Now Playing: Bioshock 2

What do Arnie Schwarzenegger, Jackie Chan, and a Big Daddy have in common? They all have experience as babysitters.

The first is muscle-bound and speaks in funny accented English, the second does crazy kung-fu, and the third is just plain badass, throwing lightning and fire out of one hand and shooting bad guys dead with the other.

Should be a pretty easy decision who to choose to babysit your kid right?

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(Minor spoilers abound)

I'm having a rollicking good time with Bioshock 2. I was apprehensive about it at first, my concern being that there may not be anything left to talk about, after the first game so blew our minds with its philosophies. I also thought putting you in the suit of a Big Daddy was just a novelty.

But it appears there's a whole lot more left unsaid in the world of Rapture, and playing the Big Daddy rocks the socks off the John Doe protagonist of the first one. I could talk about plenty of awesome things in Bioshock 2 like the improved combat, open-world design, etc. but I'll leave that for the review.

There's just one thing I want to talk about now, and that's the mysteries of Rapture. Bioshock 2 is doing what good sequels should do. Not only is it revealing little by little revelations on the first game, it also keeps adding new layers of mystery to further frustrate us. It's like a lasagna.

And this is a good thing because we've seen Rapture already, in its splendor and initial decline into oblivion. What is new is seeing the city's grimy underbelly, the locales you visit aren't the larger than life fronts that the average citizen will have a gander at but places tucked away, hidden from the public - cesspools of degeneration, rebellion, and squalor. These are also places that were the built the earliest, before gradually becoming forgotten as the city expanded in the name of "progress" and "capitalism".


It's definitely an interesting return to Rapture, especially for fans of the first game. Newcomers will have a good time too no doubt, but I can't help but feel that they are missing out on a lot of nuances and subtext in the second, because they didn't play the first (so go play it).

The levels are all self-contained and connected via an old monorail system. It's a mode of level transition that harks back to the days of Doom's elevators, very static and surprisingly a backward move by 2k Marin; especially when the world in the first game felt more seamless. But when I think about it deeper, the use of this transportation is very much in line with the antiquated, obsolete nature of the world in Bioshock 2. Even the Big Daddy that you play is an obsolete model.

New villain. Sofia Lamb, a psychologist - strangely unmentioned in the first game - and new tyrant to fill the shoes of deceased Andrew Ryan.

She's a strange 'un. Very school headmistress-like, the kind apt to smacking your bottom if you do wrong. She's an A-class uptight bitch hell-bent on killing you. Lamb's also a Collectivist, believing in the power of Many over the Individual, the latter the very ideology that Andrew Ryan built Rapture on and their conflicting beliefs is what got them fighting in the first place.


It's gotten annoying to hear Lamb's voice constantly over PA speakers crowing to splicers to come together as a "group" to destroy "one" person, you. But it definitely emphasizes the herd-like mentality of the citizens of Rapture. They are in need of something new to turn to for "guidance" and "solace" as they watch the city fall apart. It's only in Bioshock 2 that I came to the realization that despite Ryan's well-thought fail-safe plans, he couldn't count on the stability of the very people he sought to build Rapture for.

This sequel is also about "daddy issues". About fathers, mother and daughters, what does it mean to have a relationship with a child, at what lengths will a parent go to protect their own. But Eleanor, my supposed daughter, I'm not really sure whether or not I should trust her. As far as I've gotten into the game, she flits in and out of my mind with our psychic connection, telling me to save her and stop Lamb (her mother). In fact, a tonne of characters, strangers who I hardly see or trust, keep telling me what to do and that annoys the hell out of me.

In Far Cry and the first Bioshock, the protagonist is dropped on a mysterious island/underwater utopia so conveniently aided by a stranger, only to be f*cked in the ass by them ("betrayed", to put it less crudely) at the end of the game. If Bioshock 2 did that to me again, I'd be really pissed. Also, where the hell are the NICE people in Rapture? It's such a tragically depressing game when you're surrounded by bad people all the time (Tenenbaum doesn't count, she's boring). Even Sinclair, your new ally, is not all clean.


Bioshock 2 also reveals the historical development of Big Daddies and Little Sisters, and how that in turn led to the creation of Big Sisters over time. It's quite interesting, but I still can't help but feel, like the sudden emergence of Lamb, that it's all convenient and we're just supposed to digest this information as if it's canon (remember that legendary Ken Levine, creator of Bioshock is not working on this title). And whilst the protagonist of the second game is definitely an insider to the ecosystem of Rapture, he is no different from the first game's protagonist in that both are observers to the thoughts, beliefs of the major players as well as innocent to the city's decline. It would be interesting to play a character that had a part in Rapture's destruction (devs take note for Bioshock 3).

Anyway, it's good so far. The more I play, the more I'm seeing that this is a tighter, more focused experience than the first. This is what good sequels should do (i.e. Mass Effect 2). I'm hoping the story will also culminate into mind-blowing-awesomeness like the first.

Review soon.