| 03 April 2010
Not to take away from Steve's excellent review of BioShock 2, I finished up this game last week and decided to award my utter tardiness with a review recap of my own.
I've written about this fact before and have mentioned it on our podcast, but I simply never realized that playing BioShock 2 meant that I was going to reenter Rapture and shoot up some splicers. I guess all of the mediocre press about the game left me thinking that I wasn't going to enjoy myself. Little did I know that a game that's 80% as good as one of my favorite games of all time is still pretty freaking fun. The gameplay, graphics, sounds are almost identical to its predecessor, and you'll hear no complaints from me in those departments. Sadly, the story doesn't live up to the first game (but really, what does?) but it's still good enough to keep me playing. True, some of the story mechanics really start to wear thin by the end (just go through that door…oh no!…some new element is keeping you from getting there), but there are enough new gameplay mechanics (wielding both plasmids and guns in particular) that provide enough depth that I was rarely bored with the game.
I have a few gripes that I'd like to address, but they're minor at best. A lot of the level layouts were confusing and I found myself lost a few times. It seemed like there were an overwhelming number of audio diaries this time around (100), but apparently the first game had over 120. I think they were just placed in really inconvenient places, which forced me to comb over every pixel of Rapture whether I liked it or not. None of the guns felt particularly powerful, even after upgrading them, but I felt that way in the first game, too.
Sure, 75% of my experience may have been fueled by nostalgia, I still had a great time playing through BioShock 2. I had some complaints, but there were enough clever gameplay and story tricks to make this game worth a rental. It didn't change my life, but it did let me revisit my favorite underground dystopia again.
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