Bioshock was perhaps one of the most interesting first-person shooters I remember playing in recent times. It had an intriguing setting, a plot that had an interesting method of presentation, and a unique first-person shooter experience.

Bioshock 2 has not tread very far from its roots. Though it takes place in different parts of the underwater city of Rapture, and all the same elements are there, the game has a very different feel.

In addition to the standard single-player game, Bioshock 2 includes online multiplayer. Seeing as they are two very different aspects, I feel it’s in the game’s best interest to review them separately. The multiplayer review starts here.

Single Player

The game begins with an introductory movie. You find yourself banging on a ventilation duct for a little sister to come out. Your little sister. You are one of the original alpha series of big daddies, and the first successful big daddy. Being an early model, you have a limitation that others don’t: you’re bonded to the one little sister.

Your little sister, Eleanor, takes you through the pre-Bioshock Rapture of 1958 in order to find an "angel," a dead body that contains genetic material called ADAM. As she takes you through a party, she's ambushed by a group of splicers. As you fight to protect Eleanor, one of the splicers takes control of you using a mind-control plasmid.

A woman walks out from the shadows; she is Sofia Lamb, who tells you Eleanor is her child. She then causes you to place a pistol to your hand and shoot yourself.

You wake up ten years later in front of a Vita-Chamber.

Nine years have passed since Jack ventured beneath the surface in Bioshock. This is a Rapture that has been removed of Andrew Ryan and Frank Fontaine of the previous game. In the time since then, Sofia Lamb has unified the splicers to blindly do her bidding. Throughout the game, you must overcome the Cult of Lamb, and find Eleanor.

Bioshock 2 uses the same style of giving you the whole story as its predecessor. Audio diaries give insight into what happened before everything went to hell, what happened to characters, and how things generally were and came to be. This is just as effective and interesting as before.

The fact that Lamb had been injected into the existing history bugged me quite a lot at first. As I continued to play, though, I came to realize that ret-conning doesn’t really matter. The events of Bioshock had almost nothing to do with those of Bioshock 2. While some of the characters provide the history and background knowledge, they’re long-dead, and this is a very different Rapture. There is no power struggle to speak of. Instead of objectivism governing society, its opposite, relativism, has taken its place.

Bioshock 2 doesn’t stray far from the established style, but that’s not to say they’ve been slouching. There’s so much detail throughout the world, both inside Rapture and outside on the seabed, it’s obvious that even though this game was not made by the same studio, much care was taken in keeping Rapture uniform, even as you travel through these new areas.

Each area of the game seems to have been gone over with a fine-toothed comb. The wear of 10 years with little maintenance is evident in Bioshock 2, especially in a certain level that had been filled with water for who knows how long.

My first thought when playing Bioshock, was that Rapture was creepy. It was the emptiness and anticipation of splicers I felt. With the altars to Sofia Lamb you find, Bioshock 2 takes the already eerie setting, and makes it even worse, but in a good way.

But at the same time, you’re a big daddy; you don’t have a lot to fear with your hulking drill of death. The creepiness I felt previously has been replaced with a kind of indifference to my safety in regard to splicers. They are simply fodder.

Little sisters are still around, abducted from the surface in order to replace the sisters that have aged too far into adolescence. You still have to fight off their big daddies in order to deal with them. But being a big daddy yourself, you have the option to adopt little sisters as your own, or to harvest them for as much ADAM as you can.

Once adopted, your little sister will travel on your shoulders, allowing you to find bodies that have ADAM. When you find one, you can set her down and let her work while you protect her from the inevitable splicer attack that follows. When you pick her back up, she shares the ADAM she recovered with you. Each little sister can only perform two of these extractions before needing to be returned to one of their vents. At the vent, you can choose to exorcise the ADAM slug out of her, like in the first game, or once again, harvest her.

This brings me to the enemies that filled me with dread: big sisters.

There are a few story-based occurrences where the big sisters appear, but through most of the game, they only appear after you’ve dealt with so many little sisters. Outfitted with plasmids and ridiculous reflexes, they are your antithesis. That isn’t to say you can’t beat them. It’s difficult at times, but the big sisters aren’t impossible to defeat.

The gameplay is almost unchanged from the previous game. It’s still just as solid and enjoyable. There are a few new weapons to play with, in addition to previous offerings. There are no longer enough weapon upgrade stations to upgrade every weapon to its maximum potential, so you have to really think about what will benefit you most. There’s no longer a single melee weapon, you can now use any weapon to clobber your enemies.

Plasmids have gotten an overhaul. There are now different plasmids for each level upgrade. It simply upgrades the one you currently have. The upgrades are pretty awesome. Level 3 Electrobolt, for example, lets you shoot a constant ray of lightning from your hand for as long as you hold the trigger. Level 3 Hypnotize brings back the ability to hypnotize a big daddy to fight for you. While expensive, all the plasmid upgrades are very much worth it.

Tonics have been tweaked as well. Instead of three different tracks of different tonics, you have a single pool of slots and can choose from any tonics you have. This allows you to customize your passive effects far better that you previously could. There are also a lot of new Tonics. You can speed up your little sisters’ gathering ADAM or even cause them to gather more.

Hacking is the one thing that has been completely changed. Instead of the old system of using tubes in a grid, you have a needle that moves back and forth kind of like a metronome. Hitting green is a success, blue gives a bonus, and red calls in security bots. You also have a remote hack tool so you can reach things you normally couldn’t.

The one thing I didn’t like at first was only being able to hold five first-aid kits and EVE hypos. As time went on, I found many tonics that gave me health and EVE in many different ways, including standing in a pool of water, that it was a good design decision: if you play the game smartly, you won’t have to use either outside of battle.

The sound quality is once more top-notch. Garry Schyman’s score helps accentuate an already disturbingly eerie setting. The game’s use of sound is wonderful.  You may have the look of an underwater city, but it’s just a box until you add the ambient sounds an underwater city would make. Water leaking somewhere in the walls, splicers’ muffled voices the next room over, the light pitter-patter of footsteps sneaking around behind you, it all helps bring the game to life.

The game isn’t all gravy, though. Pacing was one problem I found. The first few levels, you’re slowly wandering around large areas with only a few tasks to complete before you continue on. Later, you’re running laps around a level in order to complete objectives, and move through these areas a lot faster.

Bioshock 2 loses the ability to revisit old areas. Once you miss something and continue on, there’s no possible way of going back. While this is attributed to the trains that you use, instead of the bathyspheres of old, it’s still a setback.

Overall, Bioshock 2 is a worthy sequel. The few problems I found are not game-breaking; rather, they’re conscious design decisions, which I can respect.

My score: 8.9

Multiplayer

Bioshock 2 includes online multiplayer. In the first foray into multiplayer, Bioshock 2 seems to be a case of trial and error.

The multiplayer mode includes a prologue that sets up why you would be fighting around Rapture. You wake in your apartment to find Ryan broadcasting that it’s time to fight. This is the civil war between Andrew Ryan and Atlas.

Your apartment serves as a virtual menu system that you can explore. It’s interesting, and helps guide new players that may not know what they would be doing otherwise. Going to the apartment isn’t necessary, though. Everything can also be found in the main lobby screen.

The multiplayer itself boils down to a concentrated form of playing the single player game. You must choose from two weapons with one upgrade each, two plasmids, and three tonics. The game gives you a total of three load-outs so you can customize and experiment if you’d like while still have functioning equipment if you need to switch in the middle of a match.

Starting out, almost everything is locked away. In order to unlock new weapons and the like, you have to play and gain experience in the form of ADAM so you can level up. Luckily, just about everything you do in multiplayer nets you ADAM. You even get extra ADAM just from finishing a game.

As you level up, new weapons, upgrades, plasmids, and tonics become available. And as those become available, so do trials. Trials act as a sort of usage tracker for weapons and plasmids. Examples include kill thirty enemies with a weapon, or use a plasmid thirty times on others. It’s very much like Modern Warfare in this respect.

That being said, early on, you’ll find yourself very limited. This poses a problem, as there doesn’t seem to be a way for you to find others that are evenly matched. I struggled a lot, and still continue to do so, when matched against players that have been playing longer and have more weapons and plasmids available to them. If the matchmaking system were to try and set you up in a match that has players within a few levels of each other, I think it could remove a lot of the frustration and lopsidedness I’ve experienced.

Another problem I’ve found is the game’s networking. I’ve been in games with some pretty bad lag on PC, but for the most part, Xbox Live has been pretty solid. This has changed with Bioshock 2. A lot of times, doors won’t open, they’ll just disappear; People moving jerkily, and all the hosts that dropped connection tells me the networking could’ve been improved a lot before the game was published.

I mentioned before this is set in the civil war of Rapture. The multiplayer levels reflect this. All the levels seem to be set in areas you’ve seen in Bioshock. They’re not dilapidated, though. This was Rapture before splicers took over.

There are seven multiplayer modes in Bioshock 2’s multiplayer:

• Survival of the Fittest is your standard death match mode. Kill as many people as you can before time runs out.
• Civil War is team death match, the same rules apply here.
• Capture the Sister is Bioshock 2’s version of Capture the Flag. One team starts with a little sister, and one of the players starts as a big daddy. They have to keep the opposing team from grabbing the little sister and taking her to a specified vent.
• Turf War is simple territories. Three territories on a map are up for grabs. Wait near the totem until the bar fills, and it’s yours. If you’re taking a territory, you have to strip the other team of the territory before you can work on making it your own.
• Team ADAM Grab is effectively Oddball. There’s a single little sister, and you have to hold her longer than the other team to win.
• ADAM Grab is the same thing, but without teams.
• Last Splicer Standing is effectively Civil War, but with only one life per person.

Each game works pretty well on all the maps I’ve played on so far. The level design keeps the maps looking and feeling like their counterpart in Bioshock, but gives them a good variety of areas.

Research plays a role in multiplayer as a way of getting a damage bonus against your enemies. You have to stand over a corpse to begin researching, and you’ll be motionless until you’re finished or abort the process.

There are also vending machines that give you EVE and ammunition. They can be hacked to eject a live grenade if the enemy gets too close. First-aid kits are non-existent, though if you keep from getting shot for so long, you’ll wind up recovering any health you lost.

The multiplayer seemed tacked on at first. The more I played, the less I was sure about this. There is some depth. It just takes an investment of time and effort to find it. While I’m going to continue to work at seeing how much depth is in Bioshock 2’s multiplayer, I know for a fact that a lot of people won’t have the patience to work for it.

This, I think is the single underlying problem: there isn’t enough variety in the beginning and the rewards that are unlocked as you play aren’t unlocked fast enough to hook new players. The potential is there, I just wish it were a bit closer to the surface.

My score: 7.3

Bioshock 2 was released on February 9, 2010 for Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC and retails for $59.99. This review is based on the Xbox 360 version.