Journey to the Surface.

Sequels can be funny things. Sometimes they vastly improve upon their predecessors, and other times they take a step backwards. Mostly, however, they're a combination of the two. Take Bioshock 2, for instance. There are immediate and obvious improvements to the game - most of which are mechanical - and they go a long way in allowing me to continue to enjoy my journey into the depths of Rapture. But what is the cost of these rote additions to the nuts-and-bolts of the game? I don't mean to suggest that one aspect of a game has to suffer in order to improve upon another; I'm simply wondering where the priorities were for the folks at 2K Marin while they were developing Bioshock 2.

Don't worry, I'm enjoying the game quite a bit so far, but there are certainly flaws I feel the need to point out. For starters, being a Big Daddy should come with immediate advantages. It certainly does when you're dealing with regular ol' splicers, but when confronted with taking down another Big Daddy, the encounter exposes what's really going on with the gameplay. Visually, you look and feel like a lumbering behemoth that could wreak havoc at will. In practice, you're exactly the same as you were in the first game, only with a different character skin. You'd think that being inside an enormous diving suit would afford you some luxuries in the defense department, but when a crazy lady with a pipe hits you for a quarter of your health in 3 seconds, all pretenses of power are dropped. But my problem isn't really with normal enemies. I noticed this disconnect mostly when I encountered my first Big Daddy/Little Sister combo. When I was about to engage him, I thought to myself, "Alright, Big Daddy on Big Daddy, dueling drill arm action. May the best man win." Once it was over, I was painfully aware there was only one Big Daddy during the fight, and it wasn't me. Why is it that when I swing my gigantic drill with thunderous force against the armor of the Big Daddy, he seems to shrug it off and in one fluid motion knock me half-way across the room, taking half of my health with it? I thought we would be evenly matched as far as brute force goes, but I was sorely mistaken. I'm not complaining about actual difficulty, mind you. I'm noticing the difference between what the game is telling me I'm capable of doing, and what it's actually allowing me to do.

I completely understand that if I were able to just obliterate everything in my path that the game would be a simple matter of pressing the "kill things" button while walking forward. Perhaps, then, the basic concept should have been completely different. Maybe they should have done what I've been wishing for since finishing the first Bioshock: a full-on prequel. I want nothing more than to be able to walk through Rapture at the height of its power and opulence; to be a witness to the unfolding madness and chaos as Ryan and Fontaine battled for control of an ultimately failed societal experiment. I think it's a great idea to take the role of one of Fontaine's lackeys, going about his dirty work trying to throw every wrench possible into Ryan's works. At some point, maybe your character would start to see things differently and a conflict would arise. I haven't put much thought into it beyond that, but I'd call it a pretty good starting point. Anyways, my whole point is that being a Big Daddy for the entire game might not have been the wisest of design choices. The game plays just like the original, which I'm fine with, but it forces me to ask why I can't take (and dole out) the same amount of punishment every other random Big Daddy is able to. I'm willing to forgive this disconnect and call it what it is: a purely cosmetic change. Granted, story-wise it's a genuine difference. But as far as the gameplay is concerned, you walk with a metal clang in your step and grunt when you fall.

Something else that really bothers me is gathering Adam with the Little Sisters. I haven't gone back and checked, but I'm pretty sure Adam can be harvested from any corpse. As long as they're spliced up, they should do fine, right? And if that's the case, then why can't I get it from, oh, I don't know, the hundreds of people I'll have killed before I'm through? Instead, the game only gives me Adam from specific corpses that are labeled as "Adam corpses". I can guess the reason, which is mechanical contrivance. But it makes absolutely no sense to me, and gives me more cause for alarm. A secondary (and far less stupid) bafflement is the sort of mist that acts as an ethereal bread crumb when trying to find the next Adam corpse. What the hell is up with that? I don't remember there being any supernatural means for Adam extraction up to this point. In fact, if you remember when you get your first plasmid in the original game, a Little Sister walks up to you thinking you're dead. When she gets close enough, she realizes you're still alive and says something like "he's not an angel yet." So, she was fooled by seeing you lying on the ground, which means she wasn't being led by some weird fog trail that comes out of nowhere. No, it's another gameplay mechanic that has no weight or meaning to it, and I wish it wasn't there.

One thing I'm glad is available is the ability to change the difficulty setting at any time. I started the game on hard, but after a couple of hours I realized I wasn't having that much fun. There are certain games I'll only play on the hardest difficulty possible, and they mainly consist of FPS or shooters. If you want to count Bioshock as a "shooter", then go right ahead, but the reason I play it is wholly different than why I play most other FPS. I'm not exploring Rapture looking for the hardest twitch challenge I can get, and I don't want my time to be filled with frustration and repetition from dying. What I do want is to feel immersed in the environment and delve deeper into the story behind the fall of Rapture. If I need to scratch the shooting-dudes-in-the-face itch, I'll pop in Call of Duty or any number of other games. But I made this realization after I had my first Little Sister protection encounter. Up to that point, I was pretty much getting devastated by every single splicer I had fought, but I was soldiering on. But when I had to fight like five of them at once, and then five more after that, it clicked in my head that this isn't why I'm playing. Bioshock isn't the most technically proficient FPS out there (I never claimed it to be), and the harder difficulty really highlights this fact. It actually seems quite a bit harder than the previous game's hard difficulty. So, yea, I'm playing on easy now, and I couldn't be happier. I never thought I'd say that about a game, but when the story is more important than the challenge, it makes a lot of sense. One could even say it's a testament to the game that the story is good enough to put the combat on a lower tier, and I really think that's the case here. Either way, for me, easy is the way to go.

My last gripe isn't really a gripe, and it pertains to both games in the series. The issue of morality and harvesting/saving the Little Sisters was never that big of a deal to me. Honestly, it's such a binary decision that morality doesn't really factor into it. The moral choices have already been made in Rapture, and all you can do is look at the outcome. Of course, no one would want to kill a child, but I think the way it's presented is superficial when compared to the rest of the game, and limited agency to such a degree defeats the point. If the developers really wanted the question of harvesting or saving to be a moral one, there should be no tangible benefit to either decision, and no pretense of there being one. The way it's currently set up, it just boils down to a numbers game. Most people will approach the situation by wondering which decision will yield more Adam instead of pondering a mercy killing versus attempted salvation. Giving such a choice a deliberate numerical value takes away from the emotional impact that should occur within the player. But, like I said, I find that emotional impact elsewhere in the game, so it's a minor fault that I'm more than willing to move past. The rest of the world and the people in it are so detailed and thought-provoking that I don't really need this specific mechanic to carry all the weight. I'm just sayin'.

An aspect of the sequel I did move past, or rather re-thought my perspective on, is the way you talk to and interact with Sinclair. Last night I played through the Atlantic Express section, and when I saw Sinclair for the first time, I was a little annoyed. I had thought that his character was supposed to be Bioshock 2's Atlus, and it felt forced. In combination with that, the only time other characters interact with you (excluding enemies) is behind an artificial impasse. There's always something blocking you from fully seeing them, and sometimes even your movement is restricted. For some reason, that really bothered me when I saw Sinclair. I felt like the developers wanted to keep the feel of the first game, but they were trying too hard. I even went to bed thinking about it, but the more I thought about it, the more I saw the presentation of all the characters differently. As I mentioned in the paragraph above, the fate of Rapture was basically sealed a long time ago, and as I'm going through the different areas, I feel like I'm seeing the ghosts or echoes of things that were. In a sense, I get the same feeling from characters like Sinclair, and even Tenenbaum. By effectively cutting you off from most visual contact, the game subtly turns living, breathing people into memories. If you think about it, their most common means of communicating with you is strikingly similar to the audio logs strewn about the environments. And when you actually get to see them, it's only for a fleeting moment from a distance. So as the game presents them, I know they're still in Rapture, but I feel like I'm alone.

The story itself is still up in the air. I like the way the communal, "we are all one" societal structure is shown as a cult-ish religion. At first, I was a little put off by the directness in Sofia Lamb's approach. She's so much the polar opposite of Andrew Ryan that it almost felt like too much. But that's the thing: she's so entrenched in her beliefs that she's consumed by them. Her every waking moment - much like Andrew Ryan's before I clubbed him in the face with a wrench - is spent propagating her point of view. So it makes sense for her to speak in platitudes now and again, and to seem like a personification of an idea. That's exactly what she is, and Rapture is, yet again, the outcome of extreme idealism.

Of particular note so far is the Journey to the Surface section of Rapture. It's a theme park built by Ryan to indoctrinate children against the desire to go to the surface. It's structured like a Pirates of the Caribbean-esque experience, with animatronic scientists, artists and families being used to further his brain-washing techniques. The sets are pretty damn great, because they all have the same basic message: everyone on the surface is trying to do their own thing, but The Man keeps getting them down. To illustrate this point, it shows people going about their business, then a gigantic hand comes down from the sky to stop them in their tracks. The amusing part is how every single display does the same exact thing. Andrew Ryan was not one for subtlety, after all. But this section of Rapture was, by far, the most interesting in my journey and I can only imagine where it's going to lead me in the coming days.