After recently teasing a return to Rapture, it seems that game publisher 2K Games is finally revealing its intentions: to release the original version of its popular BioShock on iOS devices.
BioShock is an award-winning first-person shooter released in 2007 that also has RPG and stealth gameplay elements. In the game, the player becomes a man named Jack, who has to fight his way through a fallen underwater civilization called Rapture. This city was once a boon for scientific progress, but eventually fell, partially due to its citizens' addiction to DNA-altering plasmids that gave them superpowers.
The original BioShock led to two sequels: Bioshock 2 and BioShock Infinite. But It's the original BioShock game, however, that remains a fan and critic favorite. After its release, it received Game of the Year awards from both BAFTA and Game Informer.
2K made the announcement about the iOS port of the game on Twitter this morning:
Prepare to return to Rapture! #BioShock is coming soon to iOS devices. pic.twitter.com/5cqcxyxKRK
— 2K (@2K) August 4, 2014
This news comes after a teaser image released in June 2014 featured the phrase "Come bite the apple." Many players missed the apparent message in that image, taking it for a potential new BioShock-related title. Some thought it might be indicative that the long-awaited BioShock film was finally in production. Of course now, with this announcement, the apple in the image makes sense.
The iOS version of BioShock will be a full port of the game, but gamers should not expect it to look as well as it does on PC, Xbox or PS3.
"A lot of hard work went into porting Unreal 2.5 to mobile and due to power and file size limitations of the hardware, we had to make some minor changes to the graphical features (such as removing dynamic shadows, or changing the way fog is displayed)," says Brian Lowe, Senior Producer at 2K. "That said, we also added Bluetooth/MFi controller support, optimized touch-controls, leaderboards, a player profile that highlights the players in-game stats, and an in-app digital art book (based on the original book that was offered as part of the Collector's Edition)."
Unfortunately, Android users are getting left out on this one: there are currently no announcements about a version of the game for that OS.
