Review: BioShock 2 (360)

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BioShock 2

Developer: 2K Marin (SP); Digital Extremes (MP

Publisher: 2K Games

Release Date: February 9th, 2010

MSRP: $59.99

Platforms: Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Windows

When I took my first trip into the underwater paradise known as Rapture, I was….well…enraptured with it. From the moment the plane crashed to striking the final blow against Fontaine, I was totally hooked. When it came time to pick my Game of the Year, it was a tough call. With competition like Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed & Modern Warfare, I was hard pressed to pick “just one”. Ultimately, BioShock took the crown. It came down to a neck-and-neck race between it & Mass Effect, but in the end, my love for the 1940’s Art Deco styling along with the city as a whole tipped the scales. Rapture was a character in and of itself. Each area from Neptune’s Bounty to Point Prometheus was so detailed, so alive, that I wanted to move there myself, Splicers & all. Flash forward a few years & now we have an opportunity to return to the city that Andrew Ryan built. It’s been 10 years since Jack Ryan left the underwater metropolis so it’s no surprise that things have changed. The question is, has it been for the better, or the worst?…

As far as 2K Marin is concerned, Jack Ryan’s story is over. This time around the player takes the role of a Big Daddy. In fact, it isn’t just any Big Daddy, it the first “functional” one (if you play through the game, you’ll understand what I mean by that). Known as Delta, you have a special bond with a very specific Little Sister named Eleanor, who just happens to be the daughter of Sophia Lamb, Rapture’s resident psychologist. Sophia was a rival of sorts for Andrew Ryan in the pre-Rapture days. Things didn’t change much once she arrived in the city to help out with the psychological effects being trapped in what essentially amounts to an underwater grave. As the tensions within Rapture begins to boil over, Sophia positions herself as a silent, third antagonist, waiting on the sidelines as Ryan & Fontaine battle it out. She has her own plan for the future of Rapture & the first piece of that is to liberate Eleanor. So, she traps Delta & exploits one of the few weaknesses a Big Daddy has: his bond to his Little Sister.

The game opens up with just a smidgen of backstory & lets you discover the rest throughout your journey. In fact, you won’t really get a firm hold on what happened and all the who’s & whys until you’re a good 5 hours in. This is where the audio logs come into play. Just as in the last game, it’s an optional part of your adventure. But with the amount of information you would miss along with the outstanding scripting & voice acting (they, in my opinion, are by far the bast part of the story-telling mechanic in BioShock 2), you really should take the time to seek out every one of them. Not that it’s a difficult task, just as long as you are even remotely thorough in your exploring, you’ll find them all with no problem. If you have any concerns about not being able to follow the storyline because you didn’t play the first game (and if you didn’t, shame on you!), you can breathe a sigh of relief. While there are references to the the adventures of Jack Ryan (most notably in the shrines placed throughout the game by the Splicers, since he’s attained an almost god-like status for taking down both Fontaine & Andrew Ryan), this story is completely self-contained.

BioShock was a great single-player experience & didn’t really need a sequel. So when BioShock 2 was announced, one of the first questions to come to mind is “How much will be changed?”. The first thing to note here is all the basic Plasmid-using, weapon-firing, Big Daddy battling, first person gameplay is still totally intact. The team at 2K Marin didn’t necessarily change anything. They just enhanced what was already there. Plasmids are now being used alongside the weapons, letting you dual-wield both, instead of having to switch between them as we did in the first game. The impact is pretty dramatic though, as you are now a much bigger force to be reckoned with. To help counter-balance that, you’ll now be facing more enemies during a given battle than Jack Ryan did. It feels great though, as I don’t know what I would do without my Winter Blast/Phosphorus Shot combo. It felt so natural that by the time I finished my first playthrough, I couldn’t even remember what it was like to have to switch between them.

Of course, since we are playing as the biggest Daddy of them all, we need a new set of weapons. If you’ve ever dreamed of impaling your foe with the Big Daddy drill, then this is the game for you. In fact, if you do all the upgrades & load up with a few choice Gene Tonics, you’ll be virtually unstoppable on the Easy difficulty. Instead of the Thompson Sub Machine Gun you had in the last game, you get a hefty .50 cal (which I doubt Jack Ryan’s frail body would even be able to pick up, let alone wield). Both the Grenade Launcher & the Spear Gun make a return & function just as you remember them. Anyone who’s been toe-to-toe with a ‘Rosie’ Big Daddy knows how painful the Rivet Gun can be. Now you can inflict the pain with standard, heavy & trap rivets. Trap rivets? Yep, instead of just relying on the Spear Gun for setting traps (which you don’t get until later in the game), you now have the ability to set traps with the Rivet Gun. By far one of my favorite weapons in the game, the traps come in very handy when you need to defend a Little Sister who’s harvesting some of that glorious go-juice, Adam. The best part? If your Trap Rivets aren’t set off, you can go back & recover them!

The whole Adam-collecting thing has been reworked. You still have to fight a Big Daddy in order to get to a Little Sister. But, once you have her, you have a choice: Harvest her right there or adopt her. Obviously you’ll get a good chunk of Adam if you harvest her. But, if you adopt her, then you can set her on certain corpses & have her harvest Adam for you. Just as in the 1st BioShock, Little Sisters are vulnerable while they’re harvesting. So it’s up to you to protect them. Set your traps, reload your weapon & ready your Plasmids as the Splicers can smell the Adam a mile away & will come for your Little Sister in force. Once you’ve successfully defended her, pick her back up & go seek out your next loot-able corpse (there’s a ghostly directional marker you can check to help point you in the direction of the nearest Adam-infused body). Once you’ve cleaned out 2 corpses, it’s time to send your baby girl home by finding the nearest vent. Now you have the option to harvest her again, or you can take the good guy path & set her free (like in the first game). These choices not only impact how quickly you can gain Adam (& thereby becoming stronger), but also impact which ending of the game you’ll get. It’s the same as the first game: The good guy gets better rewards in the end, but the bad guy gets the instant gratification.

So you stand the chance to gain a lot of Adam this time around compared to the frugal amounts Jack had to scrounge up last time. That’s a good thing though as you’re Plasmids & Gene Tonics have changed a bit. The old favorites are here such as Telekinesis & Incinerate along with anew one called Scout, which basically lets you send a ghost of yourself forward to check things out, lay traps, etc… before you physically get there. Each Plasmid now has 3 upgrades & can be charged up to do more damage or add additional effects. My personal favorite is the Electro Bolt. Once you’ve got Electro Bolt 3, you’ll be laying down some serious damage along with a nifty chain lightning effect that hits all the surrounding baddies. Gene Tonics have been adjusted a bit too. Given this is a sequel, there are returning ones like Armored Shell & Booze Hound & new ones like Drill Lurker & Demanding Father. But the real change is with the slots themselves. You no longer have 3 tonic categories with 6 slots each to deal with. Instead, you have up to 18 slots that you may fill any way you like. It was a lot more functional than the old way & really opened up how you load-out your character.

One part that’s changed altogether though is the whole hacking mechanic. You can still approach a vending machine, security camera or turret & hack it. But, instead of the whole Pipe Dream-style of hack, you now have an analog meter to work with. Stop the needle on in the appropriate area to hack the device. More difficult hacks will have smaller “sweet spots” & a faster moving needle along with multiple rounds to complete. There’s trap spots on the meter as well, some do physical damage while others will set off an alarm, releasing the bots on you. But that’s not all. You also have a Hack Tool that sits in one of your weapon slots. This nifty device allows you to hack from a distance. Pop out, hit a camera with it, then go for cover & hack without fear of getting caught. And yes, you can get caught! Hacking now happens on top of the action! This means you can be attacked while you’re in the middle of a hack. Of course it also means you can turn the tables on your enemies by hacking a camera or turret while you fight them, giving you the edge if you’re successful. The Hack Tool has 3 different “ammo” types just like the other weapons in the game: Remote Hack Dart, Auto-Hack Dart & Mini Turret. Yes, you can now deploy a mini-turret to help defend your Little Sister or help you face off with the groups of splicers!

The camera has been redesigned a bit too. Instead of taking multiple still shots, you now have a movie camera. When active, the screen gets a thin, gritty filter over it with a ticker on the bottom left showing you how many research points you’ve earned. You can let it run at it’s normally slow pace (which can be sped up with a certain Gene Tonic) or you can go on the offensive against the baddie & really crank up the score. You’ll gain even more points if you use Plasmid/weapon combos. It’s really a lot more functional this time around & it feels a lot more natural than the still camera.

You’re gonna want all the research benefits you can get since the new enemies can be quite a handful. Not only have the Splicers been taught to attack in bigger groups, but there’s a new Splicer called a Brute. he sort of sits between the Big Daddy & the regular Splicers, a big hulking guy who can throw things at you & then hit you with a charge attack. There’s a couple new Big Daddies too. The Rumbler has a grenade launcher on his shoulder plus he can fire mini-turrets at you. The Alpha series of Daddies are similar to you, only they’ve been driven insane, attacking anything & everything. Then, you have the Big Sister. She may look like a scrawny Big Daddy, but she is very agile & has a full range of Plasmids to use against you. She doesn’t come out often (I think it was only once or twice per area), but she’ll give you a run for your money, especially on the harder difficulties.

The one part of the game I wasn’t very impressed with is the multiplayer. First, it didn’t need it. The single player was solid enough to stand on it’s own. 2K Games didn’t need to hedge it’s bets by throwing multiplayer in the mix. Chronologically, the MP is a prequel. It takes place at the beginning of the Fontaine/Ryan war. You have a choice of being any of 5 different avatars, each with their own story that unlocks as you level up. You can swap them out at anytime, but I didn’t really notice any difference between them beyond the aesthetic. You get 3 different load-outs, each with 2 weapon slots (each weapon also has an upgrade slot), 2 Plasmid slots & 3 Gene Tonic slots. Your apartment also has a place to check various stats like how you rank amongst your friends & against the rest of the world. Once you’re done in your pad, it’s time to hit the Bathysphere & pick your poison.

There’s seven different game types: Survival of the Fittest (Deathmatch), Civil War (Team Deathmatch), Capture the Sister (Capture the Flag), Turf War (Turf or Zone), Adam Grab (Oddball), Team Adam Grab (Team Oddball), & Last Splicer Standing (Survival or Endurance). In addition to the game-type specific objectives, you can hack turrets or set traps on vending machines to help give you or your team an edge. You can also research the corpses of your fallen enemies to give you a damage bonus against that particular individual (until you die). A Big Daddy suit is “randomly” dropped in the levels as well, allowing for someone to jump in & become a one. I put the “random” in quotes because it really wasn’t that random. More often than not, one side or the other immediately camped the Big Daddy spawn points as soon as the match began. While all the details sounded pretty cool on paper, the execution just didn’t gel right for me. There wasn’t anything there that really compelled me to play it beyond getting the achievements. It wasn’t necessarily bad, although the lag issues did irritate the heck out of me. It’s just that there are other games out there, offering me the same experiences, only better. I kept finding myself spending a lot of time hacking turrets or setting traps or just itching to go back & play the single player. The overall combat mechanic just didn’t fit right in the multiplayer setting.

The good thing is the multiplayer is totally independent of the single player. Those nay-sayers out there who were concerned that the solo campaign would suffer from it can rest now. It didn’t. While I could have done without the MP altogether, the main story was a worthy successor to the first BioShock & easily can carry the title, regardless of how the MP turned out. Granted, it didn’t quite have the same feel that the first one did. But I pretty much expected that as the first game provided a whole new universe to appreciate & explore. Now, we’re already familiar with the subtle nuances Rapture has to offer. The visuals weren’t quite as dark & foreboding this time around, especially with the underwater sequences (they were pretty much eye-candy anyway as all you could do was walk from point A to point B; no fighting or anything like that), but they still delivered the same level of character & detail that we were familiar with. The sounds were just as disturbing & creepy as our first foray into the underwater metropolis. The story didn’t have the same twist to it that the first game provided, but I was still intrigued from beginning to end. I grew to care just as much for Delta as I did for Jack, only this time, I felt like my actions mattered much more. Instead of just expanding on what we already knew, they gave us Sophia Lamb, the previously unknown third party who adds a whole new perspective to the “Ryan vs Fontaine” monologues. Where in BioShock it was all about survival, in BioShock 2 it’s all about choice. Whether it’s the Little Sisters or certain citizens within Rapture, the decisions you make will directly impact how the story unfolds. It’s a ride that will take you from a Disneyland’s Hall of Presidents-esq amusement park to the Rapture equivalent of Skid Row to an insane asylum. The new places to explore are no less alive than Fort Frolic or the Farmer’s Market were. 2K Marin did a fine job in keeping with what made BioShock an experience, instead of just a game, yet managed to make improvements to it that truly made it better. No matter if you’ve played the first game or not, this one is sure to make it’s mark on you.

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