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Bioshock 2 by TAKE2
Product SummaryBrand: TAKE2 Audio: English (Unknown) Published: 2010-01-31 Release Date: 2009-02-09 Platform: Xbox 360 Model: 710425395536 Color: One Color Publisher: TAKE2 Product features: - Online and offline multiplayer modes including: Free-For-All, and Team Death Match and more.
- Return to the underwater city of Rapture where now the 'The Big Sister' is the toughest creature around.
- Play as the original the Big Daddy as you harness raw strength to battle Rapture?s most feared denizens as you battle powerful new enemies.
- New game mechanics including the ability to wield plasmids and weapons simultaneously; flashback missions detailing how you became the Big Daddy
- New game environments including Fontaine Futuristics, headquarters of Fontaine's business empire and the Kashmir Restaurant.
Video Game Reviews of Bioshock 2Customer Review: Bioshock 2 - Summary: 4 Stars
To understand what to expect from Bioshock 2 you really must have played the Original, capital O intentional. Bioshock 1 exposed players into a very refreshingly original world, a city under the sea. Not only that, but it told a story that was absolutely riveting along the way. The characters of Andrew Ryan, Atlas, Fontaine, and all the others you meet and find along the way are brilliantly and professionally voiced, as they are in Bioshock 2 as well. The difference between Bioshock 1 and 2 though, is that the main villian is hardly interesting at all. Ryan was intriguing because he not only conceived and built rapture, but it was humanly easy to understand his desire for success of Rapture. On the flipside, I felt Lamb was made into something she wasn't. She wasn't a builder and she didn't care for anything but herself, which contradicted everything she talked about over the radio signals to a degree. The things that Ryan mentioned and talked about, "escaping the tyranical governments on the surface" were and still are very real historic events. In a world where governments ARE run by tyrants who oppress and outright slaughter their citizens, it was easy for me to get behind the whole idea of Rapture. This wasn't the case with Lamb, with the abscense of Ryan, she was a free reigning psychopath who was hellbent on domination at all costs and this severely hurt my sense of wonder and care for the world of Rapture. With Bioshock 1, the ficticious world was grounded in reality to the extremes, whether the player knew it or not. This simply wasn't true about the story in Bioshock 2. Without spoiling too much more, i'll just say I give the actual story behind Bioshock 2 a 6/10. Bioshock 1 was definately a 11/10, if you get my emphasis. I've never played another game before or since Bioshock 1 that had a better story, environment and way of telling it than that original.
That brings me to the story Telling. I love the Bioshock series audio tapes. It gets somewhat mundane by the time I played through Bioshock 2 to be picking them up everywhere, because I dont get the same "oooh i can't wait to hear what it says". As I mentioned above, the world of rapture in Bioshock 2 just isn't as interesting for the reasons I mentioned and because of this, the tapes which add a lot of immersion suffered a little bit. The story telling itself was however almost as good as it was in Bioshock 1. There were elements of the gameplay that overlapped and hurt the story telling, such as the constant mantra that is repeated throughout the course of Bioshock 2 "hurry up, stop trying to soak in the story and enviornment and just get to the next objective" for no tangible reason. In the original Bioshock, there was a sense of exploration. Eventhough games like this tend to be more linear than say a Fallout 3 title, Bioshock 1 still managed to capture a lot of exploration wonder because as a character in the game, I felt free to excerise exploration. A good example of Bioshock 1 was Fort Frolic. This map for me was like a great amount of relief from the constant "hurry your butt up kid" mentality that fontaine pushed. Like comedy relief does for highly dramatic movies, a Fort Frolic where you end up somewhere unexpected and feel like your fully absorbed in the wonder of it all would have done Bioshock 2 a lot of good. I felt a constant pressure to just get to the next objective y so I could get to the next objective x for this reason. At a point in Bioshock 2, it just completely stopped trying to entertain and just threw out roadblocks 1 after another. I give the story telling a 5/10.
As far as the technology behind the game, if I were to remain objective here I'd have to break it out into a few categories. Performance wise, Bioshock 1 ran flawlessly for me at 1920 x 1200 on my Radeon 4850 with everything but Anti Ailsising turned on. I heard before Bioshock 2's release, that tweaks to the engine for better graphics had been made, making it look better and running even faster. I can't remember 1 time in the whole course of Bioshock 2, playing 1920 x 1200 w/ 0 AA that my framerate ever dropped under 60. It felt smooth as butter the whole way through. On the performance aspect, I give it a 10. Good graphics do not a good game make, and I was thrilled to hear Bioshock 2 was going to focus on making a good game versus one with graphics I can't enjoy anyway. Bioshock series is not a series for the extreme computing junky, it's a series for people who want amazing use of artistic style and a balance of technology.
Another aspect of the technology is more of how it's used than the technology itself. This meaning Artistic Direction, as hinted to above. Bioshock 1 and Bioshock 2 share similar philosophies with art direction. The thing about Bioshock 1 was that in the broader sense, a city at the bottom of the sea is impossible, right? Well, Bioshock 1's art team made it believable. Everything in Bioshock 1 had a sort of hand drawn glow to it, as does much of Bioshock 2. This is largly the same with Bioshock 2. Most things looked hand drawn, but I absolutely hated the level designs the developer came up with. Oftentimes it felt more like I was on a spaceship with many corridors then anywhere real on earth or at least locations inspired by earth. In the original, the level design was used to captivate the player into thinking the environments were or could be real, and the artistic style and hand drawn nature used in both games simply lit the environments of the Original up with life. With Bioshock 2, the environments are very gorgeous at times and at times very believable, but the level designs that resulted in a "roadblock for a roadblock's" sake philosophy was overused in Bioshock 2, killing a lot of the immersion in most levels for myself. Some places in the game made my jaw drop though with how awesome it was. In the original Bioshock, the little sisters can be seen walking about rapture, speaking about seeing angels in the sky and puppy dogs, but what you see is a violent world, dangerous and often gritty and destroyed. What made my jaw drop was how Bioshock 2 showed you the perspective of what the little sisters see and how it meshed with the "reality" as seen by the player's main character. When the level design allowed the artistic style of the levels to be brought to life, things like that make the story come alive. When the level design doesn't give the artistic teams much to work with, i mean how many inspiring corridors can a game have, the world and immersion suffer greatly. As far as Artistic Direction go, i'll give it a 3/10 for Level Design and Actual Graphical art a 10.
As I said, It's as true as mathematics that good graphics do not a good game make. Bioshock 2 uses the same Unreal 2 engine with lots of modifications by the developers. It runs great, was stable (never crashed for me and alt tabbing was flawless). I believe they dub it Unreal 2.5 or some such, because it uses "some" technology from the Unreal 3 engine. Personally I hate the Unreal Engine, because it seems every game I get interested in that uses it ends up sucking on technological grounds, but it was clear that the developers of Bioshock 1 and 2 know how to use the Unreal 2+ engine to it's full capacity. Being it's not cutting edge, obviously I couldn't say it's a 10, but i'd still give it an 8/10.
Gameplay I don't even want to comment on because what's fun for one person is torture for another. I liked the gameplay to an extent, but there were points in the game that had me cursing and wanting to throw my keyboard out the window. I played the game through on Medium. It seemed like the difficulty of the game on medium had 2 extremes, way too easy and way too hard. At one point i got 1 shotted by a charging brute, I let off some obsceneties at that because it was during a point where you have to protect a little sister. With enemies coming from every direction non stop and then getting 1 shotted was just extremly annoying. Enemies tend to just... appear. They appear seemly out of nowhere. You can be standing in an open area looking in direction a, and when you turn to direction b for 2 seconds and turn back to direction a, the place can be absolutely swarming with guys you never heard come in, even though they make tons of racket the entire time they're alive. I. Hate. That. It absolutely slaughtered my immersion and was the single thing that made the gameplay worse than the original. The original used this very rarely, Bioshock 2 uses this the whole time. I tend to think and act quickly, and when i have no chance at even reacting because some splicer popped in next to me because the game engine thought it should, it took a lot of fun out of it. Enemies also spawn much more often than the first game. In Bioshock 1, if you went in and cleared out an area, with some exceptions it was mostly clear except for 1 or 2 stragglers that would spawn after certain discoveries were made. Bioshock 2 just had enemies spawning out the wazoo seemingly non stop. Immersion gets killed because the suspension of disbelief is cut. There's definatley a balance between letting the player turn the level into a permanent dull wasteland and just non stop spawning, but the Original game balanced this much, much better.
New enemies... What new enemies? There was 1 new splicer and 1 big sister. All of the old ones were much more dull and boring. Leadhead splicers and thuggish splicers could be heard throughout Bioshock 1 making all kinds of interesting statements about the world they're in. Generally speaking too, when you went and started killing a splicer in Bioshock 1, it stopped telling you about something that happened that day in their casual tone. The enemies in Bioshock 2 are much more dull and boring. They are actually annoying because some of them don't shut up, and at least in Bioshock 1 they often made a little bit of sense in what they said. Bioshock 2 had a lot fewer cases where the enemies were "just there", meaning you didn't see as many splicers talking amongst themselves. This is more of a story telling aspect that overlaps greatly on gameplay. Bioshock 2 seemed more concerned about ambushing the player than making him feel like he's living in an environment crafted not just for him. Bioshock 1 waited until several levels in before using the cheap trick of having a splicer pretend to be dead. In Bioshock 2, this cheap trick is overused to the nth degree. Spider splicers make a return. This splicer is the only one that should be allowed to just "pop in" behind your back, vis a vis their ceiling walk abilities. They were also boring though because they never really said much, they were just a punching bag that was in your way. I don't know what other enemies they could have added, it's not my call anyway, but the baddies in Bioshock 2 suffered a great amount of creative malpractice.
Ammo. Is. Everywhere. I was actually annoyed because I couldn't expend ammo fast enough. I'm a scrounger and I like to collect stuff, and leaving 4 containers in a room chock full of goodies was hard to get used to. By the end of the game, i was leaving twice as much ammo behind as I was using up.
Gameplay wise, I'd say Bioshock 2 was a 6/10. Bioshock 1 for me was a 9/10. I never, ever play through a single player FPS twice, with the exception of Goldeneye on N64 and Bioshock 1, which i've played through now a total of 4 times. Twice on medium, twice on hard for Bioshock 1. Bioshock left me wanting more of the environments and the world the developer made, but Bioshock 2 left me glad the game was over.
Bioshock 2 is NOT more of the same. Many elements that made Bioshock 1 great are NOT present in the sequel, and if they are they are bastardized and diminished. It is a good game overall, but mostly on the merits of the series and the momentum the story and gameplay of the original began with. Virtually everything the developer of Bioshock 2 did was screw good parts of the original up. Honestly, if it had been more of the same I would have been very pleased. I really wanted a true Bioshock 1 sequel, but I doubt that will ever happen now.
Description of Bioshock 2New Page 1Product InformationBioShock 2 is a first-person shooter set in the fictional underwatercity of Rapture. As in the original game BioShock 2 features a blend offast-paced action exploration and puzzle-solving as players follow varyingpaths through the overarching storyline based on the decisions that they areforced to make at various points in the game. In addition to a further fleshingout of the franchise's popular storyline players can look forward to newcharacters game mechanics weapons locations and a series first multiplayergame options.Product Features Online and offline multiplayer modes including: Free-For-All and Team Death Match and more. Return to the underwater city of Rapture where now the 'The Big Sister' is the toughest creature around. Play as the original the Big Daddy as you harness raw strength to battle Rapture's most feared denizens as you battle powerful new enemies. New game mechanics including the ability to wield plasmids and weapons simultaneously; flashback missions detailing how you became the Big Daddy; the ability to walk outside the airlocks of Rapture to discover new play areas and many more. New game environments including Fontaine Futuristics headquarters of Fontaine's business empire and the Kashmir Restaurant. Follow-up to BioShock, 2K Games' critically acclaimed and commercially successful 2007 release, BioShock 2 is a first-person shooter set in the fictional underwater city of Rapture. As in the original game, BioShock 2 features a blend of fast-paced action, exploration and puzzle-solving as players follow varying paths through the overarching storyline based on the decisions that they are forced to make at various points in the game. In addition to a further fleshing out of the franchise's popular storyline, players can look forward to new characters, game mechanics, weapons, locations and a series first, multiplayer game options.  The new power in Rapture. View larger. |  Duel wield plasmids & weapons. View larger. |  New choices as Mr. B. View larger. |  Franchise first multiplayer options. View larger. | The Story Set approximately 10 years after the events of the original BioShock, the halls of Rapture once again echo with sins of the past. Along the Atlantic coastline, a monster — somehow familiar, yet still quite different from anything ever seen — has been snatching little girls and bringing them back to the undersea city. It is a Big Sister, new denizens of Rapture who were once one of the forgotten little girls known as Little Sisters, known to inhabit the city's dank halls. No longer a pawn used to harvest ADAM, the dangerously powerful gene-altering lifeblood of Rapture, from the bodies of others and in turn run the risk of being harvested herself, the Big Sister is now the fastest and most powerful thing in Rapture. You, on the other hand are the very first Big Daddy, in fact the prototype, that for some reason has reactivated. You are similar to the Big Daddies familiar from the original BioShock, but also very different in that you possess free will and no memory of the events of the past ten years. The question is, as you travel through the decrepit and beautiful fallen city beneath the waves, hunting for answers and the solution to your own survival, are you really the hunter, or the hunted? Gameplay and Multiplayer In BioShock 2 players will take on the role of the original Big Daddy, not that of game one protagonist, Jack. As a Big Daddy you will have access to all the strengths and weapons of a standard Big Daddy, including the drill and rivet gun. More importantly you also possess free will and the ability to use plasmids and gene tonics — genetic modifications allowed for through ADAM, a stem cell harvested from conquered enemies, or sea slugs outside the Rapture air lock, and powered by the in-game injectable serum known as EVE, which can be found, captured or purchased. Plasmids and gene tonics provide a wide range of aggressive and passive abilities which can be upgraded and arranged for quick use. The ability to use plasmids and tonics gives you a decided edge over other Big Daddies and most other denizens of Rapture, excluding the powerful Big Sisters. In addition, due to their role as a Big Daddy, players will experience a new relation to the Little Sisters. Upon defeating standard Big Daddys you are given the familiar choice as to whether to harvest or adopt them. Harvesting gains you ADAM immediately, but could alter your path through the game, while adopting makes you responsible for Little Sisters, who then accompany you through Rapture, but also provide aid and warning in times of danger. Additional gameplay features include: new plasmids, weapons and the ability to combine these two. The game also features the anticipated multiplayer modes. Several of these are team-based, allowing up to 10 players. Within these players are provided with a rich prequel experience that expands the origins of the BioShock fiction, and allows you to play as one of several characters pulled from Rapture's history before the events of the first game. Key Features - The Big Sister - No longer just something to be harvested or not, the Big Sister is the most powerful resident in Rapture.
- You Are the Big Daddy - Take control with the original prototype Big Daddy, and experience the power and raw strength of Rapture?s most feared denizens as you battle powerful new enemies.
- New Plasmids - New plasmids such as "Aero Dash" allowing for bursts of speed over short distances, and "Geyser Trap" a stream of water used as a jump pad and electrical conductor, join the ample list of Plasmids from the original game.
- New Game Mechanics - BioShock 2 contains many new gameplay mechanics. Just a few of these are: the ability to wield plasmids and weapons simultaneously; flashback missions detailing how you became the Big Daddy; the ability to walk outside the airlocks of Rapture to discover new play areas, and many more.
- New Locations - Just a few of the locations and environments debuting in BioShock 2 are Fontaine Futuristics, headquarters of Fontaine's business empire and the Kashmir Restaurant.
- Evolution of the Genetically Enhanced Shooter - Innovative advances bring new depth and dimension to each encounter, allowing players to create exciting combinations to fit their style of gameplay.
- Return to Rapture - Set approximately 10 years after the events of the original BioShock, the story continues with an epic, more intense journey through one of the most captivating and terrifying fictional worlds ever created.
- Genetically Enhanced Multiplayer - Earn experience points during gameplay to earn access to new weapons, plasmids and tonics that can be used to create hundreds of different combinations.
- Experience Rapture?s Civil War - Players will step into the shoes of Rapture's citizens and take direct part in the civil war that tore Rapture apart.
- See Rapture Before the Fall - Experience Rapture before it was reclaimed by the ocean and engage in combat over iconic environments in locations such as Kashmir Restaurant and Mercury Suites, all of which have been reworked from the ground up for multiplayer.
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