BioShock 2 (Xbox 360) review "There were plenty of reasons I wasn’t overly fond of the first BioShock, but the one that I keep coming back to is that the game was too easy. I understand that 2K's tour through the majestic underwater metropolis of Rapture served as little more than a technical showcase – let’s be real – and that a constant string of deaths would get in the way of leading players from one skillfully crafted set piece to the next, but it’s important not to forsake the game. I’m not a stickler for ..."

There were plenty of reasons I wasn’t overly fond of the first BioShock, but the one that I keep coming back to is that the game was too easy. I understand that 2K's tour through the majestic underwater metropolis of Rapture served as little more than a technical showcase – let’s be real – and that a constant string of deaths would get in the way of leading players from one skillfully crafted set piece to the next, but it’s important not to forsake the game. I’m not a stickler for challenge, but I don’t enjoy being insulted, either. Since the game’s Vita Chambers would instantaneously bring you back to life with no progress lost, combat proved completely broken once you realized that nothing posed a threat. It was detrimental to the game’s otherwise spooky atmosphere and robbed the many gunfights of the urgency they needed. Tell me I’m approaching the game from the wrong angle all you want; I’ll always be amused by people who insist that I “missed the point” of BioShock, because I’m the one judging it as a first-person shooter, not as a Disneyland ride.

And if your rebuttal is that I could have turned the Vita Chambers off, then I’d point out that this feature was exclusive to the PS3 rendition, which isn’t the version I played. YOU DON’T KNOW ANYTHING.

Still, that slight modification to the formula demonstrated that developer Irrational was at least aware of the problem, and they've thankfully included the feature in the sequel, as well. And upon booting up BioShock 2 for the first time, I couldn’t have opened the options menu and selected “off” fast enough. I can’t believe how much more exciting BioShock 2 is as a result. While the game still isn’t particularly hard (at least on the normal setting), the fact that I could die forced me to approach combat from a much more reasoned angle. Most of the enemy types are repeated from the first game, but the fact that they actually posed a legitimate threat this time made me view them in an entirely different light. Those lumbering, moaning Big Daddies are so iconic that they've received cover art treatment for both games, and here, they finally steal the spotlight as they were always meant to. Because if I’m not dreading every single encounter with them – if I don’t get a sinking feeling in my stomach when I hear those heavy footsteps – what’s the point?

Another incredibly minor change has a significant impact on the combat: dual wielding. Weapons are still equipped to your right hand, while plasmids (magic spells, in essence) are set to your left. The difference is that you can now use them simultaneously, which works hand-in-hand with the death factor in forcing me to find creative ways out of sticky combat situations. In the first BioShock, I’d typically just abandon the plasmids altogether in favor of the more straightforward guns, rather than having to clumsily juggle between the two. In BioShock 2, the combat is opened up immensely, granting me the opportunity to more intimately explore useful combinations of the two attack types. If I’m low on ammo in BioShock 2, I’m more likely to, say, freeze an enemy and smash him open with the butt of my rivet gun, whereas in the first one I’d likely whip out my wrench, whack away until I died, then get resurrected and finish the job.

These few seemingly minor improvements are the main reason why – and I realize I’m squarely in the minority for this one – BioShock 2 is a better game than the first. That’s saying a lot when you consider everything going against it, at least in the eyes of those who loved the original. Rapture is still one of the most unique and beautifully realized environments in any game, but the thrill of truly discovering it is gone. We all knew that before we even played the sequel, but even having said that, BioShock 2 suffers from an awful lot of texture issues that make it significantly less pretty than its predecessor. That may sound like a lethal misstep, but I'd like to read it as intentional, as if Irrational stopped trying to wow us with stellar visuals and nothing else. Kudos to them for focusing on what really matters, I say.

But BioShock 2 still isn’t a great game. It still moves at that awful, plodding pace that plagued the first game, for one. What exactly does Irrational have against linear, straightforward level design, where you move from point A to point B, and then to point C, and so on? In BioShock 2, you’ll be led from point A to point B only to find out that you’re actually at point C, and that point B is back in another direction, but as soon as you get there, you’ll discover that the path is blocked until you backtrack to point A.5, and so on and so forth. Your objectives are always simple, but your character is constantly being set back for the most obnoxious reasons, usually only fixable via arbitrary fetch quests. Levels, by and large, are quite small, but the game is artificially lengthened by repeatedly forcing players to trek back and forth across them.

I mean, your first major objective in BioShock 2 is to get from one side of Rapture to the other by train, and that alone takes something like half of the game, because the train keeps getting stopped. First the gate’s frozen shut, so you’ve got to get off the train, find the fire plasmid, then backtrack all the way to the station to melt the ice. Next there’s a security lockdown, so you’ve got to find the woman who’s holding the override key and take it from her, then get back on the train and keep going until the next arbitrary obstacle arrives. And the whole game is like this.

The story largely functions the same way. To an extent, I’m glad BioShock 2 lacks the sense of wonder that the first game had, because that makes it less frustrating when 2K stalls and deliberately holds off on giving us answers until we absolutely can’t wait any longer. BioShock was praised for having a terrific narrative, but truth be told, it wasn’t that great. We were more enamored with the setting than the characters or the dialog, and the drive to keep playing came from the desire to learn more about Rapture. BioShock 2 doesn’t present itself as well as the first one did; following an excellent opening cinematic, we’re more or less dropped into a relatively unremarkable room and expected to dust ourselves off and pick up the pieces as we go along. There’s a distinct “welcome back to Rapture” moment, but it lacks the punch of the original’s opening five minutes, and as soon as we realize that the plot is once again largely established by audio logs and transmissions from characters hiding away in undisclosed locations, déjà vu sets in.

But BioShock suffered from a peculiar problem that its sequel avoids. The first two-thirds of the game were spent luring us in with the promise of answers, and the game’s big reveal was nothing short of spectacular. But once it passed, the game was out of surprises, but kept going anyway. The pull was gone, and in its place was simply an overly slow-paced and far too easy FPS.

The new protagonist is Subject Delta, the first Big Daddy. That alone makes you hungry for details, and unlike its predecessor, BioShock 2 absolutely delivers, as the final two hours are utterly phenomenal. I don’t want to ruin anything, but let’s just say that the story’s clever surprises play hand-in-hand with the game design itself. We’re no longer touring the Rapture Museum; we’re fully involved in the storytelling, and it’s an exhilarating process to behold. As mixed as I am on most of the game, there’s no denying it ends with a bang.

The journey there is another matter. To some degree, I feel BioShock 2 wasted some of its potential – the promising underwater sequences really only exist to showcase fancy set pieces, and aside from having a drill on one arm and occasionally escorting a Little Sister, I never really felt like I was controlling an all-powerful Big Daddy. I guess I can’t blame 2K for playing it safe when the original was so critically acclaimed, and I’ll note again that the small adjustments made to the combat prove monumental. But we’ve recently witnessed a spike of grade-A video game sequels, and BioShock 2 does too little, too late to feel distinguished. That said, I still enjoyed it, and I find myself looking forward to BioShock 3, which is something I wouldn’t have said about this one.

Featured community review by Suskie (February 18, 2010) Mike Suskie is a freelance writer who has contributed to GamesRadar and has a blog. He can usually be found on Twitter at @MikeSuskie.