BioShock 2

I literally played BioShock and BioShock back to back so my experience in Rapture was both fresh in my mind and confusing. In BioShock 2 you are one of the first Big Daddys named Delta. You have awoken from your slumber on a mission to find the little sister that you were paired with. You'll have to go all through Rapture to find her, but you'll have to try to stop the minions of Sophia Lamb, a person who was apparently still running things in Rapture after Atlas and Andrew Ryan met their bitter end. You'll get to utilize the drill as well as a wide variety of weapons, and some very familiar plasmid. You'll also get a chance to interact even more with the little sisters who still hunger for the Adam found in the corpses found throughout the game.

Graphically I have to say I thought BioShock looked good, but the second one looked even better. There was a sort of I've seen this before kind of feel, but at the same time it looked great. The parts where you actually get to go outside and walk the ocean floor also gave us a taste of how much this game could do graphically. The enemy designs really didn't change all that much, but there were a couple of new enemies that you had to get through to survive.

The music was still that 40's-esque music that was haunting and eerie, and yet fit the game perfectly. There was also the ambient noises of the splicers whispering and threatening to keep you on your toes. I do have to say that the voice acting was still top notch for this title.

So the control layout changed ever so slightly. Gone is the ability to accidentally consume eve over and over again as you're trying to hack a security bot. You'll have to open up one of the radial menus with the left or right bumper to refill your eve, unless you want to wait till it runs out and then you'll automatically do it. There was also a change to how you replenished your health, no longer were you using the X button but the right direction on the d-pad.

So you've been re-born, in a sense, in rapture, and find out that there is only one person who can make you feel whole, and ironically its the daughter of the one person that you wish you could avoid at all cost, Sophia Lamb. Sophia Lamb is apparently someone with high ambitions who wanted to make the perfect utopian to create an example for all, but with all the power hungry struggling within all the different groups she was cast out, and then came back after the fall of Atlas and Andrew Ryan. She's the reason why you had to be "re-born". You'll have to fight your way through different sections of Rapture, most of them are areas not seen in the first game. Also apparently everything is connected by an underwater trolley, a piece that wasn't in the first game. You'll once again have the chance to add different plasmids ranging from fire, ice, electricity, swarm, and more. You will also have upgradeable weapons at your disposal (shotguns, speargun, rivet gun, launcher, etc). One thing I do have to say is that once again you'll have a camera to capture your enemies so that you can slowly get upgrades, but this time around its a video camera, and I personally felt that it was a much better fit for what it needed to accomplish. There's so much that I wish I could talk about for this game, but to do so would be giving away key parts to the story. What I can say is that there's going to be at least a couple of twists, you'll be faced with some moral choices (most revolving around little sisters), and you're going to be drawn into this underwater city. This of course will keep you playing for hours.

BioShock 2 continues with a strong story, beautiful graphics, and the depth to draw you in start to finish. Sure there are some small little quirks in the game, especially when it comes to the audio recordings you find throughout the game repeating at weird times, but that's no where enough to keep you from enjoying this game. If you like first person shooters with a little bit of a 1940 twist, and lots of enemies coming out you, you'll like this game. This game gets a 9.3 out of 10.