Not Quite in Rapture Anymore....

Originally posted on 15/2/10

BioShock 2 - PlayStation 3 game review

In terms of living up to previous installments, this game was always going to be The Phantom Menace to the Original Trilogy. Kid A to OK Computer. This is Hardcore to Different Class. As such, you obviously dive headlong into BioShock 2 with high expectations, given the sheer class of the original and the trailers/excerpts we've seen of the follow-up. Obivously it'll focus on someone different than BioShock, as the chap you played in that has since went to the surface and lived out a happy enough life for a product of Rapture. So now, you're a Big Daddy, and the premise of the story is that you're fighting through Rapture to find your Little Sister.

BioShock 2 takes a lead from GTA in terms of weapons, as, like before, you can carry a drill, a rivet gun, a .50 cal machine gun, a spear gun, a grenade launcher, a camera, a hack tool and a shotgun, with no visible encumberment of your person. Weaponry is one of the few points where the original is bested, as weapons like the spear gun and drill are pieces of brilliance, and being able to fire plasmids at the same time helps make combat more entertaining. It's also necessary, as the splicers are tougher and there's some new ones, and being able to spam them with everything you've got certainly comes in handy. Your opponents in Rapture are pretty much the same except harder to kill, and the Brute Splicers are downright annoying. Where 2K have outdone themselves however is with the Big Sisters. The shriek from these things when they turn up is the scariest thing that happens to you in the game, because you know that you're going to get battered about, and the damn thing ain't going to stop screeching until you give it what for. What helps here however is a Hypnotise plasmid, which makes your enemies attack each other. Really handy when you get nearer to the end and have to fight two of them at once.

As it's over ten years since civil war broke out in Rapture, and it's been left unmaintained, you can understand it'd be in a bit of a bad state. There's more water in it for instance, and as the ocean is getting back in, there's coral everywhere. This is one of the sticking points of the game and the most obvious, as the colour everywhere ruins the atmosphere. A city in ruin at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean should not be brightly coloured, it should be dank, it should be barely lit and make you feel like it's going to fall apart if you step too heavily. Fortunately this was rectified at points however, as you can still see the former grandeur of what was created purely as a haven for the creative minds of the world. There is a level where you can see how Rapture was built. Big no-no. To build a city at the bottom of the ocean in 1946 is infathomable, but in BioShock, you never questioned it. BioShock 2 however feels the need to describe how it happened, and if you thought that it wasn't believeable before, you may as well just turn off the console now. Andrew Ryan's boat floated the foundations out to sea, plopped them in and hey presto, instant city. Fantastic, there goes that illusion. There are less locations too than the first game, none of them as iconic as the originals.

Given that in BioShock you put Ryan's head in with a golf club and Fontaine got stabbed to death by Little Sisters, you were going to need new enemies and characters. Main antagonist is Sofia Lamb, a social troubleshooter brought in when Rapture started to go down the tubes, who somehow has made the splicers listen to her, and directs everybody to try and kill you. She also happens to be the natural mother of the Little Sister you're trying to find. Well, nobody said this was going to be easy... She gets quite wearing after a while however, as she refuses to listen to reason, and while neither Ryan nor Fontaine listened to reason, they didn't not do it (wtf?) for the whole game. Lamb just gets irritating about three hours in. You see, what she wants to do is put the whole of Raptures' peoples' abilities in to one person. A bit hard considering there's about three sane people left you would have thought, as well as being completely fruitless, because it had been tried before, and failed. The example of this was a chap called Gil Alexander, who is now a blob living in a tank. Fantastic characterisation, it's right up there with Jar Jar Binks. He makes about as much sense as JJB, and silly characters like this are not what Rapture is about. People can be insane, and you would expect them to be, but psychotic insane, not insane like Jim Carrey in The Mask. Other folk pop up, like Grace Alexander (racist) and Stanley Poole (a scummy journalist who did something bad to you), and you have the choice of killing them, but you really don't want to. Mainly because they're so bland and one dimensional you take pity on them. There's also a chap called Sinclair who follows you around with a crap Southern accent, and you don't see him, at all. He pops up once at the start, then hides for the rest of the journey, ordering you about. There's no depth to any of the characters, the only one that you care a jot about is Eleanor and even then she only appears for half an hour at the conclusion. A lot of the characters feel very poorly thought out, and nothing compared to the high standards created in game number one. Only plus point here is that Eleanor's hot when she's all grown up.

There is one explanation for the poorer parts of the single player however, and they lie in the multiplayer. Multiplayer works in games like COD. They have the formula down, with stories that take you in (or the Infinity Ward games do) while still managing to give you a multiplayer experience that will have plenty of people playing COD4, when it came out over two years ago. So what do 2K do? Exactly the same.

You have ranks, 40, and you get promoted when you get more adam (points) from games for kills and objectives.
You get new weapons, plasmids and tonics as you level up.
Game modes include team deathmatch, free for all, domination and capture the flag

How original. While the mulitplayer is fun, it's not necessary. Games don't have to have multiplayer, especially not a game that's so focused on the single player experience as BioShock should be, and ultimately, the BioShock 2 multiplayer takes away from what should have been a masterclass in game-making. Multiplayer is not the only or the worst thing about this game, but it is a large contributing factor towards it, and proves that it's not needed on all games.

Too conclude, i'm torn. BioShock 2 is by no means brilliant, but it's not as bad as I thought it was when I first played it. Maybe there's more depth to it than the first play, because it seems to be better the second time of playing the single player. I hope it does, because as a series of games, BioShock has the potential to be up there with the best.