A great, atmospheric, sequel with some alarming oversights in what made the original so brilliant....
User Rating: 8.5 | BioShock 2 PC
Of course I'll go back and update this as I continue. I'm only a few hours in and already there are some things niggling at me. The graphics are in keeping with the original, but everything is just a bit 'snazzier.' The direct x 10 surfaces are pretty much everywhere. I do miss the 'old' hacking from the original game, but I must admit that the new mechanic keeps the focus in the game and has better 'immersion.' That being said, the new mechanic lacks the whimsy of the original. The main thing that is bugging me is the 'soul' of the piece. The original Bioshock should have won the Academy Award for art direction. The rooms, the flow of the architecture, everything told you you were IN Rapture. So far in Bio2, there is too much awareness of it's 'gameness.' When you get the telekinesis plasmid there just happens to be a machine that shoots stuff in that room....and immediately after you are shown into a room simply FULL of explosive things you can throw with your mind. There is simply no logic within the world for this. In the original, the tennis ball machine made sense because this was the room for 'testing' said plasmid. Secondly, and this is also nitpicky, the developers go a great length to show you are are IN the Big Daddy suit. And they do a great job of slightly altering the HUD without being distracting. But you have underwater sequences right off the bat as if to say to the player "HEY THIS IS A DIFFERENT GAME AND YOU CAN BE UNDERWATER NOW." That's great....I love it...but then why do the developers have you be able to eat and drink and smoke to gain eve/health just as you did in the first game? It makes no sense. You are in a HELMET....they keep reminding me I'm in a helmet....how the hell am I eating potato chips? There have already been several instances of these 'this is a game' flubs so far.....as I said, I'll continue to update.
The second distraction is more disturbing I'm afraid. The voice overs. Some of the same actors have been employed and the actor playing Andrew Ryan is, as before, simply brilliant. But either they replaced Tannenbaum, or I simply didn't notice how awful she was in the first game (I haven't been able to find the VO cast list for Bioshock 2 online yet). Her accent is a positively embarrassing mess of a mix of Russian and German...and she sounds about 20 (I'm an actor, so I'm overly picky about this sort of thing...but hire a damn dialect coach for God's sake). Then you get a 'Southern' character....who sounds almost exactly like Matthew McConahey....which takes me RIGHT out of my diving suit let me tell you. Not only does bad voice acting take you out of the world, but it lacks the perfect sense of 'period' that the first game enjoyed. Don't want any of this to seem like I'm not loving the game. Bioshock is an IP that I consider to be brilliant and damn near perfect. I just hope this sequel gets better as it goes and not worse......
