CW: Suicide (I don’t describe it in detail). The game features a suicide in the opening act. I mention this in the plot in the second paragraph, but it won’t be mentioned again.

In replaying BioShock, I knew I wanted to replay both BioShock 2 and BioShock Infinite. While I have replayed BioShock multiple times, I believe I have only played BioShock 2 and BioShock Infinite once, so I don’t remember them as much. I think I tried to play BioShock 2 on a harder difficulty and then never finished it, but I could be wrong. I have since finished BioShock 2, and it wasn’t a bad sequel by any means. There was one change made to the game that didn’t make the game better.

BioShock 2 takes place in 1958, where Subject Delta, a Big Daddy, is escorting his Little Sister, Eleanor. Sophia Lamb shows up and forcibly takes Eleanor away from Delta, and before Delta can react, Sophia forces Delta to kill himself. Ten years later, Delta is resurrected under orders from Eleanor and Brigid Tenenbaum, who tell Delta that he needs to find Eleanor; otherwise, he will die due to his prior connection to her. Delta navigates throughout Rapture with the help of Augustus Sinclair to rescue Eleanor once and for all.

BioShock 2 is not a bad game. I think it has higher expectations because it came after BioShock. I like the story and how this game follows a Big Daddy versus another person in Rapture. This game goes into more of the connection between the Big Daddies and the Little Sisters and how their bond works, which I found interesting. I liked using the drill and found that I used it more than any other weapon in the game. It also helps that the game has drill fuel lying around each level. Sophia Lamb isn’t as compelling a villain as Andrew Ryan was, but she clearly poses a threat to Delta. Augustus Sinclair serves as a valuable guide. I actually feel for him because I felt his death didn’t have a lot of meaning. Overall, I think the story itself is entertaining.

BioShock 2 made changes, some of which I felt were improvements. The first is being able to toggle between all the Plasmids. In the first game, you have to manually click until you find the one you’re looking for, while in BioShock 2, I can bring them all up and find the one I’m looking for. Another change was hacking. In BioShock 2, there’s a specific gun that can fire a hacking bolt into a camera or a turret from afar. This is so slick. This way, I don’t have to approach a turret directly and take damage or risk going up to a security camera to commence a hack. Hacking is also easier in this game than in the first game. I didn’t mind how hacking worked in BioShock, so this was fine. The big change I felt was more of a nuisance was gathering ADAM. In BioShock, once you defeated a Big Daddy, you could either save or harvest the Little Sister right away. In BioShock 2, since you’re a Big Daddy, you can take the Little Sister, and she can lead you to corpses throughout Rapture with extra ADAM. Seems cool, right? Except once you start gathering ADAM from the corpses, more splicers come to attack. It feels like a lot of extra work. Resources and ammunition are already spent defeating the Big Daddy, so now you need to fend off attacks from splicers on top of that. Also, if you die while this happens, you can go back to the corpse, but you have to start over. It feels like a lot of extra work without a lot of benefit. I ended up giving up halfway through the game, where once I defeated the Big Daddy, I navigated towards the tunnel and gathered ADAM right away, and skipped the additional step to gather more. Oh, once you rescue or harvest all the Little Sisters, you have to fight the Big Sisters, who are an additional step in this process. This was a process that I felt was perfect in BioShock, but was made more tedious in BioShock 2 when it didn’t need to be.

If I compare BioShock 2 to BioShock, it almost feels unfair because I feel that BioShock is a perfect game. However, if you separate BioShock 2 and look at it on its own, it’s not bad. I already have BioShock Infinite installed, so I can’t wait to play it and finish my BioShock series replay.