Gaming BioShock 2 Preview

Greetings!

Want a demo of this.
If it is the same as the first, its not worth the full price.

Bioshock was way overrated.

 

my point is that you can go through the entire game with the first two weapons you are given and most of the time they're the most effective anyway, why would you surround a splicer with bees and then take him down with a massively upgraded shotgun when you can use mr sparky and mr wrenchy much quicker and easier.

i rate all sorts of games as 'good' and they usually include weapons that have to be used in order to progress, try taking down a walker in HL2 without a rocket launcher for example. its called balanced gameplay, and plenty of games have it.

 

The original Bioshock was a good game, and I enjoyed playing it, but it was seriously overrated by most. The vita-chambers just seemed to leave the game broken, and after meeting Ryan, the game seemed to just fall apart a bit for me. I might take a look at the sequel, but I wouldn't exactly say I can't wait for it.

 

Yes and apparently you can finish half life in less than 40 minutes but wheres the fun in that?

I thought the effects of the different guns and plasmids was interesting.

The argument about the Vita chambers is ridiculous since there are plenty FPS games where you can quicksave at any point you like allowing you to essentially respawn at the point of your choosing rather than where the game puts you

 

I'm with the pro-Shock fans on this one. Yes, the gameplay was not the greatest in the world, but the atmosphere and premace were utterly brilliant. Personally I didn't use the Vita chambers, just old fashioned quick save quick load. Same effect really.

The Big Sisters (there's more than one now?) really interest me, they seem very well realised, but I share my fears with Bit, it stands to lose more than it can gain. Bioshock was a bit of a one-off experience, one I won't even think about replaying for a good while just to keep it fresh. Bit like Braid, the first one was fantastic, but a sequal would just be wrong on so many levels.

 

BioShock is a pretty game with a nice story and absolute dogshit gameplay. I'm interested in BioShock 2 but it seems even more like a shooter for people with developmental disorders... and the first one came pretty close to that already. Everything about the game reeks of cash cow, from the totally unnecessary and unimaginative tacked-on multiplayer, to the storyline which is stapled on to the original, requiring more retcons than Fallout Tactics to even make sense. And seriously. Guys. Big Sister? Do you really think you are clever? This game was designed by a ****ing marketing committee.

 

Loved the first for it's story especially the first half. I've said ever since it was announced that the 2nd should be a prequel to witness the decent of rapture into choas. But I'll reserve judgement till it's out.

 

Anyone raving about BioShock should play System Shock 2. It's SO much better it's not funny.

 

****ING THIS! ^^^^

 

M'eh. SS2 is a great game. BioShock is a great game. I know they were meant to be very similar, but to me they are very different and I'd get different things out of them. I'd play SS2 when I want a real challenge and fear, BioShock when I want a visually compelling and more philosophically thoughtful game with FAR better action.

 

Bugger. I was fervently hoping that the sequel would be the story of the fall of Rapture, which would have been genuinely interesting. Instead, what we're likely to get is the fall of Rapture as caused by a group of dribbling imbeciles who run around everywhere at a dead sprint while jumping up and down continuously and sprouting hastily-typed speech bubbles containing intelligence along the lines of "ur t3h looosar hahahaha11111". I have a feeling this may spoil the ambience a little.

I hate multiplayer games.

 

Meh.

I picked up BioShock for €25 on Steam after the price (finally) fell and I STILL felt ripped off when I finished it.
The game world was arguably stylised but not very appealing to my eyes (subjectively speaking), and almost completely static despite the physics engine.
Both of the 'big twists' in the plot were obvious to me long before they happened and I'm usually the kind of person who gets taken by surprise by obvious twists, not so here.

The supposed 'big moral choices' were reduced to playground binary decisions and powergaming for even the most immersed players.
Such a black & white moral question of "kill the child to benefit yourself or save her to soothe your conscience" is hardly groundbreaking and makes up the greater portion of quests in RPGs done a thousand times before. Its effect is lessened even further when you're rewarded later in the game for taking the moral high ground, essentially making it a powergaming "small benefit now or bigger benefit later" situation.
Even a game like Knights of the Old Republic, which uses a simplistic sliding scale from good to evil (light side, dark side) to fit in with the Star Wars approach to morality; still did a better job of forcing players to make moral choices.
Hell, Baldur's Gate and Fallout, 10 years earlier, both did so too.

The combat was unsatisfying, the voice acting was annoying, the characters and setting were trying far too hard to be spooky and 'out there', the RPG elements were weak (both in terms of actual Role-playing and gameplay) and could have been left out - The list of flaws goes on and on as far as I'm concerned.

I can accept that my opinion isn't always going to concur with those of reviewers the world over and it usually doesn't, elitist PC-gaming snob that I am; but I will never understand quite how Bioshock ever got the insane hype and praise that it did.
Are we so starved for good games these days that Bioshock is the best of a bad bunch?

Seems to me like the sequel fixes few if any of the original's problems and I'll be avoiding it like the plague and speaking with my money.
Of course, my voice will be lost in the crowd of easily-impressed console gamers and the media hype-machine, but that's how it goes.

 

After the farce that was the first one I will be happy to avoid this

 

+1! Pretty much how I feel too. The graphics were interesting and different, though personally I wasn't attracted to that style. Gameplay was OK, but nothing amazing in my eyes.

 

hopefully this wont be as crappy of a storyline/game play as the first

 

aren't all shooters (actually FPS) reskins of each other now?

 

Philosophically thoughtful? BioShock's "philosophy" was just a simple right vs wrong, short term vs long term decision. I find SS2 much more substantial because it raises questions about the ethics of creating strong AI and artificial life. Not explicitly, but there are plenty of hints, for example in crewmans' audio logs.

But yeah, BioShock is NOT scary. SS2 was genuinely frightening the first time I played it. BioShock has TOO much action -- there is no time to built suspense. SS2 has you running alone for extended periods of time, so you are startled when you run into a single enemy.

 

It's all about the villains, in the end. I loved the idea of Ryan's utopia of individual achievement which couldn't outrun its own corruption and how it eventually collapsed and he, unable to overcome this, ended up living a bitter life in utter isolation. BioShock is different because in many ways it does actually explore some explicit, defined philosophies - which is why it prompted me to read Atlas Shrugged and learn about Objectivism.

Where it falls down is in the fact that Ryan isn't the bad guy for long, ultimately.

 

Loved the first one, played it solidly for the whole weekend - I will be buying this. It may have been a lazy console port, but it was quite an engaging one and the level design was excellent.

 

Big Sisters Little Sisters? What's this? A hentai game? They should've named it "Onee-san" instead LOL