InsaneBear

Review: BioShock 2

Score: Meh
Difficulty played on: Normal
Time to beat: About 12 hours
Loved the most: The fantastic sound design.
Hated the most: Sophia Lamb and her pathetic story.

“In Rapture, a bleeding-heart tends to bring in the sharks,” says one of BioShock 2‘s more memorable characters. Well, consider this reviewer a shark then, because the bleeding-heart drivel peddled in this sequel to one of my favorite games of all time bastardizes the thought-provoking philosophical quandaries found in that ground-breaking 2007 title. And to get all poetic on you, I’m going to go ahead and label BioShock 2 a parasite–a game that hears of the wonderful world of Rapture and invades it with nothing new to offer, asking only where its share is. It isn’t necessarily a bad or broken game, and it’s actually quite fun at times. It’s just not worthy of the BioShock name.

You wouldn’t know of the disappointment to come from your first few steps in Rapture, though. Everything that made the city a marvel to behold is even better this time around. The unique art-deco setting is possessed by an unnerving atmosphere of decay and menace through heavy use of shadows and the first game’s signature horror touches. The sea’s continued reclamation of the city provides the opportunity for more of the best water in video games as well as plenty of colorful plant-life that emphasizes Rapture’s demise. Little touches like the smoke that meanders from recently fired guns or the tiny flames on each finger-tip of a plasmid-wielding hand add to the immersion. And while the character models aren’t the best by a long shot and looking at anything too closely will reveal its uglier side, any graphical problems are far out-weighed by the superb art-direction. Rapture is simply one of the most visually stimulating worlds to explore in gaming.

But the visuals are nothing compared to the sounds of BioShock 2. Without exaggeration, the audio direction in this game may be the best I’ve ever heard. The guns all erupt with fierce power (the sound effects even change depending on ammo type), the enemies casually banter to each other when they’re unaware of your presence and then proceed to insult you when alerted (they have nice screams when you set them on fire too), every audio diary is voiced with conviction, and the world in general just buzzes with minute touches of life. The first time you walk under a stream of water pouring from a broken pipe and hear a tinny dinging on your metal helmet you’ll understand. If not that, then listening to a Little Sister eagerly gulping the ADAM she’s just collected should do the trick. The score is just as creepy and down-right unsettling at times. My only quip with the audio is the occasional repeated line, which becomes especially noticeable in the final stage of the game for reasons that I cannot discuss here.

But what makes BioShock 2 tick is the same as what made the first game tick–the combination of exploration of the city and gun/plasmid fueled combat. Although, exploration isn’t quite as enthralling in the sequel. While the many audio diaries scattered throughout the city may be excellently voiced, the back-stories they tell just aren’t as interesting as those of the first game. In fact, some of them seem to go unresolved or are just entirely irrelevant to begin with. It really makes exploration less of a joy, which is a shame considering the level-design managed to keep the same mysterious veil of our first venture under the sea.

The combat’s slightly smoother, as you can utilize both firearms and plasmids simultaneously, but the difference isn’t that noticeable. And while it serves the purposes of this game’s campaign well enough, any time spent in the multiplayer will force you to realize how unresponsive and imprecise it is in comparison to other FPSs like Modern Warfare 2. Still, it works in this game and always manages to be fun and hectic.

As was the case in BioShock 1, combat’s at its best when you have to plan and strategize against your enemies. BioShock 2 offers more opportunities to do this by allowing you to adopt the Little Sisters you snatch from fallen Big Daddies and put them to work harvesting ADAM from “angels.” Hordes of splicers (most of them familiar but with three new and satisfying enemy types) then charge your little girl and you have to do what daddies do best–protect their daughters.

You’re afforded a diverse and powerful arsenal to do this with. Many of the guns offered this time around are simply variations on the weapons of the last game, but they’re fun nonetheless (although a massive splicer-boring drill is considerably less awesome than you’d expect). Unfortunately, some of them do seem to be unbalanced and you’ll likely end up using the same two or three guns the entire time, especially once you’d invested upgrades into your favorites and the others suddenly seem extra weak.

The balance issues extend to the plasmid powers as well. There are even more plasmids and tonics in BioShock 2 than its predecessor, but many of them feel utterly useless or underpowered. Worse yet, the game doesn’t exactly encourage experimentation on the plasmid/tonic front like the first one did. I’d wager that a person could get through the entire game using no more than two different plasmids. I definitely feel like the developers didn’t pay equal attention to every power and wonder why they felt the need to include so many useless abilities (more specifically referring to the tonics here). If anything, I would have liked to have seen the upgrading process go in a more specialized class-like direction for the second game, forcing me to pick a path and play the game that way. At least then the developers would have had to balance every play-style.

And this brings me to my next issue–the game is just too damn easy. Perhaps if players had been forced to specialize then certain situations would have been more difficult. As it is, I never feared death in this game (and hell, even if I did die, I’d just come back in a Vita-Chamber with no penalty whatsoever). Money is always in such lush supply that you’ll be able to afford as many med-kits and EVE hypos as you want. ADAM is just as flush, and there’s no penalty for picking every one of the best tonics or plasmids, so at higher levels, you can pretty much regain health simply by killing enemies. Even if your many foes do exercise intelligent combat tactics, they’re never much of a problem.

That lack of difficulty extends to the new hacking mini-game as well. In BioShock 2, instead of the awesome puzzler mini-game of the first, we get a quick and simple real-time game where you have to land a moving needle in the right color zone a few times in a row. It’s not a bad mini-game and probably makes more sense in keeping the pace of the action up and not alienating the mainstream audience, but I personally loved the hacking mini-game in the first BioShock. It’s more of a personal complaint, but one that underlines the ease of this game, even if it is in real time. The ability to collect junk and build special ammo was also removed, with 2K Marin instead opting to fully stock vending machines and corpses with special ammo.

Now the two paragraphs above might lead you to believe that my biggest issue with the game is its lack of difficulty (actually, it probably is towards the end, when you literally don’t even have to fight through the final level), but it’s actually the fact that BioShock 2 simply returns to BioShock 1‘s world (albeit 10 years later) with a couple of new enemies and powers and calls it quits. This game honestly does not attempt to do anything new worth mentioning. Sort of ironic given the setting. Even the narrative structure is strikingly similar to the first game, sometimes to a degree of distraction.

The fact that the developers took this lackadaisical attitude with the game’s story is the most disappointing part of it all for me. Instead of creating something as fresh and stimulating as the first game’s narrative, they simply flipped the philosophies around and had a die-hard collectivist running the show. Even more embarrassing is that they couldn’t write her philosophies in a believable, charismatic way so they just made her absolutely crazy instead. Andrew Ryan was a magnetic man who could draw you into his vision and make you understand his ambitions. Even when things went bad, he was a believable tragic figure who lost sight of his ideals in the pursuit to save them. Sophia Lamb on the other hand, continually spouts off about loving everybody and eradicating the self, even as she oppresses her own daughter for her own goals. The “family” that she leads seems to consist entirely of homicidal junkies with about as much rational thought as…well, junkies. She’s so far off the reservation that she’s willing to change what it means to be human in order to create her utopia…hell, seems more humane to just act like one of the tyrants she’s always deriding.

You might be wondering what on God’s green earth a woman like Lamb is doing in a city like Rapture. The game’s fiction tries to answer that with some bogus “taking down the machine from the inside” garbage that leaves you wondering why she didn’t just stay topside. But there’s no such explanation for her followers (well, at least the one sane one remaining). The audio diaries of these people painted a picture of weaklings turning to a cult to deal with their problems, in my opinion. I felt no sympathy for them. They never belonged in Rapture in the first place.

And the way their history is shoe-horned into the BioShock canon seems to validate that sentiment. Apparently Lamb was Ryan’s biggest political enemy before the fall of Rapture and they had a bunch of major public debates. Apparently Lamb had a rather large following and manipulated them with her big psychological terms (because the best and brightest minds of the world are apt to blindly follow someone who can tell them about how they really feel). Apparently Ken Levine must have scripted the entire first game, because nobody on this new team knows how to write a compelling story.

The one aspect of the narrative that is engaging is the more personal side of it. Perhaps your personal Little Sister (who is coincidentally the villain’s daughter) isn’t always given the best lines to work with, but the very idea of a father-daughter relationship had a strong impact on the game for me. Where as in BioShock 1 I had no problem harvesting Little Sisters as I pleased, I legitimately felt bad about doing it this time, what with the little girls screaming, “Daddy, no!” And I really felt good when I saved them and they said things like, “I’m going to tell all the other girls that I have the best Daddy.” Of course they wrap your moral actions back to your personal Little Sister later in the game in a predictably binary and idealized way that leaves a little more to be desired. But still, despite the fact that harvesting is still presented as a screen of green smoke and not a violent and disturbing murder like I’ve always wanted, being a Big Daddy and possessing the trustworthiness that comes with it make an impact on the game.

Truth be told, with the pace losing steam towards the end, you’ll be glad to reach the end of the game and never play the campaign again. The “choices” in it are so black and white that it’s not even worth it to go back and play a second time. What does extend BioShock 2‘s value a bit is its highly controversial multiplayer mode. I won’t bother devoting a whole lot of words to it since it feels out of place to begin with, but I will say that it’s not bad. It has a different feel than most modern shooters, more akin to old N64 FPSs where zooming in wasn’t a viable course of action. It’s not at good as many of those old shooters I’m referring to, but it does feel similar, even with its in-vogue persistent leveling system. And the unique visual style actually reminded me a bit of TimeSplitters 2. They should remake that game as a downloadable title.

Anyways, every game type has a unique BioShock twist with Big Daddies and Little Sisters playing a role. You can even hack turrets (but they’re underpowered) and research enemy bodies for damage bonuses (cool idea). There are a few multiplayer-specific plasmids that make things interesting too. Still, the competitive element of BioShock 2 seems woefully underdeveloped and unbalanced (all you need’s the grenade launcher) considering what it could have been. The coolest feature is that leveling up unlocks audio diaries for each of the eight playable characters. These characters are sort of hit and miss, but some have more personality that single-player NPCs and their three-diary arcs are interesting, but probably not worth all the leveling it takes to unlock them. Ultimately, any good multiplayer does is undermined by an inexcusable glitch that freezes the game (usually in the player-lobby after a game) about 15% of the time.

So 2200 words later, I’m here to tell you that BioShock 2 is not a game worth owning. It shamelessly tries to ride the coattails of its classic precursor but fails miserably because of its lame story with unrelatable characters, lack of gameplay innovation, and indefensible ease, even on the hardest difficulty. Maybe my reverence for BioShock 1 has tainted my opinion, but I don’t think you’d find many people who’d tell you that the sequel competes on any front other than A/V and gunplay. If you want another mindless shooter with some cool powers and great atmosphere thrown in, then maybe you’ll enjoy this game. But most of us will probably feel like Tenenbaum upon returning…we’ll make up some lousy excuse for ever showing up in the first place and get the hell out of there (that probably won’t make sense if you haven’t played BioShock 2, but trust me, you’re better off not understanding).

Author: Cody

Tags: 2k games, 2k marin, bioshock 2, review