Bioshock 2 (

2010

)

Does anyone miss 10 years ago, when the most shameless anti-consumer tactics big video game publishers did was crank out mediocre sequels to great games? Or is that just me? It certainly was a problem not long ago. The superb Dragon's Age: Origins [2009] was followed up by the atrocious Dragon's Age 2 [2011] and the decent Star wars: The Force Unleashed [2008] got an abominable sequel with Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II [2010]. Series like Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty became annual releases, with a new almost identical game coming off the assembly line year after year. Even Dark Souls [2011], my personal pick for game of the decade had to deal with a half-hearted, rushed-out sequel in the form of Dark Souls 2 [2014]. It seemed like the unstated goal of every big publisher was to transform their most popular series into the equivalent of FIFA or Madden, where they could just re-release the same game with minimal updates and charge full price for it year after year.

Make no mistake this was a problem, but in the past ten years we've seen how much worse it can get. Be it predatory loot boxes designed to pray upon gamers with compulsive gambling addictions or games designed to intentionally annoy or needle the player into purchasing a speed-boosting microtransaction, we've seen how bad the future can be. At least when dealing with an annual release of Call of Duty you could be reasonably sure that the game would not be deliberately designed to swindle money out of us in addition to the $60 dollar price tag.

Still, I can understand why there was such a hostile reaction to Bioshock 2 at the time, as it was a largely unnecessary sequel to a modern classic. Indeed it was especially grievous because Bioshock [2007] did not leave much room for a sequel. All the characters were either dead or enjoying a peaceful new life on the surface (or conquering the world with atomic weapons depending on the player's choice). The city of Rapture itself was ruined beyond repair, and with the departure of the little sisters it was stripped of any value it would have for outside interlopers. If any life remained in that sunken wreck it was doom to molder away for a while until the structural flaws in the city turned it into a watery grave. Not exactly the best place to start a new story.

So, in order to actually have a plot, the game was forced to retcon in a hitherto unmentioned faction in Rapture lead by a deranged collectivist psychologist named Sophia Lamb. I suppose it's only fair that the collectivists get their turn at being the bad guys, as the villains in the previous game were extreme individualists. Of course, it seems somewhat redundant to cast a bunch of proto-communists as the villains in your high concept sci-fi action game. You do not need to build a cybernetic dreamscape to see the evils of extreme collectivism, you just have to open up a history book that covers the 20th century. From the death camps to the killing fields, to the gulags the governments behind each of these atrocities probably weren't extolling the supremacy of the self. If by some rare chance a radical individualist ascends to a position of power he will invariable do very little (as was the case with say, Calvin Coolidge) or compromise his beliefs in a quest for more personal power.

The idea that a city founded as an objectivist utopia has been transformed into a commune is difficult to swallow initially but makes a lot of sense when you give it a little thought. The people who went to Rapture originally were, with few exceptions, extremists and idealists. Upon seeing the hell that their ideals created they may have changed their minds, but they wouldn't simply stop being extremists and idealists. No, it's far more likely that they would just shift their viewpoint to a different extreme. Indeed, I've seen this often enough in real life to know that the phenomena is real, as you see people drifting from one failed 20th-century totalitarian ideology to another, never for a moment considering the vast array of more boring but more workable options at their disposal.

The player takes on the role of Subject Delta AKA Johnny Topside, an explorer who discovered Rapture at its height and got turned into a Big Daddy for his troubles. While you were a Big Daddy you were bonded to a Little Sister, who through a series of misfortunes and plot-contrivances turned out to be Eleanor Lamb, the daughter of the collectivist leader Sophia Lamb. The elder Lamb is not going to win any mother of the year contests though, because after she got her daughter turned into a little sister through pure negligence, she started using Eleanor as a science experiment. The plan was to use Adam to turn Eleanor into a hive mind of all Rapture's most prominent geniuses, in the hopes that this collective entity would be “the first utopian.” I'm surprised she's willing to use her own daughter as a guinea pig for a procedure that might not even work (indeed, the first test subject was just turned into a massive fish and driven insane by the process), but communists aren't exactly known for their strong parental instincts. Apparently, Eleanor doesn't like her chances of survival either because she uses her psychic bond to you, her Big Daddy, to call for help, asking for you to battle your way across Rapture and rescue her from her loony mother.

From a gameplay perspective, Bioshock 2 is just a refinement of Bioshock [2007]. Most of the plasmid powers are recycled directly from the original along with more than a few of the weapons and ammunition types. However, the game has added the ability to have both your plasmid and weapon out at the same time and fire each by using the left and right mouse buttons respectively. This is a significant improvement as there were times in Bioshock [2007] where I found myself struggling to pull up the correct weapon or plasmid, and took fire while I fiddled with my mouse scrollbar. Here, plasmid powers integrate into the standard gunplay making them more accessible and effective.

The difficulty of the game has also been cranked up a bit, extending the period of time where splicers will pose a serious threat to you till well after the game's midpoint. Indeed, during my first playthrough (playing on hard mode, naturally) I found myself actively avoiding enemies because each fight meant I'd have fewer resources to deal with the inevitable showdown with the Big Sisters/Big Daddies/Brutes. Indeed there were many moments where I was pushed to the limit, nearly out of cash, ammo, and health kits which is exactly the sort of experience I would expect from a game's “hard” mode. Of course, with the right plasmids and tonics, your character will eventually become an overpowered killing machine, but such is the fine line that all action RPGs seem to walk. Bioshock 2 does a better job of things than most and even shows up its predecessor in this regard.

The hacking minigame from the first game has been replaced with a QTE, which is significantly less intrusive. I'm probably the only person in the world who enjoyed Bioshock's hacking minigame so while I miss it, I can understand why it's gone. The new QTE is a rather joyless affair, but at least it doesn't grind combat to a complete standstill like the old minigame.

The bad guy here, Sophia Lamb possesses one of the smuggest, most gratingly annoying voices I've ever heard. It's like somebody put the entire Seed family from Far Cry 5 [2018] in a blender and shaped it into a posh British bitch. Consequently, I was somewhat disappointed that at no time in the entire play-through do you get the chance to cave her skull in with a bowling pin (I'd settle for a no agency kill al la Andrew Ryan in the first game). If you're a bastard during your play-through then you're “punished” by getting to watch Lamb be skewered by her daughter. You know, the one that she transformed into a horrible abomination in pursuit of her insane ideas. If you're a goody-toe-shoes then the ruthless, totalitarian bitch is spared so she can presumably go back to abducting little girls to turn them into nightmarish science experiments while enslaving armies of pheromone-controlled goons to her cause. She sure as hell doesn't repent at any point, so there's no reason to suspect that she won't continue with her plan to brainwash the world into selfless cooperation. I'm just not sold that this character is more worthy of redemption than Ryan. Indeed, if anything she seems far less. Ryan despite his faults had moments of doubt over the horrors he'd inflicted on his city.

Indeed, the whole moral system seems more than a little suspect in Bioshock 2, as one of your chief decisions is whether or not to kill any of the named characters that have been moving heaven and earth to murder you. Kill one of them and you'll get a rather stern lecture about how you've been a very naughty boy at the ending, but if all you do is murder a few thousand splicers along the way then you can still be treated like a saint. This seems exactly backwards from a moral perspective, the named characters are all in possession of their faculties to a greater or lesser extent, whereas the splicers are controlled by pheromones and consequently are not really responsible for anything they do to you. If anything I should score moral points for sparing the splicers and killing the sick bastards who use them as foot soldiers.

Despite that hiccup, Bioshock 2 comes alarmingly close to fixing the issues with Bioshock's moral system, at least where it relates to Little Sisters. Now you can gain additional Adam by adopting a little sister and protecting her from waves of splicers while she harvests Adam from corpses. If this was an option that provided your only source of Adam other than outright harvesting the little sisters then it would actually provide a strong incentive for you to kill the girls, as protecting them from the splicers will quickly consume a great deal of your spare ammo and health kits. Unfortunately, you can still get Adam from rescuing the little sisters and they still give you plenty of Adam in the form of gifts for rescuing them. So not only is there no reason to harvest them, but there is also no reason to have them gather Adam from the corpses. Just adopt them and rescue them immediately and you'll still have plenty of Adam for your needs. Even on the game's highest difficulty Adam never becomes that important. Indeed, the game actually removes any incentive to harvest the little sisters by making their in-game models significantly cuter than the original's more simian rendering.

It wouldn't be a Bioshock game without a few ill-considered plot points that call the structure of the narrative into question. Here the most obvious issue is the fact that Lamb and her family are stealing children from the surface in order to turn them into Little Sisters. This is, simply put, an absurd risk that could lead to surface governments butting their noses in with attack subs and depth charges. Remember in the first game Ryan was scared that smugglers, people who are naturally not on the best terms with government thugs, would lead the surface authorities to discover Rapture. Stealing children is much more conspicuous than buying a couple of crates of cigarettes and loading them into a submarine. I understand that the original little sisters have to grow up someday, but last time I checked there was an easier way to make more children. There are plenty of men and women still hanging about in Rapture after all. Did this Lamb bitch skip sex education? Does she just not know where babies come from?

The other issues with the plot stem from the Vita Chambers... again. As I said in my review of Bioshock [2007], adding in an in-universe explanation for re-spawning is an admirable goal, but needs to be handled with some care lest it introduces holes into the plot, as it does here. Eleanor re-codes the Vita chambers to Subject Delta's gene sequence, which raises the question of why Fontaine didn't do this in Bioshock [2007] once he took over Rapture, especially after Jack's programming wore off. It also raises the question of why Lamb doesn't recode the damn things after she declares Subject Delta public enemy number one. There's also the bizarre offhand comment that Lamb makes towards the end when she has you captured that if you die naturally then you will not be revived by the Vita chamber but if you're killed you'll pop back up in one. So the Vita Chamber will revive you from a car crash but not from a heart attack? Does this machine just automatically know if it's “your time to go” or not? Who built this damn thing, a Christian Scientist? I understand that this snatch of dialogue is there to provide tension, but if you need to undermine your world-building to have tension in your story then the basis of your story probably has issues.

Bioshock 2 is obviously not as ambitious a game as its predecessor. It has no aspirations to redefine the player's relationship with the medium, nor any desire to flush out a wholly original world at the bottom of the sea. It aims solely to be a pretty good, story-focused FPS with a touch of RPG elements. This makes it a rather poor follow up to Bioshock's grandeur, but an enjoyable enough pass time in its own right.