Descend into rapture...again

Ah, the first Game Shelf of the year. I've finally got some time to play some games that are actually current, but then again when a game becomes six months old it suddenly becomes ancient history. One of these games is "BioShock 2."

"BioShock 2" was released in February of this year by 2K Games for the Xbox 360, PS3 and the PC. It quickly became one of the best-selling games in recent memory.

Oh, 2K, we've had quite an interesting relationship, haven't we? You always manage to impress me with your great stories and settings, but then you make me mad because you don't give me a game that challenges me. Don't get me wrong, I love that you tell great stories, but at least make us work for them.

Anyway, now they have brought us "BioShock 2," the highly anticipated sequel to the 2007 Game of the Year. The year is 1968, and the underwater city of Rapture is still in utter chaos. With Andrew Ryan and Frank Fontaine defeated, a new leader has come to power. Sofia Lamb, a psychiatrist who came to Rapture to help people who were having trouble adjusting to underwater life, has turned the city into a cult called The Family that follows a pseudo-Communist logic.

Enter Subject Delta, a Big Daddy who was the first to be pair-bonded with a Little Sister, a little girl who contains vast amounts of ADAM, a massive power source found in Rapture. Only it turns out Delta's Little Sister is actually Sofia Lamb's daughter Eleanor. After supposedly being killed, he wakes up with no memory and pieces together his past – as well as Lamb's plans for Rapture – and must find a way to stop her.

The narrative drive of the first game is back in full force here and the story is actually a good one. But I actually have some issues with it that I'll bring up later.

The game play does not see many major changes from the first game, but there are certainly plenty of tweaks. First of all, for the first time ever in a 2K game, a wrench is not your starting weapon. But there is an assortment of new weapons that do different kinds of damage.

You also gain the use of plasmids that allow you to have different kinds of superpowers, like telekinesis, creating electricity and fire and many more. The only problem with it is that there are no new plasmids from the first game. They are all the same powers as before. But, in this game you can use them at the same time with your weapons, rather than separately, as in the first game.

Hacking has been revamped so that instead of a plumbing mini-game that manages to freeze time, it becomes a quick-time event that occurs in real time. So, that's two nice little fixes to the game play.

Then there are the Little Sisters. The girls carry what is called ADAM, the driving force behind the psychic abilities that the residents of Rapture wield, and in order to gain plasmids you must extract the ADAM from their bodies, bringing back the moral choice system from the first game. The player can choose to "extract" the ADAM, resulting in the girl's death, but there is higher ADAM reward. On the flip side, the player can choose to save the Little Sister, resulting in lower ADAM; however, the player wins more ADAM later in the game if they follow this path.

There is also a new enemy called Big Sisters, who you must battle after finding all the Little Sisters in an area. They are the Little Sisters from the first game who now have plasmid powers and bad attitudes to match. And, you must fight them after taking out all the Big Daddies, which leaves you with little ammo, EVE and health items, and they're the toughest enemies of the game. It's cheap and you will die fighting them… a lot.

But a new element is added to this called Gathering. If you choose to do this, you can adopt a Little Sister from the Big Daddy you defeated and take her around the area to find corpses that contain ADAM so you can collect more. But when you do this, you get hounded by enemies and the task is damn near impossible, as you will keep dying and have to start over again. It's just like the last mission in the first game. You know, the part that nobody liked?

Health items and ammo are scattered everywhere. Dying is still just a temporary nuisance rather than something to avoid, as you'll be resurrected in Vita-Chambers, one located every 20 feet. The game's difficulty has shot up quite a bit though, and you're going to see the inside of a vita chamber a lot more than your last trip to Rapture.

If there was one thing I liked more in this game than the first, it was the music. I highly enjoyed the score here, especially at the opening menu, as a lone violin really lets you know about the tragic place you are about to enter.

But there is one question that I have to ask. This question has shunned me from the village of my gaming friends, as they all enjoyed this game. Did we need it? Did we need "BioShock 2"?

There are several major plot holes when it comes to connection in story and setting with the first game. It makes me wonder how a game with such clever writing could miss such important points. I couldn't help but think that one of video gaming's best arguments is that it is art was whoring itself out, trying to make as much money as it could for its pimps at 2K. But then again, that's what gaming companies do.

Plus, I think I can honestly say that "BioShock 2" is the most literally titled game I have ever played. It really is just more of "BioShock." It relies on all of the things that "BioShock" did and tries nothing new. While "BioShock" was all about taking risks, "BioShock 2" takes no risks at all, not even a loop-knocking plot twist like the first game.

I can't even say that if you are a fan of "BioShock" that you'll like "BioShock 2" because anyone who truly loved "BioShock" knows that it wrapped itself up all nice and neat and didn't really leave room for a sequel. I mean, I could see making a prequel, but a sequel is just being plain greedy. Sure, there were a couple things we were left a little vague on, but nothing that didn't leave us unsatisfied.