Just befiore handing in all my uni work I went out and bought three and some xbla points so I could download a fourth. Bioshock 2 was one of the three I bought. The original was one of the games I bought when I first got my 360 and I enjoyed it alot, buying the sequel was an easy choice.
I returned to the underwater city of Rapture, this time playing as a Big Daddy, a giant monstrosity that protect the Little Sisters. I’d taken down my fair share of them in the first game and I would be doing so again. There were only two types of Big Daddy’s in the original and they weren’t known for their speed so you play as a special type of Big Daddy known as Delta. All of Raptures standard enemies return plus a new type of Splicer and three new Big Daddy types. The most noticeable addition being the Big Sister, I’ll get to them in a bit.
Like the new enemies, new characters have been added. The two main antagonists of the original are well and truly dead along with every other boss you encountered along the way. This means there was a fair bit of Retconning going on. The into shows you protecting a Little Sister when a woman called Sofia Lamb shows up, takes the Little Sister who is really her lost daughter Eleanor. Lamb then makes you shoot yourself in the head. You’re revived some years later and begin a quest to rescue Eleanor from her mother.
The main gameplay of the game hasn’t changed much from the original. You’re still duel wielding guns and plasmids, following quest markers, gunning down Big Daddy’s to get at the Little Sisters. What’s different this time around is what you do with the Little Sisters. You’re given the harvest option which nets you some ADAM (a special currency) or to adopt them. If you adopt them you can take them to gather more ADAM or take them to and air vent and cure them or harvest them. The cure/harvest option is the moral choice system again which effects the ending and a few item pick ups. The taking the Sisters to gather more ADAM is an interesting change. You gain more ADAM but you have to defend the Sister while she gathers it making the player debate if the risk is worth the reward.
Each level has up to three Little Sisters and once you’ve dealt with the third in whatever fashion you choose you will get a warning. A Big Sister is coming for you. Big Sisters are a special form of Big Daddy and are the most powerful enemy in the game. They can jump around the room making them hard to hit, they can use plasmids and they dish out alot of damage.
These Big Sisters are the closest thing to bosses the game has. Bosses are this games weakness. You bump heads with various characters throughout the game but all but one boils down to you having the choice to spare them or kill them. No fight, just a choice. It’s a little disappointing. I can think of a few moment which could be classed as boss fight but barely. One of the bosses is just a more powerful version of a Spider Splicer, a type of enemy you have to gun down dozens of just to get to the boss. I didn’t even notice I was fighting him until the fight was over and I’d finished killing the group of other enemies he had in the room with him. The other bosses are just scripted Big Daddy or Big Sister fights. The boss fight for the second last level was two Big Sisters at once. The final, big battle of the game was fending off waves of enemies. Very disappointing.
Difficulty wise it’s a bit odd. The game starts out easy like it should, got quite hard as it went on before becoming easy again and finally very easy by the end. The last stage of the game you trip over health packs, money and ammo. Heck, they give you a plasmid that allows you to summon your own Big Sister to fight with you. It makes that final fight that much more disappointing.
Last two paragraphs aside the game is still very good. It’s well made, the level design was kicked up a notch and the story and new enemies were good even with all the “They were there all along, you just didn’t see them in the last game”. It’s a very good game and I’d definitely recommend it but I’d suggest playing Bioshock first. There are some back story stuff that won’t make sense otherwise.
Oh yeah. There’s also a multiplayer mode (vs, not co-op) which is also well done and fun to play but the match fixing times are stupidly long. It’s good for a look but waiting around to play all the time kinda ruins it.