Tue Dec 27. 2022
Considering the way the original BioShock ended, hardly anyone expected to see a sequel – yet here we are with BioShock 2. Set several years after the first game, BioShock 2 shows what happened to Rapture after the first game ended. The gameplay was changed quite a bit, including the new perspective from which the story is seen – the player now takes on the role of one of their greatest enemies from the original BioShock.
Gameplay
In BioShock 2, the player controls an early prototype for the “Big Daddies”, the primary antagonist force for the player in the original game. For those of you unfamiliar with the firs title, Big Daddies were represented by gigantic robot-like creatures sworn to protect the “Little Sisters”, girls who were tasked with harvesting resources from the city's ruins. The protagonist in BioShock 2 has lost contact of the Little Sister he was paired with, and finding her plays a major part in the game's plot.
If you think that putting you in the role of a Big Daddy precludes you from coming up against the horrendous creatures in this title though, you're wrong – Big Daddies are back as your enemies and they're tougher than ever. You can attack other the other Big Daddies you encounter, and a successful fight will give you the option of either killing their assigned Little Sisters, or adopting them in order to receive some quick guidance around the levels.
You'll be using the Big Daddy's original weapons as your arsenal, including their iconig gigantic drill. An addition to the gameplay which was very well-received by fans was the ability to use weapons alongside Plasmids without having to switch between the two all the time – this opens up the road to some very interesting combinations.
Graphics and System Requirements
Interestingly, BioShock still uses the same version of the Unreal Engine that its predecessor did – 2.5. We're saying this is interesting because if you take a brief look at the market right now, UE's version 3 seems to be dominating the shooter genre. Still, the developers have spiced up the engine quite well, throwing in higher resolution textures and better-defined models, as well as making some improvements to the lighting.
A good by-product of sticking with the old version of the engine is the fact that the game's system requirements haven't gone up that much – you'll need 1 extra gigabyte of RAM as opposed to the first game, as well as a slightly more powerful processor (a Core 2 Duo running at 2.2 GHz should be just fine). As for the video card, a 8800GT or Radeon HD4830 will get the game running smoothly.
Other
Multiplayer isn't just an extra option this time, it has been developed quite extensively and features several different gamemodes as well as a very balanced gameplay. Make sure you give it a try!
Conclusion
It's hard to jump over a bar as high as the one BioShock set, but BioShock 2′s developers somehow managed to pull it off – and with great success!