--Sofia Lamb, BioShock 2 Remastered
"Mother believed this world is irredeemable, but she was wrong, Father. We are utopia, you and I . . ."
--Eleanor, BioShock 2 Remastered
Players of the original BioShock fought the large creatures known as Big Daddies at multiple points in the game, either because the story demanded it or because they needed resources or ADAM. Bioshock 2 returns to the underwater city of Rapture, but it puts players in control of a Big Daddy, dramatically reorienting the perspective of the story. Rapture may be a familiar setting for some, but playing as a Big Daddy is not the only major change. The weapon roster has changed, the hacking process is smoother and less disruptive of the regular gameplay, and Little Sisters can now be transported around and protected. Moreover, the thematic focus of BioShock 2 is the dangers of collectivism, as opposed to the dangers of egoistic individualism in the first game. The primary villain is even perhaps the greatest female video game villain of the 2010s and highlights the general lack of developed female villains in gaming.
Production Values
The graphics look slightly more polished this time around (compared to those of BioShock Remastered), with somewhat clearer animations for character models like those of the other Big Daddies. BioShock 2 Remastered runs at a consistent framerate even when multiple enemies attack Delta in the same room. It is not the most visually impressive game on the Switch, but that is hardly surprising since it is a port of a game originally released in 2010. The sound design of Rapture is as integral as the visuals in the worldbuilding of the first BioShock, and BioShock 2 does not fail to match its predecessor when it comes to the quality of its sound. Since many details of the worldbuilding are established in audio logs that can be skipped entirely, the quality of the voice acting needs this constancy.
Gameplay
Returning to Rapture does not mean that BioShock 2 does nothing to vary the parts of the environment accessible to players, as Delta has to walk around on the ocean floor on several occasions. Observant players can even find extra ADAM, the genetic material that allows for plasmid powers, when traveling in the water. Delta's arsenal of weapons and devices has also been expanded, containing the signature drill of the most iconic class of Big Daddy, a rivet gun, and a remote hacking device. Those who admired the Big Daddies in the first BioShock has the chance to use Delta's suit and weapons to explore, protect Little Sisters while they gather ADAM from corpses, and solve puzzles in the sequel.
Hacking has been simplified and can now provide optional benefits beyond price reductions, like getting a free medical kit or giving hacked turrets damage bonuses. In order to obtain these bonuses, players must successfully hack by meeting a specific requirement that is unecessary to simply take control of a machine. Hacking is not even the only secondary mechanic that has been redone for BioShock 2. Instead of taking still photographs graded on clarity and positioning of the subject, the returning camera item films the player's fight with the subject and gives points for using a variety of attacks rather than just the same plasmid or weapon. Scoring well enough repeatedly can unlock new moves, tonics, and damage bonuses!
The included Minerva's Den DLC is worth mentioning for its depth and length. This DLC campaign tells a full, self-contained story separate from the main campaign's while providing at least one new plasmid and a new weapon. The Gravity Well plasmid lets players advance the main story by opening special locks or unleash a gravitational distortion in combat, which pulls enemies and items into a vortex before spitting them out. A new ion laser weapon with three ammo variations is another innovative change to BioShock 2's gameplay options, cutting through enemies with a continuous beam. Minerva's Den, thanks to its story and gameplay additions, is one of the finest examples of post-release DLC.
Subject Delta, a prototype Big Daddy from the days before Rapture's collapse, is ambushed when a woman takes his Little Sister and uses mind control to bring him to shoot himself. Years later, he somehow finds himself alive and searches for Eleanor, his missing Little Sister who now sends him telepathic messages and offers assistance. Sofia Lamb, the woman responsible for killing Delta, seeks to create a collectivist utopia of perfect collaboration, selflessness, and unity, using the now grown Eleanor for her own purposes. Delta fights to free his symbolic daughter and end a new brand of tyranny.
In Minerva's Den, Subject Sigma, a different Big Daddy, searches for a supercomputer called The Thinker that can control various aspects of Rapture. Sigma's journey leads him to a grand revelation about himself, concluding a DLC that is designed as well as many other primary campaign's are in other games with an abrupt narrative twist.
Intellectual Content
BioShock 2 contrasts Andrew Ryan's ideology behind Rapture with that of a new sophist who replaces a set of assumptions mingled with several falsities with a worldview that is completely submerged in contradictions. Andrew Ryan is guilty of fallacious ideologies and moral apathy, but Sofia Lamb is an open metaphysical relativist who holds that reason is a construct of consensus and that individuals cannot avoid biases without group intervention. Her errors are therefore greater and more foundational than the comparatively self-contained errors and assumptions Ryan clings to. Due to the opposing nature of Ryan's egoism and Lamb's collectivism, she represents the perfect ideologies to target after the first game's excellent deconstruction of egoism and scientific dystopias. The point of the sequel is that collectivism is not the solution to egoism.
In the first BioShock, Ryan says that all individuals truly care about is themselves: Lamb's worldview holds that non-selfish focus on the self to be tyranny that inevitably harms others. Any individual with power is therefore a tyrant according to her, and the extent to which they are not dedicated to equalizing the wellbeing of every other person is the extent to which they are slaves to evil. The worst of her false philosophical ideas is her cultural relativism regarding metaphysical truth itself. She is not just a moral relativist, which would already be ironic given that she seems to believe that collectivism is morally obligatory. Lamb makes the self-refuting, logically impossible claim that truth is created by human groups.
Truth is grounded in logic, meaning the existence of truth itself is self-evident. No one can doubt, reject, or flee from the objective nature of logical truths without standing on the very thing they are trying to back away from. Sound deductive reasoning cannot be false, and several other logical facts (like the law of non-contradiction) share this self-verifying nature. Reason is not invalidated when people dispute or deny it. On the contrary, it is people like Sofia Lamb whose worldviews are objectively false. Since all aspects of reality hinge on reason, to reject the self-verifying nature of logic and its objectivity is to reject reality itself. Sofia Lamb is therefore guilty of the ultimate offense against reason--a denial of the self-evidence of logical axioms, the only things that must be inherently true whether or not anything else is.
Conclusion
Almost every aspect of BioShock 2's gameplay improves the mechanics of the original. There are great similarities between the first two games in the series, yet there are plenty of contrasting elements, like the playable characters and the themes. BioShock 2 does an excellent job of approaching Rapture again while inverting some of the primary aspects of the first game, giving players of both entries a highly thorough look into one of the most unique video game locations to date. Moreover, both games warn against different sides of the same coin of tyrrany: neither the egoism of Andrew Ryan nor the collectivism of Sofia Lamb can deliver humankind from its gravest problems.
Content:
1. Violence: BioShock was never a particularly gory franchise, but blood is shown when enemies are attacked with many weapons, especially when Delta holds a whirling drill against them.
2. Profanity: Words like "bitch" and "bastard" are used, sometimes in audio logs rather than the story's main dialogue.
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