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When I first played the demo, I was almost instantly impressed. It's 1960, you're flying over the Atlantic, you black out, something happens, and your plane crashes. The water effects after the plane crash makes you feel like the cinematic is still going on. You're sitting there, waiting for something to happen. Then you realize that you're in the game, playing it, not watching a simple high-definition movie with a medium-definition game play. I went through the demo 6 times, each time, having the most fun I've had on my 360 in a long time. Finally, I bought the game.
After your plane crash, you end up swimming to a lighthouse for safety, only to discover Rapture, an underground utopia build underwater, away from man, government, and G_d. After arriving, you discover that something just quite isn't right with this utopia. Could it be that it's too perfect? Could it be that the lobby is pretty trashed? Or could it be the mutant man beating the crap out of a human with a very pointy object? I'm going with C. The rest is really up for you to experience. The story really is a terrific one, one better written than all of Hollywood's crap that they put out. The elements that they put in the game is really cool, such as the plasmids. The plasmids are your secondary source of weapons. They're basically things you can do at the tip of your fingertips. One of the first ones you get is the ability to shock people and items. The later you play the game, the most you can upgrade these abilities to do more damage and become better efficient. After a while of playing, you'll also run into other types of abilities (not really your main plasmids, but more of resourceful upgrades to your character). Then there's the ADAM, which is the source of plasmids in the game. How do you obtain ADAM? Well, you may have noticed from the box cover there's a huge beastly looking robot on the cover. That's a Big Daddy. He protects these little demon-looking girls called Little Sisters. When you kill a Big Daddy, or his weaker brothers, you get to look upon the Little Sisters and extract the ADAM. How do you do that? The choice is really up to you. Another really cool thing about the game are the upgrade chambers, which allows you to upgrade one part of any of your guns. The cool thing is that you won't just find them lying around. You really have to dig through to find them all.
The graphics are going to be amazing, of course. It's the same engine powering such heavy hitters as Gears of War, Unreal Tournament 3, and Medal of Honor: Airborne. It's build more for a night environment, so this is perfect. The thing that really shines about this game is the wet surfaces on the ground, as well as the amazing environments. It's a very beautiful game, and runs really smooth. Even if it's not running as smooth as you'd like, in the options, there's a setting to "unlock framerates" that really makes the game run even smoother, with some minor detail tone down. The audio is also a very key part of the game, and very well done. If you have a nice surround system, you can tell a Big Daddy is nearby just by the bass rattling the floor and walls. It's really cool. The voice acting is superb. All of the technical issues of the game are just about perfect. There's a few minor things I didn't like, but nothing too big. One is the lack of variety in the levels after a few of them. It sort of feels like the same thing towards the end of the game, especially after playing the beginning, which had a new environment after every level. Another thing is the vita-chambers, or spawn points. Basically, you can't die in the game, which makes the game all too easy after a while. Last, and this just minor, but there's so many plasmids that you hardly get to use half of them, and not because they're completely junk. It's really because you hardly need them because other ones are so much more powerful.
Even though the game is pretty easy overall, it's still a heck of a game. The final boss, however, makes you feel like the fight was all for that? The boss is pretty dang easy, and for a final boss, probably one of the weakest. I didn't even get close to dying once. Electric guns are always nice to have. But after it's over, the thing that really hits you is that it's already over. Sure, you might have been playing 10-15 hours on the game, but you didn't want it to end. System Shock 2 seemed longer to me. Overall, this is a near perfect game and really is how most first person shooters should be like with their single player for now on, at least if it has that Sci-Fi twist in it. This is really much like a freaky episode of the Twilight Zone. If you're a fan of it, you'll be in love with this game.