The year is 1958. The underwater utopia, Rapture, does not yet know chaos. In one dark hallway, a ghoulish little girl with a syringe is threatened by mutated thugs, addicts to the genetic substance ADAM notorious in the city. Defenseless, she cries out… and you come running. The drill on your right arm fires up like a monster truck engine. You are a Big Daddy, her protector. She is a Little Sister, one of many once-human girls that harvest ADAM from corpses. Her name is Eleanor. The two of you are inseparable… for a time.
Flash forward to 1970, where you mysteriously awaken in one of Rapture’s Vita-Chambers – a device that reconstructs and revives the user from genetic material. Your last memory is your death over a decade ago at the command of a woman, but your bond with Eleanor remains, and you can hear her calling out for you.
Rev up your drill. You’re going to need it to save her.
Bioshock 2 has been one of the most anticipated titles of 2010 since it was announced, and for good reason. Whereas in the first game the player was a flimsy human with a pipe wrench, the second game starts you off as a new character: Subject Delta, the first Big Daddy to be ‘pair-bonded’ with a Little Sister. This bond links you to Eleanor, who is crying out to you for rescue.
Rapture Reborn: Delta awakens in Rapture eight years after the events of the first Bioshock in a different, more historical area of the city. As a result, the game delves much further into Rapture’s history both before and after the first game. After the end of the first game, Andrew Ryan is no longer in control of the city, and his political rival, Dr. Grace Lamb, has grabbed the reins. Of course, like any good doctor/politician, the first thing she does upon gaining power is to start a cult called ‘The Family’.
Whereas Ryan believed in the strength of the individual, Lamb believes in the power of the collective, and the denizens of Rapture have been absorbed into her cause. Their plan is to imbue Eleanor with the memories and minds of Rapture’s elite in order to make ‘the first collective utopian.’ The process will essentially kill Eleanor, and because of your bond, it’ll kill you too. The point is, it’ll kill Eleanor, and Delta will tear Rapture apart to save her.
New and Improved: All of the differences between Bioshock 2 and its predecessor are positive ones. As a Big Daddy, you’re essentially a tank with legs. At all times, you have a weapon in your right hand such as the drill or the rivet gun and a Plasmid in the left like Electro Bolt or Winter Blast. New Plasmids and Gene Tonics are available, giving you plenty of firepower combinations. You can now make melee attacks with any weapon in the game as well, and all the weapons and Plasmids can be upgraded, making Delta even more of an unstoppable juggernaut.
Despite the fact that Delta is essentially 50 percent weapon of mass destruction and 50 percent atomic bomb shelter, the enemies are all carrying a bit more firepower, which keeps the game difficult. New enemies such as the hulking Brute Splicer, stronger and faster Big Daddies, and the acrobatic and fearsome Big Sisters give you challenges worth anticipating. In addition, hacking security systems is now done in real-time, so you have to have more caution when dealing with Splicers and sentries simultaneously.
Daddy’s Home: Playing as Delta makes such a huge difference to the way you approach Splicers: you can confidently assault a dystopian anarchist city full of superpower junkies, especially since you’re not fighting for your life with a lame wrench. Honestly, it’s hard to be terrified of Splicers when you’re a walking armory. You might as well be yelling I AM A NUCLEAR SUBMARINE THAT WALKS LIKE A MAN. And as strange as this may sound, nothing is more satisfying than using a drill the size of Texas to cut through Rapture’s crazed citizens.
The ADAM-harvesting Little Sisters return as well, and you still have to go through a Big Daddy every time you want one. However, since you’re a Big Daddy as well, you can then adopt the Little Sister as your own and take her to gather ADAM for you from corpses laying about Rapture. At any point in the gather, you can either harvest her or take her to an escape vent and rescue her. As in the first game, this impacts how much ADAM you receive and whether you’ll get the good or evil ending. The endings are much more profound than in the first one, no matter which path you take.
The game also has online multiplayer, with a variety of game modes to let players see who can be the most lethal citizen of Rapture. Stick 8 people in a room with Plasmids and hide some Big Daddy armors for them to suit up in, and it’s sure to be a blast.
Fair Warning: While the graphics and sound quality are still as fantastic as the first game, and the overall gameplay is incredibly fun, there are still a few flaws. Once you move to a new area you can’t go back to pick up things you may have missed, and it’s pretty easy to pass by a weapon upgrade station you can’t access and forget about it and move on once you can unlock it. An average run through the game will take between ten and twenty hours, and it’s definitely worth at least two full plays, but if you want to up the difficulty and stretch the game out, turn off the Vita-Chambers in the Options menu.
The one thing that really detracted from the game is that there are some bugs in it. In the average course of the game you shouldn’t run into more than one or two minor ones, but if you play it enough, you’ll find them. The worst one I found was when I froze a boss, and the body just disappeared. The problem is that I needed to grab a key from the corpse, and without it I was locked in permanently and had to reset to my last save. The lesson here is to save frequently, or you might be stuck in the land of No Bueno.
Overall scoring: A compelling storyline and gorgeous production values make Bioshock 2 excellent even if you’re only watching someone else play, and with the controller in your own hands it is a true marvel. It has its flaws, like every game does, but the downsides are eclipsed by the sheer enjoyment offered by it, and when a game overpowers its weaknesses, it’s a sign of greatness. I give it a 9.5 out of 10.
Bioshock 2 was produced by 2K Marin and Irrational Games and released Feb. 9 for the Playstation 3, Xbox 360, and PC with a standard edition for $60, a collector’s edition for $100, and a ‘Rapture Edition’ available overseas. Along with the game, the collector’s edition comes with an art book, posters, the game’s soundtrack on CD, and the original Bioshock soundtrack on vinyl, while the Rapture Edition comes with a different art book.
