After the critical and commercial success of BioShock, the creation of a sequel was handed by 2K Games from Irrational Games (temporarily called 2K Boston) to 2K Marin, a newly created subdivision that worked on the BioShock PS3 port. To me, there’s a sense of disinterest in this, the handing of a valued franchise to a competent set of hands simply to cash in. The fact that as of this writing BioShock’s spiritual father Ken Levine hasn’t even played BioShock 2 really says it all, and makes one wonder (if he won’t bother, why should I?) Well, should you?
BioShock 2 is set in 1968, eight years after the events of BioShock. The player character this time around is a Big Daddy (referred to as (Delta)) and the overall goal of the game is to find the Little Sister you were paired up with. The two were separated 10 years earlier by the game’s main antagonist, Sofia Lamb, and Delta has to find his way through the ruined city of Rapture with the help of several of its residents, uncovering the events of the preceding 10 years along the way including the events of BioShock 1.
Graphics, Atmosphere, Sound, Technical
BioShock 2 uses the same engine as BioShock, a modified version of Unreal Engine 2.5 and is showing its age when it comes to the pure technical end of matters. Some surprising graphical oddities drag it down further, as at multiple points in the game I noted really low-quality textures used for walls and floors, or small-scale props used to represent enormous, far-off buildings which makes your view of Rapture in its entirety a lot less impressive.
BioShock 2 also inherits BioShock’s grand art design, and in the spirit of wisdom decided simply not to mess with it. The sleek, lithe Big Sister is the only addition that feels artistically out of place, as the rest of the game features locations and enemies that might as well be from BioShock 1, and indeed it seems to reuse a lot of art assets.
Once again supported by a great soundtrack excellent in both original tunes and in licensed golden oldies and absolutely rock-solid voice acting, it should come as no surprise that the biggest draw of this game is its incredible atmosphere. Rapture still looks amazing from an aesthetic viewpoint, and while the (people taunt you as you walk around) thing is weakened by the game’s writing it still works, and BioShock 2 pulls no punches drawing you into its atmosphere.
Perhaps because it is so similar to BioShock 1 it does drive home one problem shared by both games: the gameplay doesn’t really fit the atmosphere that well. Atmospherically, Rapture is ideally suited for a survival horror, or adventure/RPG type game. System Shock 2, the spiritual predecessor to both games, balanced this well by not throwing too much action at you, but in both BioShock games you are drowning in shooting action, and it ruins quite a bit of the experience.
BioShock 2 is surprisingly messy for such a big title. The game is fairly buggy, including hard crashes and graphics bugs. One problem I had myself and read of others having is the Big Sister fight music looping an entire level, which I hope to Frith is a bug because if it is by design then the sound designer has to be incompetent, as this loud, intrusive theme gets very annoying very fast.
On top of that, BioShock 2 runs with layers of DRM. When I was running it, I had to run the game, Steam (not obligatory, but I bought it through Steam), its native DRM, and Games for Windows Live. This feels unnecessary, and it is no wonder this stack of software occasionally hits a snag or conflict and decides to just quit.
Gameplay
At its core, BioShock 2 plays the same as its predecessor. It is a fairly simple FPS with some RPG elements thrown in, and they have been neither expanded nor cut back. What BioShock 2 did do was address some minor annoyances to make the gameplay experience better overall: your gun and plasmid are now active at the same time, considerably expanding your options in using them. The guns are different but consist of more or less the same basic sets, while the plasmids are mostly the same but with more upgrade capabilities, leading to new special charged plasmid attacks. A few new enemies have been added, such as the large brute splicer and dangerous Big Sister, which together with what seems to be a slightly improved enemy AI makes up for some of the challenge lost to you being a powerful Big Daddy. The last significant upgrade is the replacing of the old pipefitting minigame for hacking to a faster timing-based minigame, which doesn’t freeze the game when it’s in use like its predecessor bizarrely did. An odd gameplay tweak is the removal of the pausing weapon/plasmid selection screen, taking away the opportunity to calmly switch tactics mid-battle, harming tactical thinking in favour of hectic action.
BioShock 2 has a number of underwater sequences which, to be honest, are just devoid of gameplay, and thus completely pointless. There’s a similar sequence later on in the game that is longer and similarly devoid of gameplay. While all these sequences serve some aesthetic or narrative purpose, they don’t really work. It’s odd, because the game’s atmosphere will have you crying for something different than the rote shooting gameplay offered, yet the only alternative the game has is to not have any gameplay at all. Opportunity missed, by a wide margin.
Another big new thing was the Big Sister, widely incorporated in the game’s expansive PR. And, well…she’s a failure, pure and simple. Her design barely works, as she’s essentially a skinny, lithe Big Daddy, which negates much of the menace of the original Big Daddy’s excellent design. But while that’s not a complete wash, the way the character is used is. The Big Sister is introduced way too early, but at least she’s a distant threat, interfering with your progress but not facing you directly. It seems to be the perfect set-up for a long-term, menacing nemesis that you slowly learn to hate. And then BioShock 2 ruins that aspect by not just having you fight her early, but by having you fight a Big Sister every level, each time a short while after you harvested/saved the last Little Sister.
This repetitive level design is probably the game’s biggest flaw, and the Big Sister’s part in it serves to completely ruin the last vestiges of decent character design you could attribute to her. Almost every level will provide three Little Sisters you can adopt by killing her Big Daddy. Once saved, the Little Sister can harvest two corpses that you’re pointed to by your map and the Little Sister. While she’s harvesting you have to protect her from a horde of splicers (and later Big Daddies). Rinse and repeat three times, and the Big Sister will appear. Even though BioShock 2’s diversity of weapons, traps and plasmids allows some variations of gameplay here, you’re essentially grinding out the same activities over and over again, and it gets old pretty fast.
You can skip saving the Little Sisters, or harvest or save them immediately after adopting them. You’ll be short of Adam if you do, but I wouldn’t think by very much. Like its predecessor, BioShock 2 is ridiculously easy, and even a non-FPS player like myself just breezed through it on normal. The game pretty much drowns you in Adam, as not only do you double up on it if you have the Little Sister harvest, dead Big Sisters and Adam Slugs from the underwater sequences provide even more. As in the first game, the gameplay consequences of saving or harvesting Little Sisters are nearly non-existent as you’ll get Adam bonuses for saving them anyway. Hypnotize plasmids just top it off, as on normal difficulty an Alpha Big Daddy needs nothing but you recharging his hypnotized state every now and again to deal with the entire level for you.
Again like its predecessor, BioShock 2 seems to be afraid to let you fail, not just in its low difficulty and deluge of Adam, but in the presence of the Vita-Chambers and a constantly present quest arrow. I can’t imagine anyone would ever need either and fortunately you can turn both off, but the combination of multiple fail-safes is borderline ridiculous. Also like its predecessor, BioShock 2 tries to fool you into believing that you’re being challenged even when you’re not. It might be effective for some people, but it was painfully transparent in both games to me, and it’s hard to get spooked when you know no fight will challenge you, just like it’s hard to feel the rush of a (the level is collapsing!) sequence when you immediately figure out the level isn’t actually collapsing with a timer, but rather waiting for you to walk through it so it can trigger a cutscene.
Story
BioShock 2’s story is a mess, plain and simple. The basic premise, in which you play a Big Daddy looking for his Little Sister both because you need her to survive and because of your personal relationship with her is solid enough and certainly more personable than BioShock’s story. In narrative structure, both plots are fairly similar, with you moving along Rapture in search of your final goal, aided by some of its inhabitants but mostly fighting off hordes while being taunted by the big bad. It even does a similar thing in taking control from you to advance the plot, which while covered up well in the game’s story is weak as a narrative tool.
In the main plot, everything that happened since BioShock sounds somewhat interesting, but it happened without you there, as if the game is taunting you with all these big events you could not be part of. Forgiving it that, 2K Marin seems to have essentially looked at Andrew Ryan from the first and decided to make a bizarro version in Sophia Lamb, whose soft personality and communist ideals are the exact opposite of Andrew Ryan. And the exactness of that opposition the mirror image it is just hammers home how derivative she is, and how badly in need of inspiration or originality the plot is.
What doesn’t help the cause is some of the worst writing I have seen in a videogame since Fallout 3. Don’t get me wrong, they get the tone right, bombastic statements delivered through radio, so it all sounds impressive. But if you stop for even one second and actually listen, it comes apart at the seams. A good example is this bit of radio taunting, from near the end, as Sophia Lamb speaks to you:
Your body begins to tear itself apart; the compulsion to find Eleanor will drive you to madness or coma. You have no claim on her — your design was amongst Rapture’s greatest sins — and yet you persist. Why?
Why is she talking about my body tearing itself apart when there is no gameplay equivalent of this? What does my design being amongst Rapture’s greatest flaws have to do with negating my claim on Eleanor? And worst of all why is she asking me why I’m persisting after just telling me the need to find her is driving me insane? BioShock 2 is full of little nonsensical speeches like these, and the overall philosophical consistency over all the rants is even worse. In the end, this makes the whole game feel as if the writing is just a bunch of strung together phrases that sound cool or awe-inspiring or epic, without due consideration to consistent writing.
BioShock was widely praised for its philosophical undertones. I thought this point was a bit overdrawn, as BioShock’s hammy delivery of Ayn Rand’s already unimpressive philosophical views was hardly enlightening, but even this low plateau BioShock 2 does not even approach. In fact, it ruins quite a bit of the philosophical tone of BioShock in its approach. One of the points of BioShock was about the inevitability of the fall of Andrew Ryan’s city. A grand experiment, but you get the sense its doom was inevitable, as the underlying world-view simply did not match reality. Sophia Lamb, however, gives the failure agency, it turns it into the problem being a person, changes it into two competing world-views fighting and ruining each other through competition. That pretty much negates the earlier point made of inherent fallacies, making Sophia Lamb and her philosophy not just derivative, but detrimental to the game’s setting.
The endings end up just adding insult to injury. It learned from its predecessor’s mistakes by expanding the (Hitler or Mother Theresa) into four endings; bad, somewhat bad, sad, and good. The different ending configurations are reached by your choices on saving the Little Sisters, as well as three key NPCs you can either leave alive or kill during your travels. Structurally, this is a massive step forward from BioShock, but considering my preceding notes on the writing, it won’t surprise you to hear the endings are badly delivered and overly dramatic pieces of tripe, built on two nonsensical deus ex machinas that shortly precede the final conclusion.
Multiplayer
I expected multiplayer to be a quickly patched on, uninteresting game mode, but left pleasantly surprised. In multiplayer, you play a splicer character, playing to gain Adam that sequentially unlocks new weapons and plasmids, which you can configure into simplified load-outs to play matches with. Its appropriately simplified for more immediate, rushed single-player gameplay, but still complex enough to allow different tactics in the matches.
There are seven different game modes, which are essentially the standard FPS multiplayer modes like free-for-all, arena modes or capture the flag, but with specific twists to make it fit Rapture. Capture the flag, for example, becomes Capture the Sister, in which teams take turns defending a Little Sister, while the other team has to try to capture her and bring her to the Vent so she can escape. Adam Grab (and Team Adam Grab) are more unique modes in which you must pick up and hold the Little Sister. You can’t attack with a weapon while you have her, and dying will obviously make you drop her. The one to hold her longest (or in Team mode, the first team to 3 minutes) wins. I enjoyed this and the Capture the Sister modes quite a lot.
However, there are quite a few problems. Lag seems to be a very wide-spread problem in multiplayer, but perhaps more annoying on the technical side is that multiplayer runs through Games for Windows Live – an unperfected piece of software at best.
It has a few design flaws as well, the most significant being the issue of balance. Perhaps due to lack of players, the game groups together low and high ranked players, and considering the power of the weapons you unlock in higher ranks, this leaves the low ranked players with little chance for victory, and thus little chance to gain Adam to rank up. Obviously, this can quickly turn into a frustrating experience. Another big problem is the Big Daddy costume; while it is fun that it appears at random, it is often the case that the first team to pick it up wins by default. Moreover, both picking up and killing the Big Daddy give hefty Adam bonuses, even though both events are somewhat random rather than proof of gameplay skill.
Overall, though, the multiplayer is solid if unspectacular. It’s a full, healthy addition to the game that potentially adds quite a few gaming hours, so I have little to complain of here.
Conclusion
All throughout my time playing this game, I couldn’t help but feel the game was shouting (I’m unnecessary!) at me. Contrary to what game publishers would like to think, not every successful property warrants a sequel, and while there might have been some potential in BioShock for a sequel or spin-off, the cop-out of handing it to another division to just bang out a cash-in title shows, painfully so. It’s hard to play this game without being aware that it’s just cashing in, from the feel of it being just a level pack, to the derivative story, to the somewhat half-assed ideas added by the new studio.
If you absolutely adored BioShock and couldn’t wait for more, I could imagine the very similar BioShock 2 could fill the need, though it’ll do it somewhat deceptively as it’s really filling the emptiness with well more emptiness, not adding but at points even detracting. To me, BioShock already disappointed after its hype, and BioShock 2 just adds insult to injury. Yes, the gameplay tweaks improve the shooting action, and it is unquestionably a better shooter than its predecessor. But the game suffers under having no evolution in the RPG elements, repetitive level design hurting the fun, and a terrible story dragging along throughout. At only 12 hours long, I’d have a hard time advising people to buy what is essentially a competent but at points heavily flawed map pack with a multiplayer patch.
