The best way I like to describe Bioshock 2 is by saying its like going on a vacation to the same place that you’ve been to a year before, but then realizing that you’ve already done everything there is to do there the first time you went. It’s still fun because of the same reasons why the first vacation was fun, but the excitement of being somewhere you’ve never been before has worn off. I’ll hopefully explain this a little better throughout the review.
Bioshock 2’s story picks up 8 years after the events of the first game. Players take control of a prototype Big Daddy known to most as Subject Delta. Ten years ago, Delta was forced to kill himself by Rapture’s resident shrink, Sofia Lamb, who has now taken over control of Rapture now that Andrew Ryan and Frank Fontaine are both dead after the events of the Bioshock. Delta awakens from a Vita Chamber at the start of the game for unknown reasons and is pushed forward through Rapture due to his telepathic link to the little sister he has been bonded to, Sofia Lamb’s daughter, Eleanor. As the game goes on, the history of Delta, Eleanor, and Sofia’s rise to power are all explained through the discovery of audio diaries, just like in the first Bioshock.
Bioshock 2’s biggest claim to fame is in its improvements in the gameplay department. Players can now dual wield guns and plasmids at the same time, the upgrades for your plasmids have much more noticeable benefits, and of course, you get to wield a badass drill that can be upgraded with a charging attack later on that just oozes with satisfaction.
These are all great improvements and make Bioshock 2’s actual combat even more fun to play than the original. Not having to switch between weapon and plasmid every couple of seconds makes the game less cumbersome and makes you more likely to use a nice balance of the two, the upgrades to the plasmids are all really cool and make less powerful plasmids like Cyclone Trap and Telekinesis a lot more fun to use, while the bread and butter plasmids like Winter Blast, Electro Bolt, and Incinerate turn you into a walking weapon of death.
The problem with Bioshock 2 is that outside of the aforementioned improvements to gameplay, every other aspect about the game feels kind of “been there, done that, only it was better the first time.” Bioshock 2’s story lacks the punch of the first game, with characters that aren’t nearly as interesting or as delightfully insane. Sofia Lamb is definitely no Andrew Ryan and Sinclair is no Atlas.
Rapture itself, too, feels a little too familiar and doesn’t have the same level of design that made the world come alive in the first game. This is one of the reasons why I was really pessimistic about a sequel to Bioshock, because we already visited nearly all of the locations that you would expect to see in an underwater city. The original Bioshock had this atmosphere of a city that used to be thriving and then went to all hell, and you got that feeling by seeing shopping malls with actual stores and merchandise with dead bodies strewn across the floor, a gigantic garden that powers Rapture’s oxygen supply, a medical facility, a fishery, etc. In Bioshock 2, the most memorable place you visit is an amusement park.
Bioshock 2 also has a multiplayer mode, which I won’t go too much into since I honestly didn’t play it for more than two hours, but it really doesn’t deserve that much time devoted to it anyway. It’s decent, and it probably will serve as a nice diversion, but it’s nothing that will make you put away the Halo or Modern Warfare 2 discs.
Overall, Bioshock 2 is about as good of a sequel as you could hope for. It had humongous shoes to fill, and for the most part, it managed to be only about a size and a half short of a perfect fit.
