It's easy to assume that ""Bioshock 2,"" a sequel that many fans and even original game designer Ken Levine wanted little to do with, is all about the Benjamins—a pointless entry diluting the purity of the original's story and characters. While it cannot be said that ""Bioshock 2"" really does anything to outshine its predecessor, it tweaks the original formula (flaws and all) within a side story to the original game that extends our stay in the undersea city of Rapture by long enough to make it worth the trip back.
""Bioshock 2"" returns to Rapture 10 years after the first, even leakier and rustier than before. This time around you play as one of the first Big Daddies, awakened by your connection to your Little Sister, now grown up and attempting to summon you to her aid. The game follows your attempts to make your way across Rapture to rescue her, encountering enemies called Splicers to drill to pieces and moral conundrums to solve along the way.
Although its actual game mechanics were a bit dated for the time, ""Bioshock"" received great acclaim for its exceptional storytelling and immersive atmosphere. While the atmosphere is still here in spades—the once merely rusting underwater city now blooms with coral and decaying broken machinery—the storytelling seems a bit less revolutionary, playing it on the extremely safe side. We have traded villains from Andrew Ryan, the runaway objectivist from the first game, to Sofia Lamb, a runaway socialist hell-bent on making Rapture a utopia. Otherwise, not a whole lot has changed thematically—someone is always trying to manipulate you, and you have to figure out how and why.
One aspect of the game that has changed is the way you attain Adam, the magic genetic goo that allows you to upgrade your character's powers. Instead of merely harvesting (or rescuing) the Little Sisters that gather Adam, you can now protect each of them as they skip along their merry way harvesting dead bodies. This transforms Adam-quests from attack missions to protection missions, which may have you groaning until you see all the new toys available for setting traps around gatherers: the big, bad Daddy drill, mobile turrets, plasmids that can summon security bots, proximity mines and more. Hacking has also improved to help you secure areas of the level as you gather Adam with your Little Sister.
When you finish harvesting all the Adam in a level, you are attacked by a Big Sister, a beefed-up version of the Big Daddy that is faster, stronger and sexier than you are. They certainly provide a challenge, especially early in the game, but their random nature sticks out poorly in a game world primarily geared around planning and setting up traps that work with the environment.
The game makes up for challenges like this with more and more upgrades and gene tonics that make you practically invulnerable by the game's conclusion—I could cause Splicers to burst into flames, freeze solid and be shocked to death if they so much as touched me. While it is fun to feel so powerful by the game's final battles, the challenges to the player become few and far between by the end, making for a game that has a difficulty curve that is completely backwards.
There is a multiplayer mode this time around too, complete with orientation films from Andrew Ryan himself. While they certainly dressed up the mode to be a fun nod to fans, the actual gameplay mechanics do not translate very well to player versus player combat. Deathmatches and ""Capture the Sister"" are basically ""Quake III"" matches with Bioshock touches, like Big Daddy suits and plasmids. They are a fun diversion, but they often make the game feel dated.
""Bioshock 2"" is certainly worth a play through for fans of the original—if nothing else, it allows you another 15 hours under the sea. But the sequel's developers clearly fear that too much innovation could hurt game sales; a shame, since being innovative is what made Bioshock worth playing in the first place.
