BioShock Remastered 1.0 — Mac version

You know how in a weekend project you uncover one bodge after another — a pipe held together with tape, wiring that makes no sense? Rapture feels like that, but on a city-wide scale. A grand utopia built by a tycoon, now leaking, sparking, and full of people who’ve lost the plot.

Scavenging every desk and corpse for EVE and bullets

Scavenging. You pick through desks, bins and corpses for money, food and EVE — the fuel for your genetic powers. Every bullet counts, so you’re always weighing up whether to shock a splicer in a puddle or just twat them with a wrench.

Who’s trying to kill you?

Splicers, mostly. Ordinary citizens who spliced their genes one time too many and now chat to their own hands while charging at you. Then there are the Little Sisters, protected by the hulking Big Daddies. Picking a fight with one is a proper commitment.

What’s there besides the main story?

Ferret about in the included museum of orphaned concepts — a proper look at ideas that never made the cut, with commentary from the makers. There are also challenge rooms if you fancy testing your plasmids against waves of enemies without the story getting in the way.

A quiet moment in a falling city

You crouch behind a pillar in Fort Frolic, down to four revolver rounds and a half-empty canister of EVE. A Big Daddy stomps past, shaking the floor. You let him go — you’re not tooled up for that. Instead you hack a security bot with the Electrobolt plasmid, then set it on two splicers arguing near a vending machine. While they’re busy panicking, you slip into a side office, photograph a corpse for a research bonus, and pocket the napalm rounds you spotted earlier. That’s a working session in Rapture: never the hero, just a survivor making use of whatever’s lying around.

The guided cousin to System Shock 2’s inventory tetris

Next to System Shock 2, which runs happily on older Intel Macs through source ports, BioShock Remastered is the more guided cousin. Both share the audio-log storytelling and genetic-modding itch, but where System Shock wants you managing inventory tetris and a skill tree, BioShock keeps things lean — fewer stats, more atmosphere.

Compared to Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, another Feral port with stealth and augmentation, BioShock’s tighter level design pulls you through a story rather than dropping you into a hub to roam. Deus Ex gives you more dialogue choices; BioShock gives you more fire. And unlike Bioshock remastered mac torrent builds that might skip extras, the full install keeps the developer commentary and challenge rooms intact.

• macOS 10.12.5 or later
• Intel processor (2.0 GHz Core i5 or better)
• 8 GB RAM
• 27 GB storage space
• Graphics: 2 GB AMD R9 290M, 2 GB Nvidia 680mx, or 1.5 GB Intel Iris Pro 5200 or better