Reviews: Behold The Same Damn Place!

I knew I forgot something! Well, more accurately, my delay was a combination of the leg thing, having a temporary job, and writing a novel (well, the first draft. And that's going to spawn at least another blog post,) keeping me busy. I'll try to play catch up in the next week or two, because I have ideas to burn. Starting with this one!

Due my continued being poor-ness, especially with the medical bills still an issue, I've been focusing on renting video games except for a few I got for my birthday last month. And I didn't beat them yet, so I'll worry about them later.

The latest game I rented was Bioshock 2, the not nearly as great sequel to one of the best games of 2007. I'm not saying it's bad; just a sequel not nearly as inspired as the original. The gameplay takes a step forward, but at least two steps back. But it's the story and setting that bothered me the most.

I'll start with the gameplay. The actual controls, at least, are better. The game lets you dual-wield your normal weaponry and magic-emulating plasmid superpowers. Not only does it get easier to select powers, but it's much easier to combine effects. Shock-stun an enemy and crush them in a melee weapon! Charge a super attack while simultaneous shooting enemies! And while there are few new weapons or powers, the ones they get are very cool. The improved versions of old powers lets you dominate enemies to make them long-lasting allies, summon robotic minions, create improved traps, or many more. The camera is replaced with one that records moving pictures (and mercifully doesn't require you to collect more film.) And the spear gun that lets you pin enemies to the wall? Priceless.

Beyond that, though, I wasn't impressed. The big problems include how linear the game became. Unlike the original, once you beat a level, it's gone. You can't return to collect recordings or items you missed, finish up with Little Sisters, or just visit particularly scary or compelling places. And speaking of the Little Sisters, while they cut the number of actual Sisters to only 12, once you collect one, to actually make full use of them, you have to let them collect ADAM from dead bodies while fighting off hordes of enemies who magically find you at that exact time. That barely sounds fun once. 24 per playthrough? This is MMORPG-level tedious.


The game just lacks creativity or even an ability to maintain its own theme. Take the enemies. There are only three new enemies in the game, all rare monsters, so you'll be fighting the same crazy people with melee weapons, guns, and occasional spider or invisibility powers as the last game. And the new guys are a bigger and stronger splicer and effectively two new types of big Daddies. That's EXACTLY what the game needs: more big, melee-heavy enemies that absorb a tons of fire. Why not create some monsters that actually use the potential of genetic engineering? Flying enemies that dive bomb or strafe you? Walking electric fields? Confusing enemies that create illusions or blind you?

And despite the game's premise that you're playing a Big Daddy yourself, albeit a prototype with different powers, you never once feel like one. Most of the weapons look bigger, but they rarely can kill enemies more effectively. The only weapon that really feels Big Daddy-esque is the giant drill weapon. And defensively, you feel far weaker than the first game. I barely last two seconds against enemy attacks. Sure, by the end of the game, I was walking death, but mostly because I was surrounded by three robotic or mind-controlled minions at all times. In other words, it came from the plasmids, nothing Big Daddy-related at all.

But forget all that. Despite the weaknesses, I enjoyed playing the game, just not as much as the original. It was the story and setting that bothered me the most. As scary and/or disturbing as the splicers and Big Daddies are, the really scary thing about the game is the city of Rapture itself, a ruins to fallen ideals populated by brilliant but misguided people who don't deserve the horrific fate of what they have become. A sequel was inevitable, but you can't simply repeat the scary thing in a horror game, but that's exactly what they've done. They just took a half dozen new loonies to replace the ones that screwed everything up last time and pretended that they were always there. Nice try, recordings of Andrew Ryan suddenly interested in new main villain Sofia Lamb! I'm not buying it!

Not that the game's plot is all bad. Once you get past the other new guys WHO WERE ALWAYS THERE and actually confront Sofia Lamb and the main plot-head on, it actually is affecting. Sure, the morality system is barely better than the original, but at least it shows some room for subtlety. And the game's only truly chilling moment, which I'll leave a gap before mentioning on the off chance anyone ever reads this and wants to avoid spoilers...











...appears here when you briefly see the world through a Little Sister's eyes and realize how truly horribly Raptured ruined these girls for personal gain.

But beyond that, the story just didn't grip me. It doesn't even really fit the setting. Sure, a communal government based on socialism is the logical mirror to the original games objectivism, but the latter fits the resulting city and the mad splicers scavenging for power far better than the former. What in the game is remotely for the common good? It's just people killing each other for ADAM all over again. Even the main villain's plan is less altruistic and more standard mad scientist.

I guess none of this would bother me as much if not for the fact that I at least feel I could do better. I had an idea for a sequel since the original came out, so I might as well share it. The trick is remembering that in a horror story, once you introduce the terrifying element, you can't just do it over and over again. That path leads to slasher horror sequels. You have to take that element and tweak it; expand it into a new world that makes it scary again in a whole new way. Compare Alien to Aliens, for example, or how Silent Hill 2 replaced the cult with a new and more personal story and was all the better for it.

In my version of Bioshock 2, shortly after the first game ends, the investigation of the plane crash and results of the ending (good is my canon version,) results in the public at large discovering the now nearly uninhabited Rapture. Soon, both the United States and the USSR have gotten their hooks into the place, both vying for the power that ADAM represents. A few years later, the water is drained, the old bodies disposed of, and Rapture is up and running again! Nothing could possibly go wrong!

With both unfriendly nations present, Rapture is basically Berlin Wall-era Germany underwater. The place is split into two sides, but there is a neutral zone between them and some groups, mostly engineers, are allowed to work in either location. It's the only way the electrical and hydraulics, which weren't built around the bisected city, can work. You play as one of those low-level grunts, too mundane for the leaders of either side to care. All of the sudden, we have political parallels to Ryan's libertarianism in the first game, but it makes perfect sense that they're there. All the men from Washington and beyond, Ryan's greatest fears, are there. And they're about to screw it up just as badly as he did.

That's where the horror of this game comes in. The player knows exactly what's going to happen to New Rapture, especially as the signs of disaster appear. But the characters remain as steadfast in the righteousness of their actions, as insistent that it can't happen again, not with the power of Uncle Sam/the people's will/God on their side! The suspense and horror of the inevitable builds, and by the time you hit the last third of the game, when Rapture again lies in ruins, things are all the more grim because you personally know many of the splicers and know for a fact that when your home went to hell, you did nothing (not that you could.) It allows for a broader ranger of moral options as well. Do you manage to talk you neighbors out of sending their daughter to that new school the government set up? Do you abandoned desperate refugees simply because they're from an enemy nation? Do you risk taking more plasmids early on knowing that, in the longer time frame of this game, you could actually start going mad before the conclusion?

This is a horror game with the ambition of the original Bioshock, one worth buying and not simply renting when you're done with Bayonetta. Which, conveniently, will be my next review! Or at least half of it.