Rapture: the underwater city built as one man’s dream of utopia, quickly buried under a sea of hypocrisy, opportunism, duelling philosophies and bad decisions. In the original Bioshock, we saw how it failed. In Bioshock 2, we return a decade later to see what happens to the pieces left behind on the ocean floor.
There’s only one way to get power in Rapture – to take it by force.
The Bioshock series are an odd mix of relatively straight-forward shooting and philosophical backstory – picking through the ruins to learn their story, while constantly fighting against the city’s psychopathic, drug-addled denizens.
At the heart of this fight is Adam, a super-power granting chemical harvested from the city’s dead by Little Sisters; brainwashed kids, guarded by their protectors – diving suit clad behemoths called Big Daddies. Whether you help or harvest the Little Sisters determines how much of the precious Adam you get to spend on new abilities like throwing lightning bolts or growing bees in your arm, along of course with how much of a bastard you are for killing kids. In practical terms, there’s enough of the stuff around that you’re more or less choosing your morality rather than worrying about practicality, although there are a few other decisions that affect how the main story plays out.
P.S. Kilroy was here
As fun as the action is, the city is Bioshock 2′s highlight. True, in style it’s more or less the same as the first game’s version, and the old technology does occasionally grate, but the sheer visual style is worth the trip. Even in ruins, Rapture is a glorious place, dripping with art deco architecture, backed with light jazz music, and every location telling its own stories via background details and audio logs of better days. An early highlight is Journey To The Surface, a theme park ride designed to convince Rapture’s children that the Atlantic ocean above them is their only protection from persecution, corruption, and the parasites out to steal the sweat from their very brow. Later, you explore the seedy side of town, down the alleys where those without enough money to pay for the full utopian treatment were forced into living, and beyond, across the sea floor and down into halls filled with doubletalk and dusty brainwashing equipment. Visually speaking, it’s some of the best design around.
Next to all this attention to detail, spending most of the game smacking zombies with a giant drill can feel a little discordant. The basic combat is fun, with lots of options and different ways to take on the hordes, but quickly starts feeling routine. Chances are that you’ll find your weapons of choice relatively early on, and the game rarely offers much of a reason to chop and change except for running out of ammo. Interestingly, it doesn’t particularly matter how good you are at combat because you can’t die – you just respawn a few steps away. Some enemies recharge their health over time, but you can still whittle them down the hard way if necessary.
Causing trouble? Big Sister will want a Word.
However you choose to fight, you’ll spend a lot of time using your drill-arm – there’s even the option to power it up at the expense of using any other weapons – and it’s easily the most satisfying. Charging attacks deliver a tremendous thump to anything you point at, with ice and lightning blasts holding even the toughest enemies at bay while you punch through their armour to the soft, squishy center.
Of course, you can’t use the same industrial power to get through locked doors, padlocks, glass, or the occasional plaster wall that gets in your way, because this is an FPS and That’s Not How They Roll. Annoyingly.
Unlike the first game, Bioshock 2 also features multiplayer – assorted modes, including team based combat – complete with character progression and a wide choice of weapons and not-spells to pelt around with. It’s a nice addition, although really, Bioshock still primarily feels like a singleplayer experience. The plot of this one isn’t as good as the first game’s, mostly because it doesn’t have the luxury of dealing with the fall of the city and its ideals in the same way, and the new villain is frankly irritating, but it makes up for it in some of the smaller arcs, and in particular, your Big Daddy’s growing (and surprisingly touching) relationship with Eleanor, the now grown-up Little Sister you spend the game fighting to be reunited with and protect from her sinister mother.
If you’re simply interested in the shooting, or after a deeply cerebral experience, you can do better elsewhere. The fun of Bioshock is in the mesh of world design, backstory, and (admittedly, usually pretty simple) philosophy that stands out a mile over the usual enemy bases and wartorn streets that standard FPS games love to retread. It may be a bit too close to the first game, but it’s a world worth revisiting. For Bioshock 3 however, we’ll be wanting somewhere brand new, or one hell of a fresh spin on this decaying underwater nightmare.
