The Short Version
- Platform: Xbox 360
- One Word: Depth
- Two Words: Swarming Splicers
- Worth It: Yes
- Scale: terrible | poor | fair | good | great
The Long Version
I’m pretty torn about giving BioShock 2 only a “good” and not a “great” rating. I mean, here is a game far more ambitious in its storyline and symbolism than 90% of the dreck out there, but at the same time, whenever you start to really get into exploring these new parts of Rapture, it decides to throw an army of splicers at you and bog you down in pointless, repetitive combat. The game delivers excellent dialog, creates compelling characters for you to interact with, and features a few interesting moral choices … but it also tries too hard to shoehorn the new villain into the existing Rapture storyline, so much so that one is left wondering how it would be possible to have seen no sign of her influence during the first game. On the one hand, I played the game for hours basically every day after I bought it until I’d beaten it. On the other hand, I spent a decent chunk of those hours bitching to my wife (thanks, hon!) about how little fun I was having during yet another massive firefight.
I think what it comes down to is that the net result of the changes to the game play from the first game made this one more hardcore, and it has been a long time since I was a hardcore gamer. I no longer play games, even first-person shooters, for the combat. I don’t care that I can fight with plasmids and weapons at the same time, because I never found having to switch to be particularly cumbersome in the first place, since you were rarely facing more than a couple of enemies at a time. I don’t care that the weapons and plasmids are generally beefed up from the first game, because I never thought the ones in the first game needed much improvement. I didn’t come back to Rapture because I loved fighting legions of the same four splicers in the first game and wanted to fight many more.
I came back to Rapture because its decayed, art-deco beauty and tragic history make it without question one of the most compelling video game environments ever conceived. Nearly every part of Rapture is a work of art, and to explore it means contemplating what it might be like to exist there, to live in an underwater city, never seeing the sunlight, but with constant access to the beauty and mystery of the ocean depths. The original BioShock was so damn compelling because it was so gorgeous, and had gone so horribly wrong.
Fortunately, in this aspect, the game delivers. The Rapture of BioShock 2 is even more decayed than that of the first game (though, oddly, it didn’t seem as wet), but there are still glimpses of stunning beauty all around. While I was disappointed that we didn’t revisit any of the original areas, the new parts of Rapture shown in BioShock 2 fit right in and make sense as parts of the city. We’re given information on how Rapture was built, and how people originally got around it (a sort of undersea subway system) before the invention of personal bathyspheres.
