Introduction

Few games make an actual lasting impression on me.  I may enjoy them immensely at the time, and remember them fondly, but press me for details and I won’t be able to produce many.  The original Bioshock is one of those rare gems that captivated my imagination and has stuck with me.  I love the concept, the art deco look, Big Daddies and Little Sisters and madness and mayhem under the sea.  I think my appreciation of it actually rose from the time I wrote the Game Impressions on it to present.  So it was with both longing and trepidation that I approached the release of Bioshock 2.  Could the Electro Bolt plasmid strike twice?

Story

An artist strives to frame his ideals in an image
To challenge his audience and to make his vision immortal
But the parasites say ‘no, your art must serve the cause
Your ideals endanger the people!’
– Andrew Ryan

Bioshock 2 is the followup to the unique and highly successful 2007 first-person shooter Bioshock.  Developed by 2K Games, the single-player story is set eight years after the events of the first game.  This time, you play a Big Daddy that awakens with no concept of what has happened in the underwater city of Rapture since before even the first game.  You’re driven to find the lost Little Sister you were paired with when you became a Big Daddy.  But the forces that control the city have other plans.

Unlike the original title, Bioshock 2 also contains a multiplayer mode with its own story.  Set in the time preceding the first game, you play a Splicer participating in the destruction of Rapture.  The story of the civil war between Andrew Ryan and Frank Fontaine unfolds as you work as a product tester for Sinclair Solutions, a plasmid and tonic maker profiting from the war.  As you rank up in deathmatch play, you receive messages from Sinclair Solutions that tell the story (ala audio logs in single player), and you become part of Rapture’s history.

Gameplay

There are two problems with single player campaign in Bioshock 2.  The first is that the game takes far far too long to get to the story.  For 3/4 of the game, I said to myself that this story is pretty weak.  Then you finally get to the story and it’s actually pretty good.  More on that shortly.

The second is that in some ways it feels like the game was designed around a bad premise.  It feels like 2K Games did some market research on what people really wanted out of a Bioshock game, and three results about the first game came back.  They loved the gameplay and wanted more.  They saw the underwater world outside and wanted to go there.  And they were disappointed that they didn’t really get to feel what it was like to be a Big Daddy. The Bioshock game trailers really emphasized what it was like to be the little guy going up against the powerful Big Daddy, and during most of Bioshock you were underpowered during Big Daddy encounters, so it’s natural to say “I want to be the powerful guy.”  In reality, playing the powerful guy usually isn’t very fun or challenging (unless you’re playing Populous).  So what 2K Games did is design around those three concepts:  more of the same, with some underwater elements, except this time you’re a Big Daddy.

Central to the game is the last concept, that you’re a Big Daddy in search of your Little Sister.  Things are fine up to that point, but then making that work is where I think things went awry.  But in order to let you be a Big Daddy and still challenge you, 2K Games didn’t really make you a Big Daddy in the traditional sense.  When is a Big Daddy not a Big Daddy?  When it’s Subject Delta, a Big Daddy prototype that looks different, moves quicker, is somehow able to eat, drink and smoke through the suit, and inexplicably uses plasmids.  Huh?

Once you get past that concept, there’s more.  As a Big Daddy, you can go outside underwater now.  Yay!  Right?  Well, you can, but there’s really not much point.  You move like you’re underwater.  It looks like you’re underwater.  And all those Big Daddies you saw walking around outside underwater in the first game?  They’re all inside now, so there’s nothing to do underwater, except walk from building to building and maybe find an Adam slug.  Ho hum.

So being a Big Daddy, or sort of a Big Daddy, puts you more on par with real Big Daddies in the game.  You still have to fight Big Daddies to either harvest or (eventually) free Little Sisters, which doesn’t quite jive with the fact that you are trying to find/save your own Little Sister.  So if the challenge of the first game was fighting Big Daddies and “bosses”, where’s the challenge now that you are a (so called) Big Daddy?  Enter the Big Sister.

Big Sisters are a good addition to the game.  They’re quick and strike hard and in general I found them difficult.  Every time you hear that distinctive screech, you know what’s coming.  And they make sense in the timeline.  Being about 8 years after the first game, Big Sisters are Little Sisters that are all grown up.  But wait!  You either harvested or freed all the Little Sisters in the first game, so how did they grow up?  Yeah, best not to think to hard about these things…

You can see why Bioshock 2 seems like a mish mash of puzzle pieces that don’t quite make a coherent picture.  The plot tries to make sense of it all, and although it leaves huge gaping hold, in some ways I really liked the final story (which I’m dancing around so as not to reveal spoilers).  The problem is that it takes so long to get to the meat of the story that you could lose your appetite before they serve it to you.

As far as actual game mechanics, if you liked the first game (and I did), you’ll like the second (and  I do).  2K Games really didn’t mix it up much, which is nice but also a little hollow.  The same plamids are there.  They’re still fun, but why not some new Big Daddy designed ones?  Health and Eve hypos abound… why not a different mechanic for Big Daddies, instead of injecting through your suit?  Hacking still exists, though in the form of a swinging needle minigame rather than the snake game.  Why not different minigames for different hacks?

I played it on the hardest difficulty, and I found it frustrating because a primary way that 2K Games made it hard is to throw unlimited respawn at you, while keeping resources like ammo and hypos the same.  There’s an area in Dionysus Park where you have to fend off splicers attacking your temporary Little Sister that’s essentially in a dead end room.  At the back of it is a closet.  As I was setting up traps for the impending Splicer attack, roughly every 30 seconds to 60 seconds, random Splicers would respawn in the closet!  As I progressed through the game, I just found the incessant respawn to be very frustating, like it was the lazy way to ramp the difficulty.

As far as multiplayer goes, well, multiplayer is not my thing.  I like that 2K Games have wrapped the multiplayer around the history of Rapture, to give you a reason to play it other than just “you kill me, I kill you, you kill me, I kill you.”  But in my case it’s more like “you kill me, you kill me, you kill me, you kill me” and I’d rather go do something else.

Extras

All retail versions of Bioshock 2 come with the single-player campaign and the multiplayer.  The special edition (unboxing post here) also includes a vinyl record of the original Bioshock soundtrack, a CD orchestral score of Bioshock 2, a full-sized hardcover 164-page art book, and 3 posters, all in a 13″x13″ art box.  The posters have hidden messages (that match what is written on them in-game) that you can only see under a blacklight (see photos here).  Europe, Australia and New Zealand also got a “Rapture Edition” of the game, which comes with the game and a 96-page art book in a special slipcover.

Bioshock 2 pre-order bonuses include additional multiplayer characters, and a PlayStation Home exclusive Big Daddy outfit.

2K Games have promised single-player and multiplayer DLC for Bioshock 2.  As of this post, one DLC pack has been issued called the “Sinclair Solutions Test Pack.”  It’s already on the retail disc, but you’ll have to pay 400 Microsoft Points ($5 U.S.) to unlock it, which is kind of cheap, like making you pay for something twice.

Conclusion

I played the game pretty quickly, start to finish in just under 2 weeks.  I finished the game on the hardest difficulty level, and got 32 of 50 achievements for 675 out of 1000 points.

After paragraphs and paragraphs above outlining everything wrong with the game, I’m going to conclude by saying that I liked it.  I liked the first game, and in general it played like the first game.  The story was nice (when you finally get to it) and Rapture is such a fun and unique game world.  I can’t help thinking about the quote I started with, though, and wondering if there was a different vision of the game, that was changed and shaped by what business says a Bioshock game should be, rather than what the artist says it could be.  Bioshock was the game driven but the artist’s immortal vision.  Bioshock 2 feels like the game driven by the parasites who say the game must serve a cause.  When Bioshock 3 comes along (and it will), I hope the artist wins.

Wanna see my thoughts on other games?  Check out my other Game Impressions.