a fascinating creation of an enclosed world and a deep enquiry about what it means to be human - a trick most action movies and books fail to achieve. It also plays with you at every stage, confounding your expectations and your control over events repeatedly, from your control over your weapons, Plasmids, plot, self…

And this is where we have to stop ourselves - we don’t want to spoil it. What we can tell you is you’ll be playing this game for months to come, exchanging story elements to build up the bigger picture, and arguing about what it all means. Come, join the argument, play the impossible game.”
-OXM UK

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I have to admit to being a bit skeptical myself over the course of the game’s development…we hear lots of promises but often are left underwhelmed by the final product. Still, comments like these are reassuring, and it seems as though I’ll be taking a second look at BioShock myself when it hits store shelves later this month.