Bioshock 2 (and Bioshock)

I’ve been meaning to review this game for a whole week now. I just haven’t been able to muster the words for it. Not because I’m too busy playing it or I’m lost for words because it’s so good or anything… there just isn’t anything to say.

It’s Bioshock, but you’re a Big Daddy now… That’s it.

But since this website’s audience includes people like my mum, I guess I can use the rest of this article explaining what the hell that sentence even means.

In 2007, 2K games released Bioshock, a horror game set in a forties themed underwater city called Rapture that a bloke called Andrew Ryan built to be the ultimate paradise of objectivism. Somewhat predictably, this all went wrong pretty soon with the discovery of Adam. A macguffin that can give you super powers and can only be grown and harvested by little girls. When you, the player, are introduced to this rusting, leaky hell hole, the only people around are the  gibbering lunatics that became addicted to Adam, the aforementioned young girls, and the ‘Big Daddies’ their guardians in diving suits. It was your job as the player to fight your way out after being trapped down there with only those nutters, a bunch of audio diaries and a couple of people on a radio for company.

Sounds like a nice scary horror game right? Well the thing is gameplay wise Bioshock may have talked the horror talk, but it didn’t really walk the horror walk. The aesthetic, atmosphere and direction made for a nicely creepy experience. But when you have the ability to shoot lightning out of your hand pretty much from the very beginning and soon enough you’re running around sweeping past all the messages in blood on the walls to shoot a nutter (or ‘Splicers’ as the game calls them) in the face with a tommy gun you won’t be particularly scared. This gets even worse when you realise that death also meant nothing in this game. You just come back in one of the ‘Revival Chambers’ dotted around Rapture so you could just run at the enemy, whittle their health down and come back for more when they get annoyed and gave you a slap.

In a bid to make the game accessible to people, they streamlined the mechanics until there wasn’t anything to really worry about other than whether you had an IQ high enough to point your gun in the right direction. Horror should be about survival, so that when you see a shotgun on the ground, the player should face an agonising internal debate about whether they should take it and risk running out of ammunition or not being able to outrun the monsters any more. This game just says ‘Go on! Have your cake and eat it. It’s a shotgun, it’ll be fun!’

That’s not to say it was bad. It was incredibly imaginative, it had excellent atmosphere and some incredibly good writing. But I couldn’t help but feel it could have been so much more.

In the first game, in order to become more powerful and survive, you had to harvest Adam from the little girls that pottered around the city, but to do that you had to kill the Big Daddy, no easy feat, but they were happy to leave you be as long as you didn’t disturb them, encouraging you to set up elaborate traps and luring the enraged guardian into them before having the famously bad ‘moral dilemma’ over whether you kill kiddies or not. This culminated in a section where you had to disguise yourself as a Big Daddy and protect a little girl of your own while nutters tried to kill and eat her. It was a wonderful way to show you how it must have felt being the big scary monsters you’d spent hours hunting for fun and profit, and that maybe despite being hulking monstrosities in diving suits they were just driven by love for their child… Were they the real monsters?

Go look at that sentence at the beginning again. Makes sense now doesn’t it. This time around, the game dispenses with horror by giving you the chance to act as a Big Daddy from the get go, swinging drills and rivet guns around and looking after little girls all the time… The first time, having to look after a little girl was a short exercise in humility. This time it’s just a chore where you have to fend off harrowing numbers of enemies that want to kill you and your stolen daughters. And you have no-one but yourself to blame when you could have just eaten them yourself.

The game is fun to play. But everything that needed to be said or could be said in the first game, was said… and much better. Give it a go by all means, but don’t spend extra on it for the soundtrack and stuff like I did.

Tags: 2, 2K Games, Bioshock

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