BioShock 2 Review

It has become too easy to forget what BioShock is, and too tempting to discuss it purely in terms of the more high-minded ideas behind its narrative, not the practicalities of what happens when we press buttons on the gamepad. It is a game in which you will spend much of your time messily ramming a drill-arm into the face of a screaming, swearing mutant in a party dress. While it's lovely that the voiceovers have a literate backdrop, this is not a game in which you will actively engage in consideration of utilitarianism and objectivism. It's a first-person shooter, first and foremost.

BioShock 2 does this very well - significantly better than the first game did. Its fights were always a little stilted and small, while by comparison BS2 is chaotic and huge. Most obviously, more enemies attack at once, for longer, and there are more types of them, but why the combat feels so much better and beefier is more complicated than that. It's a much more tactically interesting game, rarely penning you into corridors from whose ends murderous Splicers charge. Instead, your progress through a level tends to involve inhabiting a sprawling zone filled with choke-points and wide-open arenas, in which enemies constantly and invisibly respawn, for a good half hour or hour. BioShock 1 was about plodding forward motion, but this is about turning large spaces into sustained battlegrounds. Fortunately, it gives you the toolbox you need to deal with it.

If dual-wielding a weapon and a plasmid sounded gimmicky, rest assured it's necessary to manage the onslaught. It's rare that you'll suffer anything as straightforward as a couple of guys with guns popping up from behind a crate. At the very least, you'll be henpecked by two or three Splicers throwing bullets or bombs from different directions. At the most you'll be fighting one of the lightning-fast Big Sisters even as a hulking Brute Splicer and a couple of his standard-size mates emerge from an adjacent corridor, and then a hitherto placid Big Daddy strays into your line of fire and ohgodohgodohgodohgod.... It can be brutal at times. If you're one of those who loathed the punishment-free respawns of the Vita Chambers in the first game, rest assured they now feel essential to survival, rather than just a cop-out to avoid loading screens. Though you can turn them off if you reckon you're Big Dave Hardcore.

As the game goes on, and a carefully-selected few of your weapons and plasmids are upgraded to the nines, those odds tip fascinatingly in your favour. There'll be moments when half the room's exploding in ice and fire, the other half's covered in a swarm of plasmid-summoned wasps and angry robots, a hypnotised Brute Splicer is laying skull-crushing waste to his mates and you're just coolly stood in the middle of all this screaming and blood. Supreme master of all you survey, far closer to the superman Rapture's erstwhile overlord Andrew Ryan dreamed of than the first game's pullover-clad protagonist ever was. You'll always be left with the thrilling knowledge that there are major upgrade paths you're yet to try, too.

To some extent, this stretches into the multiplayer, which is a far cry from the token, market-necessity sundry many feared it would be. Sure, it's a lot lighter than the single-player, as there's no purpose beyond points, but the plasmid powers fit beautifully and naturally into online combat, and the pre-anarchy Rapture environments display a variety and colourfulness the main game frankly lacks. The little variances - randomly-spawning, uber-powerful Big Daddy suits, the Capture The Sister mode wherein anyone carrying the titular tween can only use Plasmid attacks - introduce thoroughly BioShockian curveballs that keep this from being Just Another Multiplayer Shooter. The music, the Andrew Ryan barks, the art deco look... It's online warfare in a place, not just an arena. That said, it's a shame the various Plasmids and Gene Tonics are tied to a persistent rank system. Sure, it's a reason to keep playing, but keeping the fun stuff at arm's length holds it back from being the utter carnage it should be. Once you have unlocked a few key toys, though, the multiplayer genuinely builds upon what you've learned in the single-player - those deadly combinations that make its battlefields so spectacular.

It's just as well the combat is so much manic fun, as in less adrenal respects BioShock 2 isn't as interesting as BS1. It may never plunge into bewildering incoherence and a Looney Toons endboss, but it lacks memorable characters and, most of all, memorable motives. Rapture's new ruler Sophia Lamb holds the philosophy, borrowed from either JS Mill or Mr Spock, that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. To that end she believes, you (a prototype, rogue Big Daddy) and her daughter Eleanor (your former Little Sister) should be physically and psychologically sacrificed if it helps unite Rapture's war-torn society. If only she ever put it so succinctly herself.

The game has a tendency to tediously over-state itself in one minute then disjointedly babble out key motives in another. It's easy enough to pick out the key facts, but it's difficult to care. When Lamb finally reveals the bad-science means by which she intends to achieve her pseudo-altruistic ends, it's as openly silly and poorly-explained as the big blue guy at the end of BioShock 1 - the difference being it's something you're mercifully only told rather than shown.
It's a problem of overcomplicating Rapture's eco-system, of trying to turn the Little Sister/Big Daddy dynamic into more than it is, but moreover the story and characters aren't anywhere near as memorable as, say, Andrew Ryan or Sander Cohen. The Big Sisters are simply empty ciphers of pure aggression, while Lamb just drones out endless variations upon the same threats. There are three encounters with major NPCs in which you make a very basic choice as to their fate, but they don't resonate enough to feel like more than 'do I shoot this silent, motionless person in the face or not?' Well, with one impressively freakish and much more morally-grey freakish exception that I don't wish to spoil.

At least the save/kill Little Sister mechanic is hung around more than knee-jerk morality now. If you choose not to immediately slay any you find for an instant hit of the precious upgrade-juice ADAM, you can temporarily adopt her and have her search for ADAM-infused corpses. Set her down on one and you'll be plunged into a desperate last stand, an exhausting swarm of Splicers drawn to the scent of that tasty red goo she's gathering. It's hard work, but you need that ADAM - so the temptation to snap the squeaking tot's neck and avoid the problem altogether can't help but tickle at even the most benevolent brain. Obviously, there will be consequences.
The unshakeable feeling, though, is that the game is a lot less ambitious than the first. It is, largely speaking, the same experience repeated, with tweaks and improvements - being out so soon after Mass Effect 2, a sequel which so determinedly upgrades the experience, does BioShock 2 few favours. It doesn't come up with a new image anywhere near as iconic as the Big Daddy, nor does it seem to try, while the environments may be packed with often striking incidental detail (collecting speargun ammo from corpses pinned to walls, for instance) but are short on bigger-picture diversity. The underwater sections are barely worth mentioning - there are only about four, and they're never more than pace-breakers, devoid of exploration or interaction. Very late on, BioShock 2 finally introduces a major new idea/setpiece (too spoilerrific to describe) that is absolutely worth seeing - it's just a shame it takes so long to be so bold.