I’ve been craving a good shooter.  The Crysis games didn’t deliver, so I grabbed BioShock 2.

BioShock 2 is set 10 years after the original game.  Rapture is still holding together, but just barely.  Sofia Lamb is your antagonist this time around…  She wants to create some kind of utopian society by infusing her daughter – Eleanor Lamb – with the combined DNA and memories of everyone in Rapture.  And you play a Big Daddy that was linked to Eleanor when she was a Little Sister.

You basically spend the entire game trying to reunite with Eleanor.  Eleanor sees you as a genuine father figure, and is looking for a way out of her mother’s plans, so she sets you on the path to rescuing her.  Your main motivation is basically to stay alive – Big Daddies die if they’re separated from their Little Sisters for too long.

You make your way through Rapture…  Killing splicers, unlocking doors, gathering ADAM, finding new weapons and abilities…  And eventually have a big showdown with Dr. Lamb and her “family.”

Again,  was disappointed that the game wasn’t basically System Shock 3.  I know – it wasn’t supposed to be.  It was just a sequel to BioShock.  But System Shock 2 was such a terrific title that anything with *Shock in the name is automatically associated with it.  And there’s a bit of a let-down when it doesn’t deliver.  BioShock Infinite is going to face the same criticism, no matter how unwarranted it may be.

There have been some improvements over game mechanics present in the first BioShock game…  Plasmids and weapons can now be used simultaneously – left-click to fire a gun, right-click to unleash a plasmid.  Hacking no longer involves guiding some kind of liquid through pipes.  You don’t have to gather odd scraps to build custom ammunition.  And the dynamic with exploiting Little Sisters to gather ADAM is much better.

But, of course, I still have some complaints…

To start with, I really thought they could have fleshed-out the RPG mechanics better.  And this goes back to my disappointment that it wasn’t more like System Shock 2.  There’s no inventory system.  There are no stats to improve.  There’s no real game-changing decisions to be made since you can always swap out your plasmids and tonics at a later date.  It is, basically, a shooter.

Which isn’t a bad thing.  I was definitely looking for a good shooter.  And BS2 definitely delivered in that respect.  But it really feels like they could have done so much more with the game.

Another area I wished they’d done more with is the setting – Rapture.  We’re again starting out after Rapture has gone to hell.  The game is set after the events of BioShock, so Rapture is in even worse shape than the first time around.  Everything is broken…  Everything is leaking…  You’ve got splicers roaming the streets, attacking anything that moves…  Pure chaos.

The opening scene shows you in your role as a Big Daddy escorting your Little Sister through a Rapture that’s still intact.  I really wanted to see more of it…  To wander around with my Little Sister through a Rapture that was still alive and healthy and functional.  I thought it would be cool, perhaps, to witness the descent into chaos.  To be there at that fateful New Year’s Eve party when the bomb went off and the rioting started.  But that doesn’t happen.  And it feels like a wasted opportunity.

Additionally…  Rapture looks a little too dead to still be alive.  Everywhere you go, everything you see, is broken.  Windows smashed, doors crushed, water leaking, flickering lights, rust, rubble…  The place looks like it’s barely standing.  You’ve got random splicers crawling out of the woodwork and attacking you at every turn.  And yet, somehow, people are carrying on with their lives behind the scenes.  Or, at least, that’s the assumption…

There’s a quick scene in Fontaine Futuristics where Alex the Great berates somebody for stealing office supplies and fires them.  Which suggests that there are other people still doing their jobs somewhere.

Later on, Sinclair is turned into a Big Daddy.  Which suggests that somewhere you’ve got enough doctors and equipment to make that transformation happen.

And you’ve constantly got Dr. Lamb preaching over the PA system…  And there’s still air to breathe…  And there’s still electricity to light the place…  All of which suggests that somebody out there is still keeping things running.

But you never see any of that.  There’s never a single mechanic working on something, who screams and runs when the fighting starts.  Never a single scientist or doctor just going about their business.  No civilians anywhere, aside from the occasional Big Daddy and his Little Sister – and even they get dragged into the fight.

Speaking of Big Daddies…  I expected more interesting mechanics from playing as a Big Daddy.

Granted, you’re playing an alpha series Big Daddy, not the same model as the others you see throughout BioShock.  You don’t stomp around in that slow, heavy, deliberate way that they do.  You don’t have a weapon permanently grafted onto your arm.  And you can use plasmids.

But I really expected it to feel more like playing a Big Daddy…

You get a drill right away.  And a rivet gun a little later.  And I expected those to be staples.  I expected those to be my main, go-to weapons.  I expected to be firing slow, deliberate shots from a distance; and then closing in for melee with a charge of some sort.  But, instead, you wind up getting all sorts of standard FPS weapons…

You pick up a machine gun, and a shotgun, and a spear gun that’s basically a sniper rifle, and a rocket/grenade launcher…  And the gameplay winds up feeling like basically any other shooter out there.

Which, again, isn’t a bad thing…  But it really feels like a missed opportunity.

My last real complaint is with the Big Sisters.  Again, they feel like a missed opportunity.

The first few encounters with a Big Sister are very dramatic.  She’s flipping across the room like a ninja…  Kicking your ass, and then running away before you can retaliate.  Then she shatters the window and swims away, while you’re left completely disoriented.  Later she does some kind of psychic scream and blows out all the screens in one room, then yanks you down the hallway.  There’s a real feeling that you’re out of your league.  Like she’s capable of things you can’t even imagine, and you’re going to get you ass handed to you on a silver platter.

But then you kill her…  And after those initial battles, they’re just fairly normal enemies.  There isn’t anything especially dramatic about them.  No more cool, scripted events where they shatter windows or blow out television screens.  They just come running when you harvest/rescue a Little Sister…  They’ve got some cool moves when you’re fighting them, but it really isn’t anything you’re incapable of yourself.  And then you kill them, and get a nice ADAM bonus…

They become just another enemy.  A periodic mini-boss of sorts, but nothing more.  That “oh my god what the hell is that?!” feeling is just gone.  They weren’t scary…  They weren’t overwhelming…  They weren’t something to be feared and avoided…  There was never a pause when harvesting/rescuing a Little Sister…  Never the thought that maybe I didn’t want to do this, because Big Sister might object…

And, again, it feels like a wasted opportunity.  Those first few encounters were very, very cool.  They could’ve made the Big Sister into something to genuinely be feared.  Something that would really give you pause.  And, instead, they just turned her into another monster.  A rare spawn, that dropped ADAM when killed.

Don’t get me wrong, the game was a lot of fun.  The city of Rapture is a terrific setting.  Dr. Lamb made a very creepy antagonist.  And I thoroughly enjoyed myself.  I’d definitely play another BioShock game…

It just feels like they could do so much more with the franchise.

Looks good…  I like the retro-futuristic thing they’re continuing.  And the new setting looks terrific.  I’m just not sure I’ll be able to enjoy playing it much, with my fear of heights…

Having played through BioShock now, I’m left with a desire to see more of the city of Rapture.  That game really didn’t end the way I wanted it to…  I would really have liked to see some kind of sandbox type mode at the end, so I could continue wandering around.

So, I’ve fired it up once more and I’m playing through it again…this time I plan on being evil – I’m going to harvest every Little Sister that I see.  Maybe the evil ending will be a bit more rewarding than the good one was.

So, I finished BioShock. Terrific game, lots of fun. Probably one of the better games I’ve played in a while…definitely the best shooter I’ve played in a very long time. Very atmospheric, very creepy, interesting storyline. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. But there are a few things I’m not terribly happy with…

As I’ve said elsewhere, I wasn’t much impressed with the moral dilemma presented in BioShock. The whole question of whether you harvest or rescue the Little Sisters just didn’t have that much of an impact on the game for me. Ultimately it appears to have affected the ending I got…but we’ll get to that later…

One of the things I saw advertised time and again was this moral dilemma with the Little Sisters. Review after review touched on it. It stirred up quite a bit of discussion – a game where you could choose to kill little girls, oh my! But ultimately it just really didn’t seem to matter much in the context of the game. There was no strong reason for you to choose one way or the other. You were never ADAM-starved enough that harvesting a Little Sister was really necessary, and they didn’t make the harvesting process gut-wrenching enough that you’d actually want to avoid it. The choice just didn’t matter.

And speaking of choices… This game, or the characters in it at least, talks a lot about choices. Ryan goes on and on about men and parasites…about choosing and obeying…about free will… Yet it seems that I had less choice in this game than your average shooter.

The game itself was very linear. You progressed from one area to the next, step by step, until you finally meet the boss. There was no back-tracking. There was no choice of which section to approach next. This is in rather stark contrast to BioShock’s predecessor System Shock 2. System Shock 2 had you traveling back and forth from one end of the ship to the next…doubling back on yourself…going back to open up new areas and pick up new tools… There was a real feeling of wandering almost aimlessly through a decaying spaceship. BioShock felt more like I was on rails.

There also wasn’t much choice in developing your character…or no difficult choices, at least. You could rebuild your character at any time. There were no consequences as a result of your choices. Beefed up your technical skills too high and you can’t kill a monster? No problem, just run back to the nearest Gene Bank and throw some stuff into combat instead.

Another choice that was notably missing is that of how to end the game. I understand that by choosing to rescue the Little Sisters throughout the game I have essentially chosen the “good” ending…but what if I was just setting them up for betrayal? What if my plan all along was to string them along, get their help, and then seize control of Rapture for myself? Well, too bad – you saved the Little Sisters so you have to be a good guy at the end.

I also felt that BioShock was, ultimately, too easy.  Yeah, I was playing on “normal” rather than “hard,” but it still should have been challenging.  As it is, there seemed to be plenty of ammunition and EVE to go around.  I never really had to worry about running out of resources.  I never had to avoid combat because it wasn’t worth the ammunition/EVE.  I never had to run and hide from anything, not even the Big Daddies.

It seems to me that a game set in a slowly dying undersea city should have more of a “survival horror” feel to it.  Some limited resources, or some overwhelming odds, or some unkillable enemies.  Something to really make you wonder if you’re going to get out of this alive.

And finally, I really don’t think they did enough with the setting of the game.  Rapture is a city built under the sea, you’re surrounded by water.  The city itself has been the victim of combat and negligence, it is slowly falling apart.  There are leaks here and there…showers of water falling from the ceiling…plenty of windows that look out into the ocean…  But the water itself never really poses a threat.

In the first few minutes of the game, as you’re being led through basically a gameplay tutorial, there is a moment where one of the tunnels collapses and you have to quickly run through to the other side as water rushes in around you.  That is the one and only time something like that happens.

I kept looking around at all the windows, waiting for one of them to shatter.  I kept waiting for a room to suddenly fill up with water.  I kept expecting to have to swim towards safety and slam some bulkhead behind me.  But it just didn’t happen.

With so much emphasis placed on the fact that Rapture was built beneath the sea…it was disappointing that the water just didn’t matter.  It could have been built in the middle of a desert for all that the water actually affected gameplay.

All of which is not to say that it was a bad game.  It really is very good.  I truly enjoyed myself over the last few days.  But I do think there are some things that could have been done better.

Well, I feel kind of stupid.  I just figured out how to hack the turrets in Bioshock.

I’ve been muttering about these damned turrets for about a week now.  It seems like you should be able to hack them…  You can hack just about anything else in the game…  And there are several places where characters make a reference to hacking the turrets or setting up a defense…  But I just couldn’t pull it off.

They’d shoot and shoot and shoot.  I’d run up, ducking and weaving, get into range…and not have the ability to hack them.  Wave the mouse cursor around, click frantically, hit the hack button…nothing.  Eventually I’d get so shot up that I’d have to kill the turret just to make it go away.

Turns out you need to disable them first with a blast from the Lightning Bolt plasmid.  Then you can stroll up and hack them all you want.

I’m really struck by how similar Bioshock is to System Shock 2.  This certainly isn’t a bad thing – System Shock 2 was a terrific game.  The problem is that there have been a few changes for the worse in Bioshock, which are made all the more noticeable by the obvious similarities to System Shock 2.

The skill system, for example, is completely gone.  Where you used to have to train up various skills in System Shock 2 you can now do pretty much anything and everything you want to right from the start in Bioshock.

In System Shock 2 you actually developed a character that was somewhat unique to your playstyle.  If I put lots of points into hacking and other technical skills my combat abilities would suffer – meaning that I would need to use my hacking and technical skills to overcome the challenges.  I couldn’t be both a master hacker and a master gunman.  It was one or the other.

Character development now consists of simply swapping in the right plasmids and tonics to suit your needs at the moment, and then replacing them with something else when your needs change.  There is really no penalty to changing your plasmids and tonics out.  All you have to do is find one of the many Gene Banks and spend a few moments pointing and clicking.

Research is also greatly simplified…  In System Shock 2 you’d have to collect a couple organs from your victim, then go locate the appropriate chemicals, then do the research.  I recall sitting in a relatively safe corner of one deck and looking at the map, wondering if it was worth the effort of traversing several monster-infested floors to get the chemicals I needed to complete my research.  In Bioshock you simply take a picture or two.  You may need to take several pictures…it may take you a few tries…but there is really very little time and effort involved in researching your enemies.

The inventory system is gone…which is both a blessing and a curse.  It’s much easier to keep track of your various ammo types in Bioshock, but it’s harder to keep track of everything else.  You can’t carry food around with you, there’s no body armor or anything like that, and there’s no straightforward way to keep track of all the various U-Invent components you’re carrying around.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m thoroughly enjoying Bioshock.  It just seems like a few things were changed that really shouldn’t have.

So, the developers are claiming that no two people will play Bioshock the same way. That every time you play it will be different in some way. And while I don’t want to call them lairs, I certainly haven’t seen any evidence of that yet.

Sure, I haven’t been playing all that long… I just got to Arcadia. But so far the game seems pretty linear. There really hasn’t been much choice of where I go or what I do. And most of the encounters have been very straightforward as well – no real chance to avoid the critters, and hardly any opportunity to do anything underhanded.

Hopefully things will get more interesting as the game progresses…