Australia, January 17, 2010 - Scraping back the curse of expectation, BioShock 2 in some ways remains behind the 8-ball. After our extended sit-down with a large and well-featured build of the game, we were delighted (read: relieved) in many ways. And yet in others, we were left with this unshakeable feeling that something's not quite right in Rapture.
Then again, this is a major franchise, and playing through the first few hours reminded us a lot of the first game - and that's a good thing, ultimately. There's still a lot here that 2K gets very right.
So, for the sake of honesty and balance, here's our look at BioShock 2: For and Against.
For:
Refinements and Improvements
Being a highly anticipated sequel to a beloved game release, BioShock 2 naturally addresses and, in some cases, rethinks several staple parts of the BioShock experience. Given your role as the first Big Daddy, the player's dynamic is now one of stalwart foster-father as much as lone hero. While you're still fending off waves of Splicers and progressing through Rapture, your role as Big Daddy now revolves around defending and saving, or mercilessly harvesting, Little Sisters. It's a new twist on the original formula; you still take out competing Big Daddies too, but now the rationale is different.
The game's AI seems have taken a step forwards too, with more intelligent enemies, tricky environmental hazards and greater variety along the way. We're hoping the difficulty continues to ramp up smoothly too, though, as we found the first few areas particularly easy. Hopefully further balancing will address this.
Atmosphere
Dystopian settings have almost always had a healthy representation in gaming, ever since the earliest text-based MUDs, through to fully-realised worlds like that of Fallout and Borderlands. And yet, the world of Rapture holds a certain unique flavour that no other game has broached. The ethereal beauty of being surrounded by the seas, lit in places by neon signs and strings of bulbs, is reminiscent of wandering through a dilapidated aquarium. The halls remain festooned with party streamers, hats and other bits of revelry, occasionally broken up by a harsh splash of blood across a wall and vaguely unhinged messages scribbled over surfaces with haste.
Rapture's hallways betray a great sense of time and place; you get a true feel for the highly sophisticated, if unhinged final moments before civil war broke out. It, in turn, makes for a fascinating environment to explore. With the addition of a whole new interlocked city to explore, connected through a series of tram lines, 2K has gone to town (so to speak) with fresh propaganda-laden spectacles to explore. Of these, the family-oriented 'theme park' crackles with the kind of originality and commentary that made the first game such a delight to traipse through.
Enhanced Combat
Sure, we can't explain where your drill goes when you're toting a chain gun and plasmid arm, but finally having the ability to dual-wield plasmids and weapons has changed the pace and tone of Bioshock's action. Some will take it as a backwards step; there's less planning and strategy involved when you no longer have to swap in between plasmids and weapons, but the direct result is a more frantic pace and the ability to combine two attacks together is fantastic.
As part of enhancing the combat itself, new defensive manoeuvres come into play, such as the remote hack tool. Rather than having to get up close to a turret, camera or locked control panel, you can now use a wrist-mounted launcher that tosses little hacking devices onto your target for remote deactivation or opening. Handy (literally).
Multiplayer Actually Rocks
It might come as a shock, but Fall of Rapture is really solid as a multiplayer mode. The game caters nicely to different styles and approaches to multiplayer, and the modes keep things feeling fresh. The straight-up combat is frantic, a constant blend of tactics to take down the Big Daddy player, while plasmids fly through the air and occasionally cling to surfaces, creating whirlwinds of flaming death. Capture the Little Sister is logically handled and her disturbing thrash gave us the willies.
It's Rapture
Yeah, it's an easy point to overlook, but it bears repeating. Rapture is a fascinating landscape to explore. While the early areas lack personality (more on that shortly), eventually the gold rises to the surface and we're reminded yet again about why BioShock grabbed us in the first place. The deeper and farther we get into BioShock 2's story, the darker and more complex it becomes. We're hoping it holds nothing back for a third game, frankly.
Against:
How is this hacking?
We know why 2K did it – the 'Pipe Dream'-style hacking minigame is now all but gone from the BioShock formula . In its place is a faster-paced, real-time 'hack' – essentially a timing minigame that requires you to press a button to stop an arrow over the green or blue parts of a dial.
Well, it's generally very easy to begin with – but it just becomes trivial as soon as you purchase a Tonic for slowing down the cursor even more. Really, some of us actually enjoy using our brains a little bit and appreciated the flavour the hacking minigame added. This new mode caters to mindless twitch gamers – which, honestly, is not what BioShock is or should be about.
The engine has dated
It's hard to come off the back of a game that, from a design standpoint was outstanding, but from a raw technical level left something to be desired. Unfortunately BioShock 2, for all the niceties associated with Art Deco design and 50s-era camp, comes across as dated. Whereas the original game impressed with its realistic handling of water physics, BioShock 2 arrives after two years of technological leaps within the shooter genre. It shows.
The counter-argument is, naturally, that the design ethic is strong enough to make up for any apparent raw visual shortcomings. However, what struck us as odd was that the novelty does sometimes wear thin. There were three separate moments in the earliest areas of the game where lighting was used to project a shadow of an enemy onto a wall – and that stopped being clever after the first time. It's almost like the bag of tricks is starting to run a bit dry and the shadow projection rehash is symptomatic of this.
Not as Quirky
Like the hacking minigame itself, BioShock 2 removes little touches like the carnival music that plays when accessing vending machines, as well as the Spanish arms-dealing weapons machines. Why? Who knows. Internal backlash? User opinion sampling? But the result is resoundingly clear; the novelty and quirkiness of these elements has left a gaping hole in BioShock 2's personality. It's simply not as quirky and memorable as a result. It's not too late for some of these elements to be reinserted, so our fingers are crossed.
