Once again, there will be quite significant spoilers about (potentially) both Bioshock games, so read at your own risk.
After one final, long sit-down with Bioshock 2, I made it to the end. Mostly it was a game of shootin' dudes, and shoot dudes I did. Shoot and shock and burn and hypnotize, confuse, cover in insects, beat down, et cetera. The very first thing I took away from Bioshock 2 was, "Damn, that felt good."
A number of significant refinements have been made to the core shooting mechanics, addressing exactly the problems I had with the first game's action. The actual act of aiming is much smoother and much easier to manage; you'll never find yourself spinning about while trying to find exactly who's shooting you.
Subject Delta is also a physically more capable fellow than Quiet McUn-named from the prequel. In the first Bioshock, for some baffling reason, you could not hold your Plasmid hand and gun hand up at the same time, even though they were two separate hands. Now that you can have a Plasmid going while you shoot, you can provide back-up fire by covering your ass with plasmids while you reload a larger weapon, such as a shotgun or a grenade launcher. On top of that, you're also blessed with a melee attack, which comes in handy to stop charging enemies or just show those fuckers who's boss around these parts. Gunplay is handled much better in Bioshock 2 than previously, and that makes it a much more fun game.
Around the end of the game, you're put into the body of a Little Sister to free yourself from the restraints that Sophia Lamb has put you into to wait for you to die (with an acknowledgement to Vita-Chambers, saying that you need to die naturally else you be revived). Inhabiting this Little Sister, you see the world in a different way. Rapture is a city on a decades-long trip of decay. Leaks have spring everywhere, corpses and blood litter the ground. Big Daddies are in algae-covered diving suits, toting drills that are soaked in gore.
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| One of the instructional posters seen by a Little Sister |
This struck me as amazingly sad. Wandering around a city I had spent fifteen hours in, knowing what a complete shithole it was, and then seeing it through the eyes of what is essentially a re-purposed and brainwashed human being. The whole idea is really hit home when you see statues of Subject Delta that depict meetings with characters you have had and the choices you made. Regardless of whether you killed the person, or spared them, the Little Sisters saw it as the 'right thing', looking up to you as their literal Daddy. "Subject Delta meets Dr. Gil," and then it showed Delta strangling a snake, a reference to original sin. In reality, I had actually electrocuted a defenseless, insane man while he begged me for his life. An act that was clearly, purely terrible and selfish had resulted in the Little Sisters erecting a mental memorial to commemorate how amazing I was.
There's more to the sequence that just that, but I really do recommend that you pick up Bioshock 2 if you can. I think it tops its predecessor in nearly every way, and you owe it to yourself if you want a game with some heavy-hitting themes and consequences. I'm going to cut it short here because I feel like I'm rambling on, but Bioshock 2 is a game that I won't soon forget.
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