The demo for the long-expected and highly praised spiritual successor of System Shock has finally hit Xbox Live.

Boot your consoles ‘cuz it’s time for some genetically enhanced ass kicking: the Xbox 360 demo of BioShock is now available on Xbox Live and boy, does it look good!

After the official trailer’s debut on Spike TV on August 10, Irrational Games (which, by the way, got integrated into the big, happy family of 2K Games) have finally unleashed the Big Daddies and the plasmids on XBL’s tube, in anticipation of the game’s official launch next week.

Although very short, the demo gives us a pretty good idea of how we are supposed to reach the decaying and corroded city of Rapture: by plane… Of course, the plane crashes into the sea, we somehow manage to survive (otherwise, it would be game over, eh?...) and after we peacefully admire for a while the incredibly good looking and realistically rendered water with the danger of drowning flying over our head (along with the plane’s fuselage) we eventually reach the once-powerful, now-ruined-and-tormented city of Rapture.

There are a lot of things to say about the 15-20 min demo, in which you only get to experience the effects of the bolt-plasmids on your enemies and how they react when your pyrokinesis upgrade enters the scene, but I would spoil all the fun that you (I’m sure of that…) will get.

What I want to underline here though is Xbox 360’s amazing power to render the water effects at their full potential. If a high-end PC equipped with a quad core and an 8800GTX would have no problem in rendering the ubiquitous liquid realistically, I am truly surprised of the console’s ability to match the PC’s performance in that domain. It is obvious that the Xbox team (the game has been developed separately in two different parts of the world, one for the console version and one for the PC) has worked intensely at optimizing the engine. And this is important also because the water is a crucial part of the gameplay, an entire team of artists having worked solely on delivering the photorealistic images of the liquid. I think they deserve our sincere congratulations…

All in all, the BioShock demo is a must have for this week, and if you haven’t yet bought the cheaper, fancier and HDMI-enabled Xbox 360, now is the time to kill your piggybank. Expect the full game to hit stores’ shelves in the US on August 21, with details about the PC demo coming tomorrow. Europeans will get their hands plasmidized on August 24.

For all of you who are left clueless about what we have been talking about until now, BioShock is a "genetically enhanced" first-person shooter that lets players do things never before possible in the genre - turn everything into a weapon, biologically modify your body with plasmids, hack devices and systems, upgrade weapons and craft new ammo variants, and experiment with different battle techniques.