Bioshock 2: Positives
By Chris Cesarano
I love video games. Obviously. I mean, I built a website just so I could have a place to discuss them. Yet as I’ve grown older I’ve found that it isn’t always enough for the gameplay to be “fun”. This is a product you are spending sixty-bucks on. It had better be worth the money invested. There must be something provided that you aren’t going to get from the competition and will call you back again.
The original Bioshock had some decent gameplay provided by plasmids, munition types, research and hacking. However, where it truly excelled was the setting and story. This is where it was truly worth the money spent on it and continues to stand atop its brethren.
Naturally, due to being a success, a sequel was inevitable. It’s almost like the games industry wants to prove how much sophistication it lacks by forcing a work of art that several years to complete to have a production line sequel. Even worse is I feel like a minority in feeling this game never should have had a sequel. I still remember discussing with friends in 2008 the possibilities of a second entry in the franchise. I felt it should have none, and if it does the last place it should take place in is Rapture. So much of the charm and meaning would be gone if you returned. Yet so many others wanted to go back and see more of the city.
Now the game is out and the review scores are great. All that matters is the gameplay, evidently, and that is the one thing Bioshock 2 does well. See, while the respawning enemies were certainly enough to hurt the game, the actual combat is mechanically sound.
Left hand/trigger controls your plasmids, your special genetic combat abilities in the submerged Atlantis, while your right hand/trigger controls weaponry. No more switching between the two as in the first. You can merely blast away with one or the other at any time, or even fire them off simultaneously. This is especially great when you need to reload your gun but want to keep the heat on, or must recharge your EVE so you can use more plasmids. It takes a bit of time to become second nature, but once it does you become a Splicer fighting machine.
The weaponry has changed little from the first game, where the new Rivet Gun is a more powerful replacement of the pistol. The chemical thrower has been cast away to allow for a hacking dart which I’ll get to later. The Drill also replaces the wrench and allows for greater melee opportunities. One of the best strategies I found was to shock foes, charge them with the drill and then immediately switch over to the shotgun for a point blank blast in the face. Each weapon also has several types of ammunition, such as anti-personnel rounds or armor-piercing, to turn the typical first-person shooting experience into a more cerebral experience.
While a simple runner-and-gunner can get by well enough, the true thinker will have weapons pre-set to certain ammunition types. This way, when combat starts to get hairy, they’ll be able to quickly swap out to the most convenient weaponry. Hold off Big Daddies with armor-piercing rounds from the machine gun and rocket spears from the harpoon gun, then switch off to to solid slugs from the shotgun to knock back splicers in a single shot to the chest. Every tool has a use, it just requires the player to know when and how to use it.
Plasmids are similar. There isn’t a single worthless ability to throw at your enemies. Every plasmid has three levels of upgrades that can be combined at tier 3, which unfortunately comes late enough in the game you won’t have much chance to experiment with combinations. Send out insect swarms to irritate any number of foes in the room, lightning bolt your ideal target to stun him, then light him on fire while he’s paralyzed. If the pressure is getting laid on pretty thick send out the decoy, which at higher levels not only deals damage back but can also reroute it to the player.
The beauty of Bioshock has always been in how well you use your arsenal of weaponry and plasmids. It’s not intended to be played like Halo or Modern Warfare. The player is meant to constantly be switching between different weapons and powers in order to beat their opponent into submission. This is one thing Bioshock 2 manages to improve upon greatly.
The tonics are also largely improved, adding in a few new buffs while simplifying the tonic slots down. Instead of having three separate categories of tonics to equip you are given three rows to slot in any type of modifications you want. This allows players to further customize just what sort of warrior they wish to be. Some players may be more stealthy and stick to melee combat more while others may focus on research and buffing their hacked army of turrets. It’s all up to the player to decide.
Hacking itself is and is not an improvement. Players aren’t pulled out of combat and instead must stop a needle on a green or blue colored block. If you hit white you take harm. If you hit red you trigger the alarms. Green is a success and blue rewards the player with bonus items or results. It’s much more simple and trite but at the same time keeps you in combat and is less time consuming. It’s also pretty hectic when you’re trying to hack a turret in the middle of a fight.
The real improvement is that made to the research. It was a surprisingly enjoyable distraction to photograph Splicers and Big Daddies previously in order to gain additional rewards in the first game, and here it has been made better. Instead of snapping as many photographs during combat as possible you can now start a “video recording” at any time, then start throwing all you can at your foe. The more abilities and weapons used the better the score. This not only makes research a tad easier to do but also encourages players to try their entire arsenal.
In terms of the Splicers themselves, most of the changes have been cosmetic. Spider Splicers themselves are incredibly deformed and hardly resemble humans anymore. Most of the other characters have mutated faces that paint a horrifying picture of ADAM addiction. Aside from taking some new cover tactics for the Lead Head splicers, though, their tactics are largely the same. Pretty much every Splicer will charge you and come in close unless they have a gun in hand.
Brute Splicers have also been added into the mix, as well as a new type of Big Daddy called a Bouncer that focuses on explosive and mini-turrets. They merely spice up the variety of combat, however. There is one other enemy addition later on in the game, but I won’t give anything away. Just let it be known that foe is the biggest reason the respawning of foes becomes excruciatingly tiresome towards the end.
Perhaps one of the greater highlights, despite some of that frustrating respawning, is holding off foes while your Little Sister gathers ADAM. You don’t have to adopt Little Sisters at all, though it certainly helps since that will allow you to purchase the maximum amount of plasmids. Just as before, if you choose to rescue Little Sisters instead of harvesting them you’ll receive gifts that include large amounts of ADAM, so in the end it balances out.
Yet being able to set a series of traps just right without disturbing the Little Sister at all is one of the more satisfying experiences possible. If you don’t have enough traps to set then merely have the shotgun ready and wait around the corner for any jerks that think they’ve put one past you. There is no worry to the Little Sister dying or being taken away. It just stalls the ADAM gathering process until you can clear Splicers away from the Little Sister while more continue to come. It’s a very short aside from the main mission, but it pays off not only in ADAM but in fun as well.
That is, until later in the game when they start throwing the more monstrous foes at you and it becomes a much greater resource vacuum.
The Big Sister herself is an interesting, albeit underused citizen of Rapture. She only appears when you’ve cleared a level of Little Sisters, so if you want you can merely adopt and rescue/harvest all but one and then leave the map without having to face her. Of course, this is lame and you would be lame for doing it. The Big Sister is the closest to a real challenge you’ll have to face and makes the Big Daddies look like a push over. She is fast, always moving, can throw random shit in the environment your way and even pull Splicers to her so she can absorb their ADAM as health. She is brutal and vicious, and that makes for a totally awesome and lethal foe.
Yet there are times when you see her in the environment, typically outside in the ocean, simply being a Big Sister. She isn’t attacking anything, nor is she stalking anything. She is merely sitting and watching her beloved home. One moment she’ll be floating around, almost in a childish and adolescent manner, before darting away like a shark to its prey. Deep inside them is a graceful girl, yes, but they’ve grown into a lethal machine of destruction.
As stated, however, it would have been nice to have seen more of these Big Sisters outside of combat. As it is these small touches are not enough to make them feel like anything more than a powerful enemy type.
The atmosphere of Rapture is, for the most part, still alive. Of course it takes until around the third level to give you that old familiar feeling, but it’s there. While each map is a bit more linear than in the first game there are still several paths to explore and obtain rewards for. There are details scrawled onto every inch of the environment to allow players to feel as if the city had once been alive, only to have crumbled in on itself during its prime.
Now, those are all the positive things I can discuss without giving away what some may consider to be spoilers. I will not give away too much from here on out, but in truth the experience is best explored with as little knowledge as possible. So if you want a quick summary on the game’s overall quality, just know that the combat mechanics have been improved greatly and guarding the Little Sister is a great distraction most of the time. The average gamer will think the story is about as good as the first game. That’s because your average gamer didn’t like Star Trek back when it had substance and requires a constant series of flashing lights, actions and cleavage to be entertained. Yet any sophisticated gamer with an ounce of real maturity will see right away that this game is a more shallow pool to wade in. However, this doesn’t stop the end of the second act and conclusion of the game from being interesting. It is, for all intents and purposes, a good game. But there is a gap between good and great.
So there. You have your summary. Now go away before I get into what may be referred to as “spoilers” by some, though, as stated before, I won’t be going too in-depth.
So for the rest of you, as stated, Bioshock 2 lacks the depth and thorough planning that its forbearer had. That happens when you are limited to a two year development time. Once again, great job 2K. Maybe next you’ll do like Activision and insist any franchise that cannot get an annual sequel must be axed? That would be fantastic.
Yet there are some things with the story Bioshock 2 certainly does well. While I was mostly apathetic to every character in the game, I did have a sort of attachment to Eleanor by the end. I cannot explain why, but there’s something about her that grew on me. It was also interesting to see what influence you have on her based on your choices. See, this is the potential spoiler of the game. As you choose to rescue or harvest Little Sisters or kill or spare the NPC’s, you are influencing Eleanor.
Now, this is still a linear game so it has no effect on anything but the ending cinematic and some dialogue. It’s the whole self-referential “Would You Kindly” joke, where no matter what you don’t have any real choices in a video game. You will always be locked into whatever options the game developers deem to give you (see? There’s no stopping the layers of meanings you can grab from the first Bioshock).
Yet that doesn’t stop the execution from being surprisingly enjoyable. I had read in interviews that your choices would be building up to the end of the game, but I wasn’t aware Eleanor would be the conduit and outlet of those decisions. This is where the game’s conceptual focus on family pays off. Every choice you make as an individual will have an effect on your child. After all, they look up to you. Even when they become a teenager they are reacting to you. This is why children so often resemble their parents. Unfortunately, most don’t realize they carry over the negative attributes of their parents as well. If you do wrong, Eleanor does wrong. If you do right, Eleanor does right.
There are also endings that tread the middle-ground as well, so you don’t have to be a completely good or completely evil person. Despite my feelings toward the rest of the game, by time I hit the closing two chapters I found myself greatly impressed and pleased. It was an ending that made me feel happy (considering my first playthrough I was my lawful-good self). 2K Marin successfully managed to measure up to the original Bioshock in those last chapters, something I wasn’t expecting them to (in particular I speak of the “transformation”, similar to how you had to become a Big Daddy in the climax of the first title).
There was one moral decision as well that I liked in particular, though it frustrates me that the “Savior” achievement hinges on sparing the character. One of the non-player characters reaches a point where killing him may be considered a mercy. In fact, he sort-of-kind-of wants to die. It’s hard to explain without giving away the situation, but it left me wondering which would be better. To kill him or not. This was the sort of gray moral choice I love video games forcing me to make. When there really isn’t a “right” choice. Unfortunately, if you choose to kill the man, something that I felt was the right choice, you don’t get the “Savior” achievement. Humbug!
Fortunately, as long as you spare the two other characters and rescue all of the Little Sisters you can still get the good ending.
So to reiterate in conclusion, Bioshock 2 was not a bad game. If I were to sit back and evaluate it as its own product, I’d say it’s worth a look into the single-player campaign. As stated I will cover the multiplayer in another post. The story is good and the combat works well. However, having foes respawn inside of a room while you are still exploring is frustrating and hurts the entire experience. Just because the game is good also doesn’t mean that it should have been made. I would rather have seen 2K Marin execute their talents on a brand new IP.
In fact, I certainly do look forward to their next project. As long as it’s not a third Bioshock game.
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Continue on to the multiplayer impressions
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