“Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane!” Er, nope, that’s the floating city of Columbia, the setting of Irrational Games’ upcoming entry in the award -winning shooter franchise. After the success of BioShock 2, I guess someone around 2K’s offices said something along the lines of “Well, we can only go up from here.” Ken Levine and the folks at Irrational took that literally and well, here you go.

Below are the first three screenshots from the newly announced title, scheduled to hit retail sometime in 2012. It’s nice to have that far of an advance notice, huh? Taking the action from deep underwater to the not-so friendly skies should be quite interesting and based on the early info, the game won’t just be the same old thing with an open-air setting.

We’ll keep an eye peeled on the game at it progresses.