Category: Retro Review

 A great lesson in life is just because that its better to have small flaws than fix them and break perfection. While Bioshock is one of my all time favorite games, Bioshock 2 had a lot to live up to. Let’s descend into Rapture again..

After the fall of Ryan and Atlas, a new force took over by means of Sophia Lamb’s “Family”, turning the Splicers and down-trotted of Rapture into a cult. Before Rapture’s decline under Ryan, Lamb had her exceptional daughter turned into a Little Sister, protected by Delta, one of the first Big Daddies. Lamb, using a plasmid to control him, makes Delta seemingly kill himself so she can experiment on her daughter more, trying to make her the messiah of the Family. 1968, Delta is woken up again from a coma by Tenebuam, feeling his Little Sister Eleanor call out to him. Can Delta save Eleanor from the clutches of her mother?

There are some tiny improvements to Bioshock 2 but it doesn’t hold a candle to the first. The Story, while fine, feels copy and paste in certain areas; what hurts it is the fact that the choices you make don’t carry the same weight at the end as they do in the first. Although the weapons themselves are bigger, they don’t seem to do the damage they did in the first game either. I do like the fact you can use melee attacks with every weapon and the drill does some heavy damage later. While most of the plasmids and gene tonics are carried over from the first game, there are new enemies including the badass Big Sisters who were a great addition to the series. The characters are pretty good. The graphics are a huge upgrade but I can’t help but notice that they try too hard at times to be creepy with the setting. It was cool to live as a Big Daddy and gather Adam with the Little Sisters but like much of the game itself, it does get stale. Things like hacking, photographing enemies, and tonic storage are really simplified  combined with much more straight forward missions makes the game lose some charm. In the end, Bioshock 2 is a good game that could have been great but still worth trying if you loved the first. May the gaming gods bring you glory.

There are few games I’d ever give a 10 out of 10 in life: Batman: Arkham Asylum , Red Dead Redemption , and Mass Effect 2 to name a few. Bioshock is one of them. I’ve played the game through half a dozen times over two console generations and I’m still finding new things in the desolate, leaky city of Rapture.

We play as Jack who is flying over the mid Atlantic in the year 1960. His plane crashes and he finds himself swimming to a lighthouse, finding only a pod that takes him to the underwater metropolis that is Rapture, where the science and art aren’t hindered by government or god. On the outside Rapture is gorgeous and a true sight to behold. Inside is decadent madness. Addicts called Splicers run free, addicted to the freedom to rewrite there genetic codes with Adam and plasmids. Mutated little girls and there hauntingly armored suit protectors, the Little Sisters and Big Daddies, extract Adam out of the corpses that litter the streets. Rapture was founded and run by Andrew Ryan, a visionary and business tycoon who doesn’t want Jack to leave, especially when aided by Atlas. Would ya kindly remember ” a man chooses and a slave obeys”

Bioshock is more than a FPS game. Besides guns, you get to partake in various plasmids and gene tonics, giving you a cool mix of powers and buffs. The detail in your skin when you change plasmids is one of my favorite parts of the game. The world is fascinating and creepy, hearing the rambling of the Splicers and the groans and thunderous footsteps of the Big Daddies. The characters are well done and the the story is a fantastic piece of smart science fiction. The graphics are pretty good on Ps4. There are a few fetch quests that are a pain the ass and there’s a hell of a difficulty spike after easy mode so I recommend going through on easy for collectibles. The DLC, besides a fun horde mode, also has a pretty interesting mode where you have to use your brain to traverse the levels. In the end, Bioshock is a classic that I can’t  recommend more. May the gaming gods bring you glory.