Power to the people bioshock 2
Once I found a combination or two that I liked (for me, it was the Incinerate power and the trusty machine gun), I tended to just stick with it.
You’ve got deadly weapons - you start with your Big Daddy drill-arm and add machine guns, grenade launchers, etc. Like your enemies, you can juice yourself up with Plasmids, consumer-level genetic modifying tonics that let you throw fire, electrify things, release swarms of insects and give you all sorts of other helpful powers. And she’s set her entire collectivist cult against you. Complicating matters somewhat is that Eleanor, the little one to whom you’ve been bonded, is actually the daughter of Sophia Lamb, who is as strident a communist as the last game’s antagonist was a Randian objectivist. To that end, you play as a Big Daddy, motivated to find your lost Little Sister at all costs.
Daddies were just monsters for you to fight Sisters were merely the device by which the game evaluated your morality: Do you kill them for extra Adam, or let them go free?īioShock 2 explores these characters more fully. The relationship between the Little Sisters (mind-controlled little girls that gather the precious gene-splicing resource Adam from corpses) and Big Daddies (hulking, metal-suited monsters that protect the girls while they go about their duties) was one of the most original, intriguing parts of BioShock, but it didn’t really figure in to the plot. BioShock is memorable for the way that it subverted and shattered videogame tropes BioShock 2 embraces them with all the fervor of a Big Daddy clutching his Little Sister. The fact that BioShock 2 does it significantly better doesn’t entirely excuse the fact that it is stamping on well-trod ground. The only real problem with this is that dozens of lesser games, from Infamous to The Force Unleashed, have been built around this same idea.
Irrational Games’ Ken Levine, the acclaimed creative director of the original, passed his duties on to level designer Jordan Thomas, who made BioShock 2 his baby, taking a step away from the themes of the original and creating a more elaborate game of moral choices: The things you do throughout the game determine what your character becomes and how the finale plays out.