BioShock 2 returns to Rapture eight years after Andrew Ryan’s death, and the city has only gotten worse. 2K Marin built the sequel on the bones of the first game, then sent players back down as something new: a Big Daddy.
Trailer, via 2K United Kingdom.
Subject Delta Wakes in 1968
You play as Subject Delta, a prototype Big Daddy. The game opens on New Year’s Eve, 1958, when Sofia Lamb tears Delta from his bonded Little Sister, Eleanor, and forces him to kill himself. He wakes in 1968, resurrected by a Little Sister under Eleanor’s direction.
Brigid Tenenbaum tells Delta he will die unless he finds Eleanor, because their physiological bond cannot survive the separation. Augustus Sinclair, Tenenbaum’s ally, guides him through the city. Lamb, meanwhile, plans to pour every mind in Rapture into Eleanor using ADAM, creating a selfless leader.
A Big Daddy’s Arsenal
BioShock 2 is a first-person shooter, and the Big Daddy kit is the reason to play it. Delta carries a drill and a rivet gun, weapons unique to his kind, and can swing any weapon in a close-range melee attack. He fires plasmids and guns at the same time.
Plasmids grant powers like telekinesis and drain EVE. Tonics stack passive bonuses, from faster movement to cheaper EVE costs. Weapons take ammunition types and three cumulative upgrades, and the fully modified rivet gun fires super-heated projectiles that set enemies burning.
Ammunition and supplies come from scavenging and vending machines. Death sends you to a Vita-Chamber.
Hacking Without the Pipe Dream
The first game’s hacking minigame was a lengthy Pipe Mania puzzle. BioShock 2 cuts it to a timing test: stop a needle on a colored gauge, hit the green to succeed, the small blue patches for a bonus, the white or red and the hack fails.
| System | BioShock | BioShock 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Hacking | Pipe Mania–style minigame | Needle-and-gauge timing puzzle |
| Protagonist | Jack | Subject Delta |
| Player role | Human | Big Daddy |
| Multiplayer | None | Story-driven, set during Rapture’s civil war |
Rapture’s Civil War Goes Online
The multiplayer mode is story-driven and takes place before BioShock, during Rapture’s civil war — a period the single-player campaign only references. 2K Marin led development with 2K Australia, while Arkane Studios and 2K China provided support and Digital Extremes co-developed the multiplayer.
Garry Schyman, who scored the first game, returned. He widened the sonic palette with blues and religious music to match the sequel’s themes.
Release Schedule
| Date | Platform | Publisher |
|---|---|---|
| February 9, 2010 | PlayStation 3, Windows, Xbox 360 | 2K Games |
| March 30, 2012 | OS X | Feral Interactive |
Lamb, Eleanor, and a City That Eats Its Own
The story earns its length. Delta is silent, but Eleanor and Lamb are not, and the ending splits on how you treated the Little Sisters and the Rapture Family. Eleanor can save her mother or leave her to drown. Delta dies either way. Eleanor either absorbs his ADAM and memories and leaves Rapture to better the world, or rips the ADAM out and turns toward conquest.
That choice is the whole game in miniature.
BioShock 2 drew positive reviews for its narrative, themes, art style, characters, endings and gameplay, with criticism landing on other fronts. The verdict here is 8.7/10. It is not the shock the first game was, and it does not try to be. What it does is tighten the shooting, hand you a drill, and trust a sequel’s hardest trick: making a familiar city feel like somewhere you have never stood before.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
