That doesn't make them bad - many of them are very effective indeed - but even a hammer with big sad eyes painted on its handle will always unmistakably be a tool.īioShock 2 offers a more nuanced take. Even ignoring the fancy speeches that inevitably accompany them, their reason is always to illustrate authorial points. They're a colder flavour of emotion though - Nolanesque, if you will - coming more from the head than the heart. Under Ken Levine, both original BioShock and BioShock Infinite offer effective emotional moments. Like so much of BioShock 2 though, the style makes it different. On the surface - or to be more exact, several fathoms under it - that might sound very familiar. The list goes on, but its most important element is that where BioShock was ultimately the story of a city, BioShock 2 is the story of its people - and in particular, a father and daughter relationship. I still want a BioShock Noir game where you're a private detective instead of a super commando wizard. It was also primarily a story of what had happened, whereas BioShock 2 is about what happens next - about Rapture's final legacy to the world. The first game assumed ignorance of Rapture, while the sequel requests a decent level of familiarity.

The villain's philosophy is collectivism, mirroring Ryan's objectivism, taken to the point where altruistic selflessness turns into arrogant disinterest in the individual. BioShock's focus was primarily on the elites of Rapture, while BioShock 2 spends its time walking amongst the poor.

In BioShock you'd been a squishy man, but now you're an elite Big Daddy called Subject Delta, with a drill-arm capable of carving through splicers with impunity. The new main character establishes the tonal shift. Its moment of genius? New creative director Jordan 'Fort Frolic' Thomas (an odd middle name, admittedly.) and team taking the original game and ruthlessly inverting all its themes. There's more to it than raw mechanics though, and while it's far from one of the best sequels ever made, giving it a chance reveals it as one of the smartest. There's some truth in that, especially in terms of combat and graphical style - though BioShock 2 does refine much of the original experience. It was a sequel nobody was really crying out for, even before we got our first glimpse at Columbia - a return to a city whose story felt comprehensively finished, and one looking more like a retread than a revolution. Editor's note: To mark the announcement of the BioShock Collection - okay, the confirmation of the BioShock Collection after more leaks than even the tattiest corner of Rapture - we're returning to Richard Cobbett's brilliant retrospective on BioShock 2, first published in April 2013.īioShock 2 rarely gets the respect it deserves, though it's not too difficult to see why.

Bioshock 2 gameplay