OK, so there's some things I loved in this game and some things I didn't like so much. Let's start with what I appreciated. I think the gameplay in this game is most definitely a step up from the first Bioshock. The double wielding plasmid and weapon system is really, really fun and I appreciated the simple, but incredibly useful lightning bolt, then drill hit combo. It's a very effective way to save ammo and really good to use on splicers. There's a bunch of new weapons introduced here that I really liked, such as the machine gun that looks more like a mini gun, the drill is really good, and I loved the hacking tool as well. Even though for example the spear gun wasn't as useful for me for my style of play, I really liked it and I can say there isn't a single weapon or plasmid for that matter that I didn't at the very least enjoy using in the game. Since you play as a Big Daddy this time around, the game forces you to go against many more enemies at once and this is, I think where the game really shines. Using the double wielding plasmid and weapon system is really cool, fun and entertaining. Hacking makes a comeback here as well and I also think it's a major step-up from the first game, where I thought it was way too hard to hack pretty much anything, so I never did. Here, I think it's balanced pretty well, so the game encourages you to go for it, even though it isn't always too easy to get away with it. By the end of the game you unlock Eleanor's plasmid, so you can summon her as a big sister and she's really effective and so much fun to play side by side with her.
Graphics-wise, the game is also really good and even better than the first Bioshock. This game did come out a few years after the first one and it really does show in the graphics department, especially when looking at water. Seriously, playing this game on PS4, the water that often comes into a room, like a little waterfall, is some of the best looking water I have ever seen, it's really impressive. For the first Bioshock, the thing I liked the most about that game was the world and the world-building in that game, a lot more than the story. Rapture felt like an actual place in that game and finding out what had happened through audio tapes was one of the things I enjoyed the most about Bioshock. In Bioshock 2, we still play in the city of Rapture, although in different areas of the game. And there are parts of it that I really enjoyed, for example in this game there are different parts where you get to go out into the water, so you walk from one building to the next on the outside in your big daddy suit, I thought that was really cool and refreshing. There's a part of the game that, to be honest, I thought was absolutely glorious, beautiful and really cool to play through. That part that I'm referring to is the Ryan Amusements level, which is some kind of theme park, with plasmid shops and a ride, that whole part of the game is amazing. I loved every second of it and it's when the game drew me in the most.
However, I was pretty disappointed for almost the entire remainder of the game after that. Most of the game you have to get to the Fontaine Futuristics area and the way you get there is mostly through the Rapture subway system, so you ride a train there, but you have to make several stops along the way and deal with the people running that level, so they can let you through, so you can eventually get to where you're going. So, let's start with that. I thought designing the entire game as essentially pit stops is not only lazy, but pretty tedious. And the Ryan Amusements part is I believe the first (and strongest) stop. After that, I thought the entire level design for pretty much the rest of the game was pretty generic and boring. Now, story-wise, I think on paper, this would have been an interesting story. At least the part about the ideologies of the people in charge. So, in the first Bioshock, you learn about Andrew Ryan, essentially a super capitalist with an extreme emphasis on individual achievement rather than on trusting governments, groups or organizations. Here, the main baddie is Sophia Lamb, a famous psychiatrist during Rapture's heyday, after Ryan's death took over the fallen city. She has exactly the opposite view of Ryan and her ideology consists of getting rid of the individual and focuses all on group identity. She uses terms like "the family" and her main goal, it turns out, is to use her daughter's consciousness to absorb all the other individual minds of the people in the city and turn it into one collective consciousness living within her. I'm not going to lie, I thought that pretty stupid. And in general I think the characters in this game are generic, poorly written and boring. Sophia Lamb talks like a generic bad guy from a Bond movie and by the end I was just sick of it. Combine that with the fact that most of the game design here is really generic as well, I actually found it rather hard to finish the game.
Speaking of hard, the game is too difficult to play on Normal and is meant to be played on easy, in my opinion. And the fact that you're a big daddy in the game does not mean anything other than you can walk under water, fall large distances and not get hurt and you get a drill. Oh and the screen size is slightly reduced. But you are not stronger than in the first game and you cannot take more damage than in the first game, which I think is stupid and beats the purpose of being a big daddy in the first place. The little sister design is also undeniably a step back from the previous game. Whereas in the first one (which I finished last week by the way), I found it morally impossible to kill a little sister, here I killed them because they are not cute at all and they are actually annoying, so there's a poor design job. Also, the addition of Big Sisters wasn't something that I particularly enjoyed in the game, they're just generic looking robots that are kind of athletic and jump around really fast. It's as if all of the awesome creative things that this game does it dumps into the Ryan Amusements level and it's only because it deals with the story of what the creators of the original game setup.
Here's the deal, this is not a terrible game, but it's not a good game either. The gameplay is truly awesome and so is the Ryan Amusements level. But the story, characters, writing, world-building are generic and poorly thought out. Oh and the voice acting is also weak and the voice acting of the splicers, particularly the women splicers and the things they say is hilarious, which I'm going to count as a positive, by the way, just because of how funny it is. "DON'T YOU DARE DISRESPECT ME!"
Graphics-wise, the game is also really good and even better than the first Bioshock. This game did come out a few years after the first one and it really does show in the graphics department, especially when looking at water. Seriously, playing this game on PS4, the water that often comes into a room, like a little waterfall, is some of the best looking water I have ever seen, it's really impressive. For the first Bioshock, the thing I liked the most about that game was the world and the world-building in that game, a lot more than the story. Rapture felt like an actual place in that game and finding out what had happened through audio tapes was one of the things I enjoyed the most about Bioshock. In Bioshock 2, we still play in the city of Rapture, although in different areas of the game. And there are parts of it that I really enjoyed, for example in this game there are different parts where you get to go out into the water, so you walk from one building to the next on the outside in your big daddy suit, I thought that was really cool and refreshing. There's a part of the game that, to be honest, I thought was absolutely glorious, beautiful and really cool to play through. That part that I'm referring to is the Ryan Amusements level, which is some kind of theme park, with plasmid shops and a ride, that whole part of the game is amazing. I loved every second of it and it's when the game drew me in the most.
However, I was pretty disappointed for almost the entire remainder of the game after that. Most of the game you have to get to the Fontaine Futuristics area and the way you get there is mostly through the Rapture subway system, so you ride a train there, but you have to make several stops along the way and deal with the people running that level, so they can let you through, so you can eventually get to where you're going. So, let's start with that. I thought designing the entire game as essentially pit stops is not only lazy, but pretty tedious. And the Ryan Amusements part is I believe the first (and strongest) stop. After that, I thought the entire level design for pretty much the rest of the game was pretty generic and boring. Now, story-wise, I think on paper, this would have been an interesting story. At least the part about the ideologies of the people in charge. So, in the first Bioshock, you learn about Andrew Ryan, essentially a super capitalist with an extreme emphasis on individual achievement rather than on trusting governments, groups or organizations. Here, the main baddie is Sophia Lamb, a famous psychiatrist during Rapture's heyday, after Ryan's death took over the fallen city. She has exactly the opposite view of Ryan and her ideology consists of getting rid of the individual and focuses all on group identity. She uses terms like "the family" and her main goal, it turns out, is to use her daughter's consciousness to absorb all the other individual minds of the people in the city and turn it into one collective consciousness living within her. I'm not going to lie, I thought that pretty stupid. And in general I think the characters in this game are generic, poorly written and boring. Sophia Lamb talks like a generic bad guy from a Bond movie and by the end I was just sick of it. Combine that with the fact that most of the game design here is really generic as well, I actually found it rather hard to finish the game.
Speaking of hard, the game is too difficult to play on Normal and is meant to be played on easy, in my opinion. And the fact that you're a big daddy in the game does not mean anything other than you can walk under water, fall large distances and not get hurt and you get a drill. Oh and the screen size is slightly reduced. But you are not stronger than in the first game and you cannot take more damage than in the first game, which I think is stupid and beats the purpose of being a big daddy in the first place. The little sister design is also undeniably a step back from the previous game. Whereas in the first one (which I finished last week by the way), I found it morally impossible to kill a little sister, here I killed them because they are not cute at all and they are actually annoying, so there's a poor design job. Also, the addition of Big Sisters wasn't something that I particularly enjoyed in the game, they're just generic looking robots that are kind of athletic and jump around really fast. It's as if all of the awesome creative things that this game does it dumps into the Ryan Amusements level and it's only because it deals with the story of what the creators of the original game setup.
Here's the deal, this is not a terrible game, but it's not a good game either. The gameplay is truly awesome and so is the Ryan Amusements level. But the story, characters, writing, world-building are generic and poorly thought out. Oh and the voice acting is also weak and the voice acting of the splicers, particularly the women splicers and the things they say is hilarious, which I'm going to count as a positive, by the way, just because of how funny it is. "DON'T YOU DARE DISRESPECT ME!"