Okay Geek Farm
Xbox 360 & PC Review: Bioshock 2
Okay Geek Team
Story
In your return to the city deep within the Atlantic, you find yourself as a Big Daddy – the first one to be precise, in a quest to find and save the Little Sister you were once genetically bonded with nearly a decade ago.A new villain named Sofia Lamb, who is a Psychologist turned Cult leader, has in Ryan’s absence been able to turn the city’s near collapse into an example to recruit blind followers in believing the once luxurious city can become a paradasaic Utopia, filled with understanding and enlightenment. And as great of an idea as it may sound, it’s execution brinks on sheer madness and therefore isn’t all that different than the idealisms forced upon by Andrew Ryan himself.
As the first Big Daddy you simply are trying to find your long lost Little Sister, Eleanor, who just happens to be the daughter of Sofia Lamb – yeah, that relationship is a bit messy and is heavy within the plot so I won’t spoil it for you. Traversing the city to get to Eleanor is your main task, but to get there you’ll require the help of a couple of Rapture’s once famous personalities, like Dr. Tanenbaum who returns from the first game, but also Gil Alexander, a Big Daddy researcher, Stanley Poole, a crooked journalist, and most importantly, Augustus Sinclaire, who will play the role of “Atlas” in this adventure, holding your hand and guiding you every step of the way.
Gameplay
Using your vast array of armory which vary from rivet guns to intimidating grenade launchers, Oh, and lest we not forget the wide assortment of Plasmids – “Psss… use the Ice Blast on the Big Daddy’s in the later stages” – make sure that your journey will be a lot more fun this time around as the gameplay has improved greatly since the original. You could say some of the mystery and magic that once made Rapture such a spectacle was traded in for a much deeper first person shooter experience. It’s an interchange that seems unbalanced to me since it was the story that really got me hooked in the first place.
As this hulking mass of a tin man you’ll encounter the usual splicers and big daddy’s; but this time around you’ll also run in into the new bullies in town, the Big Sisters. And, yes, I said sisters – plural. Against what dev’s said earlier while in development, a single Big Sister is not the focal point of the game, but rather a whole army of them which you’ll confront while on your tour of the city. Agile and chalk full of speed, these Sisters are on a whole different playing field than the Daddy’s you’ve become acquainted to, so make sure to pack enough heat because it may take you a couple trips to the vita chambers to finish them off.
For those unfamiliar to the Bioshock world, there are no gameovers in the game. You are supplied with a health bar with no regenerative properties seen in most First Person Shooters; and in case you should die you’ll be transported to the nearest vita-chamber, ready to re-enter the battle. It’s controversial amongst some since it’s not much of a consequence, but to me it’s just a part of this game’s lore.
And speaking of consequences, morality plays a big part in this game. There are 4 different endings, and depending on your actions against the Little Sisters, as well as the key players in the story, you’ll receive either the true ending, or 1 of the three consolation endings – so choose wisely whether you want to be in it for yourself or for others. Oh and one final word of advice… Do not pass up audio files, tonics, or Little Sisters because once you leave a stage you can’t backtrack as you could in the first Bioshock.
Audio/Visuals
The music is as classy as ever; the 50’s, or in this case - the 60’s, never sounded so good. Whether it’s the lounge music playing through the old phonographs, or simply the sound of the rain dripping from Rapture’s ceiling, you truly believe you are miles beneath the Earth’s surface stuck in a city lost in time. The same ominous and creepy feeling of a world that used to thrive underwater still lingers through Rapture in its silence and in its noise.
Visually, the game looks the same as the first game - and I mean graphically as well; It feels as if nothing’s changed at all since your first trip to the ocean bed, which is kinda sad since I wish there was more to distinguish this part of the city than the portion I played in last time. Interesting to note though was that the concept art of a huge whale seems to not’ve made it into the final game, which I was a bit saddened by the decision since I was looking for an adventure that was greater in scale - no such luck here. As mentioned prior, the game doesn’t improve much in the visuals department except for maybe the cut scenes, but even those are far in between. So if you know what the first game looks like then you already know how the sequel does too.
PC Version
(Alex Tretrop)
There seems to be a lot of problems specific to the PC version of Bioshock 2. When I first tried to run the game, the single player refused to work while the multiplayer worked perfectly. Although this problem may have been specific to my computer, after a few hours of reinstalling I finally got it to work properly and checked out the game.
Starting with Singleplayer, everything ran smoothly with only minor issues, mainly with the Unreal Engine starting to show its age with a large amount of texture pop in at the beginning of every level. They also change up the key binds from the first one to some stranger choices but as these can all be changed to your preferred setup, it’s not too big of a problem.
Another bug that can start to be annoying is an issue with widescreen monitors which, as of this writing, cuts off the top and bottom parts of your screen making it a little tough to see your ammo counters and notifications.
Multiplayer is where the PC version falls quite short compared to its console counterparts. You can tell that the multiplayer was lazily ported over to the PC with no dedicated server support, offering the terrible Games for Windows LIVE matchmaking system in its place. This makes most of the multiplayer games I get into extremely laggy, with dropped hosts (which happens quite a bit) forcing you to go back to the lobby. The multiplayer graphical textures and gun models also look horrible with countless bad design choices in the levels themselves.
The biggest bug that’s, as of this writing, still present is that the game can’t tell if you’re clicking or holding down either mouse buttons, making every automatic weapon like the machine gun, essentially useless - turning them into one shot rifles. Now combine that with not being able to charge your plasmids in multiplayer and you have a recipe for disaster in a number of online matches. While 2K is promising for a patch to be implemented as soon as possible, you can seemingly fix this problem by Alt-Tab’ing out of a game. No, really. Even though you can do this, you have to do it every time you load up the multiplayer and trust me; it gets very annoying, very fast.
It’s disappointing but there really is no reason for you to pick this up on PC compared to the consoles. Whereas the original Bioshock worked perfectly fine on PC and didn’t have Games for Windows LIVE, Bioshock 2 stumbles in this regard and it’s really unfortunate. If you have the choice of pc vs console, go with the console on this one.
Final Thoughts
Rapture captures the imagination but this time around is a lot less magical. The characters within the audio recordings aren’t as mystical, and the overall feeling you have when you’re in the middle of playing the game won’t be as memorable. But despite not hitting the bullseye as the first Bioshock so easily did, it still honestly is better than a lot of the games out there, especially when you look at the range of titles the First Person Shooter genre has. Also included in the game is an online multiplayer mode – which is to be honest is something they tacked on just so people wouldn’t gripe about their being no replayability once you finished the single player game.
If it’s a rent or a buy all depends on your own taste in first person shooters, as well as if you think this game can take your imagination and disbelief down to the depths of Rapture again. If you’re a little on the iffy side then I’d recommend going out and renting it, or borrowing it from a friend, and then see how you feel afterward. I thought it was a solid game but it wasnt nearly as special as the first – maybe the third one will be better… but I think that statement alone goes to show that Bioshock 1 is one of the toughest acts to follow and probably should’ve never received a sequel, but that’s just me.
