And once again, we put down the mouse on a game that has sat in my backlog for years. In fact this game sat on my backlog for almost a decade after getting it dirt cheap. At the time I had just finished the previous game and decided it wasn’t so much bad as I was disappointed with the developer repeating themselves… so to get more on the cheap? Why not? So I picked it up and let is sit around to play “one day.”
Sadly, it didn’t work out, as this game is just broken… too broken to enjoy.
Story: 2 years before the events of the original Bioshock, you were created. You were the first of your kind: a Big Daddy who was bound to a specific Little Sister, preventing you from ever becoming aware and leaving, since your life literally depends on being close enough to your specific little sister to keep your body from shutting down. Dubbed Delta, you made your way into Rapture, and life was as well as it could be for a creature such as you. But then came the day Sophia Lamb intervened.
On that day, she informed you point blank that the little sister you were bonded to was actually her daughter Eleanor. And with her back in her possession, Sophia ordered you to put a gun to your head and pull the trigger.
10 years have passed, and trouble is once again brewing in Rapture, and for reasons as of yet not known, a vita chamber (a device designed to restore life to the dead) restores you to a broken down Rapture turned into a Hell for those who remain. Sophia Lamb has taken over and is now kidnapping children from the surface to make new Little Sisters, and the one to control them all is her very daughter who you are still bound to. Being given this information by one who looks to end her project, you begin your trek across Rapture to find and rescue Eleanor before her mother can make her into something else… and before you die from being separated forever.
From this basic point, you will make a bee-line through a rather straight forward story about your quest to survive, Sophia’s quest to finish you off both as a threat to her plans and as reminder of the philosophy that made and ran this underwater world before she took it, and her daughter’s desperate need for you to live and save her from being made something she should never be. There is very little in the way of twists and turns in this story, but that does not mean it is all there is. Rather you will find details to fill out the events that lead to this point in the form of tape recordings you can play… explaining individual character’s drives as well as the conflict between Andrew Ryan and Sophia Lamb in how to run the city each being a proxy for real-world philosophies in battle even today.
To this end, this story is actually fairly deep if you have the patients (or ability) to dig in. And yet if you don’t want to hear it, that is fine too, as this game manages to keep it in the background for you to be kept aware of rather then preachy about what is good and what is bad. Frankly there are a lot of modern game devs/writers who could learn a thing or two here.
8/10
Graphics: Bioshock 2 is a fairly stylized game that has aged fairly well. Coming out before the Unreal 3 engine, the game uses a hybrid of 2 and new features 3 would accommodate and using that power to produce a rather nice looking view of the ruinous world that is Rapture well after it’s fall. The 1950s aesthetic is alive and well here, if crumbling from abuse and neglect.
True, the detail available would not stand to more modern games, but that does not mean it does not look good. Rest assured, it does, at least most of the time. This game does have a really weird graphical issue, however, as despite the game running at the full framerate my monitor allows (60 fps) without issue, not everything within the game did. Rather it seems like a lot of the animations, be it a splicer being knocked on their ass or floating objects from someone using telekinetics, are stuck running at a mere 30 fps. If the whole game ran like this, it might be a gripe for some, but at least it would be cohesive and feel like it was part of the same picture. Instead only limiting some of these results in them looking out of place and breaking the immersion the game is trying to create.
6/10
Sound: Sound, however, faired much better. Music is used as a utility rather then background, leaving calmer moments to your footsteps echoing through empty halls and resonating in lonely thuds. But when things pickup, the music will often come in to hype up the energy when you are being hunted by Mrs. Lamb’s army of fanatical splicers. The result is just great use of a descent soundtrack that will leave you with the feel a lot more then the actual memory of the music.
Nor does the rest of the audio leave this to work on it’s own, as all the sound effects also fit their rolls brilliantly. From your aforementioned stomping around as a lumberous big daddy, to many of the weapons you fire, to the meaty thunks that will almost make you feel when you get hit, these will keep the game immersive.
But as with many games, the voices are definitely the star of this game. Splicers will babble about details of their life before messing up their genetics as well as when they find you, but this is just a small detail. The big stars here will be the communications you get and the tape recorders you find. In these moments, you will get a character’s motivations, requests/orders for you, or even historical events as they saw them. These are very well made and will be something to look forward to.
8/10
Gameplay: At it’s heart, Bioshock 2 is an FPS game. You will wander the halls, killing enemy splicers who get in your way as you march across Rapture in your quest to find and rescue Eleanor. To this end, you will come across a small variety of weapons like the drill you start with and handful of guns which will vary in effectiveness, both between the weapon itself as well as the ammunition you use with it. On top of this, you will come across “weapon upgrade” stations which will let you enhance and remove weaknesses to the weapons you choose. However, you should also be warned that the game intentionally does not give you enough upgrades to take them all, so your weapons will vary from others.
In addition to this, you will have the trademark enhancement of the franchise to help as well: plasmids. These can have all kinds of effects from throwing fire to convincing your enemies to be your friends and fight along side you, adding a lot of variety to what you will be able to do when the battle begins.
Which is a very good thing, as the combat in this game did not hold up as well as one would expect requiring this variety. We can starting with the fact that you are relatively weak (at least at first) and easy to put down despite being the lumbering terror of the deep from the original title known as a big daddy. But the limits of your size still manifest in your inability to run at all (literally there is no button for this). This makes you a sitting duck who will have to rely on shooting around corners or when the enemy gets up close opening your drill on them. You are also gonna find these options limited at first, however, as there can be scarce ammo from time to time, including for the drill. This can be managed, but you when you face boss encounters (like other Big Daddies or even defending a little sister while they collect adam for you from splicers) you will find your ability to have the supplies you need very limited.
That is not to say that the game is hard, however, as you can not die for good since, like it’s predecessor, this game will restore you in vita-chambers whenever you actually die, which you will absolutely want, especially in the beginning of the game. Even boss fights will often let you use this to your advantage as the other guy will not heal unless they can find a station (or in the case of a big daddy, their little sister takes care of them). The result is a surface challenge that goes from being a problem to a nuisance almost instantly.
6/10
Bugs: And this is where the game goes from an interesting plot with okay gameplay to absolute shit. This game is notorious for it’s inability to keep running. Yep, we have a game that crashes consistently for just about anyone using currently supported versions of Windows. You can find many tricks to try to help you get the game working, but I personally found them only to prolong the inevitable crash from almost immediately to (sometimes) so much of an hour and a half into the game, and based on my hunting for solutions online, I’m not the only one.
This is actually so bad that I finally put the game down after the game crashed hard enough that my stream software ceased to do any streaming but showed a messed up version of my desktop until I reset the PC. Let me repeat that: The game actually broke my streaming software when it crashed the last time it did… that one taking all of 3 minutes after starting the game. It was the last straw.
Overall: This is another game I really wanted to like. And in fact for a few days I was able to and manage the crashes well enough that they didn’t ruin the game. But then the game began to crash more often and severely enough to get in the way of what I want my computer to do. It’s simply not an acceptable situation.
Score:
0/10
System Requirements:
- AMD Athalon 64 Processor 3800+ (2.4 Ghz) or Pentium 4 530 (3.0 Ghz)
- 2 GB RAM
- Geforce 7800GT with 256 MB VRAM or ATi Radeon X1900 with 256 MB VRAM
- Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7
- 11GB of hand drive space
System Specs:
- AMD FX8350 (4.0 Ghz)
- 16 GB RAM
- Geforce GTX 960 with 4GB VRAM
- Windows 10
Source: Steam
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