Bioshock 2 Review

The original Bioshock was an astonishing game, filled with memorable characters and encounters. The underwater city of Rapture stands as one of the most unique and interesting environments ever created for a game. There aren’t a whole lot of movies that take you to more interesting places. The sequel’s primary objective seems to have been to just put the player back in that world, which sounds like it should have been enough.

Bioshock 2 First Impressions

At this point it goes without saying that Bioshock stands as a landmark in games. Few games before or since have created such fully realized environments and engrossing stories. My first taste of the game was the roughly half-hour demo put out around the release of the game. By the time you’ve made your way to the elevator, lifting you away from a flooding lobby with Atlas begging you to help save his family, the game has you hooked. Not even the explosive opening of Mass Effect 2 matches its standard.

An hour or two into Bioshock 2, I’m interested, but if it weren’t for the residual momentum left over from the first game I’m not sure how hooked I’d be. A few people around the internet have compared Bioshock 2 to one of the expansion packs that Gearbox did for Half-life. So far, this seems pretty accurate. Entertaining, it fleshes out the edges of the original — but it never really feels ‘necessary’ enough to grab you fully.

The one thing that has really struck me about Bioshock 2 is the sense of vulnerability that it gives you. When it was first announced that the sequel would have you playing as one of the iconic ‘Big Daddies,’ it seemed like the developers were more or less enabling ‘god-mode’ by default. This turns out not to be the case. You feel like a target, with larger crowds of splicers descending on you than I ever saw in the original, even this early in the game. Walking along the bottom of the ocean, you pass by another Big Daddy fighting splicers on the other side of a window, and it just feels sad.

We’ll see where the single player game goes from here. I still have some hope that it will pick up. But before I turned the game off for the night, I decided to try out the new multiplayer. I was firmly in the camp the greeted the news of this addition with a resounding ‘huh?’ But after just a couple of matches, this seems like the coolest part of the game. In all honestly, I’m starting to think that a better model for Bioshock 2 would have been to just do the multiplayer.

The apartment the game lets you explore between matches, set in a pre-collapse Rapture, gives the multiplayer an intriguing framework. Radio messages cue in a little sense of life going on in the city as things really start to fall apart outside. I’ll be interested to see how good a job the game does of keeping this sense of a multiplayer story going. The actual matches are fun, with players throwing plasmids around in interesting combinations. Right now it feels like it could have stood to be a bit slower paced, but that could just be that I’m a bit rusty.

Going into Bioshock 2, the last thing I ever imagined I’d be thinking was that I wish they hadn’t bothered with the single player, and just focused in on what really matters: the multiplayer experience. Welcome to Rapture, 1959.