Single Player - Blair Macdonald

It didn’t though. From the flames of the original's ending comes a sequel that no one asked for and many didn’t want at all. How does it fare in today’s saturated shooter market and how does it compare to its older Brother? Would you kindly read on to find out?

Your journey is, from a standalone perspective, a set of bookends. You start off in Rapture, where science conquers all, as a Big Daddy. So you start the second game in the very same way you finished the first. Very soon, though, you die and the game begins proper, ten years after the events of the first game. Andrew Ryan is gone and a new central protagonist, Dr. Sophia Lamb, is quickly introduced. Your primary aim in your underwater mission is to rescue your Little Sister, one of the young girls infected with a mind altering sea slug and brainwashed into harvesting the lifeblood of Rapture, Adam. It is made patently clear from the beginning of the game that Lamb is responsible for your Little Sister's absence. Your first steps in Rapture this time around will be awash with a sense of familiarity rather than wonder and it will be a feeling that you find hard to shake as you continue your journey deeper under the sea.

The clear sense of purpose that you are given seriously damages the ability of Bioshock 2 to spin any meaningful narrative to truly engage the player. This is a computer game. If the main aim is to rescue someone then, nine times out of ten, the rescue mission will be a successful one. In comparison to the mystery surrounding the first game’s plot the sequel looks like a phoned-in performance. If you have any memory of the first game's structure then you’ll be surprised, and probably disappointed, to learn that weapons and plasmids, the special gene powers you could imbue your body with in the first game that seemed so unique, appear in pretty much the same order this time around.

Thankfully, the one aspect of Bioshock 2 that is superior to the original is the combat. Weapon and plasmid upgrading is trickled down to the player through a mixture of exploration and Adam harvesting. Weapons are more varied and easier to control and the range of plasmids available to the player are greater in number, if not in imagination, than in the prequel. For a Big Daddy, your character moves with a surprising nimbleness (sometimes seeming to far outpace the other Big Daddies that lumber around Rapture), and each player will soon find a good armoury combination for delaying the attacking splicers and dispatching them safely.

But, like everything else in Bioshock 2, the developers end up over-using the combat to the point of nausea. To maximise the amount of Adam that you receive from each Little Sister, whether you decide to liberate them or to kill them (yes, just like the first game), they need to be protected while they steal the stuff from certain corpses in each level. Oh yes, that’s right, Rapture isn’t a sandbox environment any more, it is a one-way ride that does not allow backtracking, so you had better make sure that you do everything you want to before moving on this time around. So you have to protect the Little Sisters while they harvest. The first ten or so times this is great fun, you run around laying traps for the splicers and thinking up good ways to use your environment to your advantage. The thirtieth time it is just tiresome.

The new Big Sisters end up being just as tiresome. They are more powerful versions of the Big Daddies who show up every once in a while to impede your progress, jump around a lot and generally make themselves a nuisance. At the start of the game they will destroy you because they are so much stronger than you are. By the end you’ll be so bored of killing things you’ll hardly bat an eyelid when they show up. Their arrival is also a moment that could have been handled so much better. If the Big Sisters stalked you quietly and showed up without warning they would represent a far greater foe than they actually are. Instead they wail and scream and you have about a minute to set up traps to kill them with. As you set out on your adventure, this represents a welcome break to ready yourself for a fight. At the end of the game it’s another feature that gets dull quickly.

That is Bioshock 2’s main problem: it gets boring. Setting foot into Rapture for the second time should have heralded a brilliantly conceived story with enough novel gameplay elements to keep the player interested without ever having to rely too heavily on one part of the game. It isn’t a bad game, the graphics are nice (even if the water on your face mask effect is used far too often), the combat is good and the surroundings are still interesting. It just doesn’t have the same emotional hooks as the first game. It doesn’t have the same fresh feeling as the first game and it doesn’t expand the potential of the setting as much as it should have done. There are fewer interesting characters and the ones that do exist mirror those from the previous game so closely they may as well be palette swaps.

There is still some fun to be had from the single-player adventure offered up by Bioshock 2 but, if it were a celebrity, it would be Callum Best: nice to look at but not a patch on his father.

Multiplayer - Matt Allen

Killing opponents, hacking turrets and vending machines, will earn you Adam (experience) with bonuses for doing well awarded at the end of each match; various trials (such as killing 30 enemies with a particular weapon) award extra Adam on top. While most of this is not particularly new, multiplayer in Bioshock 2 is an interesting enough distraction from the main game, and is certainly worth exploring and giving a whirl. The only question mark is how long the player base remains intact before all the achievements are gained; it isn't sufficiently engaging enough past that point to warrant repeated play.