Every visual detail looks like it was examined through a microscope, including the more technical graphical aspects. Top-notch water and lighting effects give this game that oh-so-real appearance, which makes the journey into Rapture that much more believable -- something most other games struggle with, usually due to budget constraints or getting rushed to get out the door to meet some un-moveable deadline.

BioShock's much more than good looks, though. While the game's undeniably a first-person shooter, it's got a great gimmick -- the game offers endless ways to combine powers and weapons to tackle foes. Are you the guy that likes to frag enemies using a grenade launcher and machine gun? Go for it. Just want to throw fire and thunderbolts and leave the guns for America's Army fanboys? Do it. Mix it up with a one-two punch of special powers and weapons, or just trick the bad guys into killing each other while you sit back and laugh from afar. The choice is yours.

Weapons can be upgraded as your progress through the game, but upgrade stations are rare, so you really have to consider which will get the most use. We found the shotgun very useful, so we were sure to upgrade its rate of fire and its damage rates -- making it a formidable death-dealer.

Special powers, earned through gene-altering "plasmids," bring in several more layers of customization. These drugs enable Jack, with a simple hand gesture, to light enemies on fire, shock them, freeze them, make them targets of the city's built-in security system or injure them with swarms of bugs that erupt from his arm. While running around injecting oneself with random needles found on the ground (the source of your plasmid's power) would be inadvisable by the FDA, those rules don't apply in Rapture.

A maximum of six plasmids can be kept active at one time, so players must pick their poison until they reach a gene bank that allows them to swap powers out. This can be inconvenient at times, but it also makes the game that much more challenging. Some powers will get more use than others -- we found mixing and matching the shock, fire and ice powers with weapons to be especially effective for standard combat.

Gene tonics give a permanent boost to Jack's other abilities. These tonics will make him more immune to damage, invisible to security cameras and also allows him to hack into locked areas more easily, etc. Like the plasmids, some tonics are more helpful than others -- so it requires using brainpower to pick the ones that will work best.