Kotaku Preview
The video system is like the new game's system for protecting a Little Sister while she's harvesting Adam life energy (I wrote that in the last single-player preview). These are well-designed additions and alterations to playing a BioShock game. They incentivize players to do the things the first game made possible: Fighting strategically without fear of being aggressive in the process. What was largely an optional style in the first games isn't quite required but certainly more amply rewarded in this sequel.
Forging ahead offers many of the comforts of a BioShock: The reassurance of radio chatter from supposedly allied characters and even the orderliness of radio contact from one's nemesis. There are more moral choices to be made. Pauper's Drop offers one decision of life or death that would seemingly be without controversy. Little Sisters found throughout the game's levels, always accompanied by increasingly powerful Big Daddys, can, at any moment after their Daddy's been defeated, be harvested or saved, offering more choice, more sense of player agency and control.
Yet that inability to backtrack is coupled with something else that makes the mind wander to life beyond (after?) Rapture: The sights of the sea. The clouded green waters outside the Rapture of the first BioShock have been replaced with the unnaturally bright light blue aquatic jungle outside the windows of Rapture in BioShock 2. Sharks and squid swim out there amid sea plants on this Atlantic Ocean floor that are colorful enough to be inviting. And out into this beautiful landscape you will go, more than once and not by choice. The sea is inviting. It makes Rapture feel like a relic of the past.
The sense I get is that I am not long for Rapture or Rapture is not long for me. If Rapture is the star character of BioShock, I wonder with this new game, as I did not with the first, if it can die.
Misdirection is possible. If the first BioShock is any indication, misdirection might even be mandatory. The dread is there anyway, mixed with the joy that two more levels down, the new BioShock 2 plays very well, keeps doling out powers and weapons and new enemy types. It is a game that's coming together well even if there's something — in terms of its fiction and the future of its famous city — that seems like it could be on the verge of blowing apart.
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