DON’T MAKE ME PLAY! BIOSHOCK 2
Don’t like it. Never tried it. Every month we force one of our team to play their most feared game
The first couple of hours of BioShock 2 are overly familiar as I pound the corridors of Rapture and pummel the heads of Splicers as a Big Daddy. Yet it’s far more refined than the first game. The familiar done better.
While the original BioShock ranks as one of my favourite games, its combat is clunky. It’s an RPG dressed up as a shooter, after all. In this sequel combat is vastly improved. I’m turning goons to ice and smashing their statuesque frozen bodies to pieces with ease. It’s a joy to juggle Plasmids and my wheel of weapons to find new combinations. The Pipemania hacking game is gone. In its place is a real time-test of skill, lending a new risk-and-reward tension to bringing gun turrets under my control.
This sequel’s creepy too. The suggested horror of Gil Alexander’s fleshy, Cthulhu-like, ADAM-infused mutation is a sight I still can’t shake off. Yeah, I chose to kill him. Did I do a bad thing? That’s my choice. This sequel still plays with ideas of free will even if the continuous push forwards and reliance on combat can feel at odds with the freer nature and back-tracking of the original. And there’s no revolutionary surprise ending as we had our first time around, but that decision to flush Cthulhu-Alexander like a dead goldfish will have repercussions, I’m sure of it.
Holding everything together is villainess Sofia Lamb. Her obsession with ‘making the world your family’, of collective thought trumping individual thinking, lands with more clarity than the original BioShock’s theme of free will versus destiny. I am in control.
I’m changing the outcome. I am an individual set against Lamb’s plans for ADAM-fuelled world unity – one planet, one Family. It’s an empowering game, even if technically we’ve all played in this pond before.
THAT DECISION TO FLUSH CTHULHUALEXANDER WILL HAVE REPERCUSSIONS.