The problem with Bioshock 2 is described in one phrase: “Search containers for loot”. Or should that read “Search lockers for loot”? Or, perhaps, “Search non-descript boxes amongst non-descript rubble for loot”? In essence, you must search everywhere for loot, as if shaking down Rapture to catch its falling pennies; the proverbial caged monkey, fixing for food pellets. The game’s reliance on what amounts to little more than grinding exists not because the gameplay mechanic works, but because it existed in Bioshock 1, and what existed in Bioshock 1 must continue to exist for all time, for it was A Good Thing. That is the bible and its commandments in full, and it’s both to 2k Marin’s credit and disgrace that they have stuck so rigidly to that maxim in forming this sequel.

For those with short memories, let’s cast our minds back to 2007. It was a time of cheap credit and Umbrella-ella-ella. It was also a time of Rapture and Bioshock. Andrew Ryan, peremptory dreamer and aristocrat, imagined a world away from the religious dogma and political restraints of his home, and sought to create a city where likeminded scientists and social engineers would be free to explore their minds and all that they might conjure up. As your plane crashed to the ocean and you ventured deep into the abyss, you learnt of the past that left the underwater oasis to ruin.

Christened Rapture, the idyllic city’s beautiful interiors (I still weep that they never sold copies of the Art Deco posters) playing host to the science of ADAM: the power to rewrite and recreate man in Ryan’s image. Plasmids were created to harness that power, and soon the extraordinary became possible. Inevitably, Shit Went Down and a civil war broke out as the underclass rose up and tried to overthrow Ryan. They failed and were crushed; their leader, Frank Fontaine, killed. A second rebellion, led by the mysterious Atlas, was more successful, and as Ryan was driven into hiding, Little Sisters roamed the city, foraging for what little ADAM was left, hulking Big Daddies protecting them as they went.

Bioshock 2 casts you as one of those Big Daddies: Subject Delta, the fourth of your kind. In a harrowing opening sequence, you learn that Rapture is now under the control of Sophia Lamb, a psychiatrist reminiscent of Dr. Breen in drag for all the care she demonstrates. It’s also revealed that the Little Sister you are characteristically joined to is in fact your daughter, Eleanor; how that procreation worked is left to our imagination. Nonetheless, you are as bonded as all Big Daddy and Little Sister duos are, only to be torn apart by a cruel act on the part of Lamb. 10 years pass before you awaken, alone, still in Rapture. Where is Eleanor? What is Lamb after? Did my robotic penis inseminate anyone else in-between times? All these questions and more, answered after the break.

The game proceeds in a manner identical to that of Bioshock 1. The interiors, whilst technically new, are essentially indistinguishable from those that came before, only a late venture into the ‘Persephone’ chapter offering a fresh take on things. The same staleness can be found in your foes, with splicers still making up a large part of the game’s encounters. Even what should be the most fundamental difference between the games – that of the character you play – doesn’t have quite the seismic impact on things that you’d hope, as just about everything works almost exactly as it did before, the formally impossible to do or reach sadly still the case. Much was made of finally being able to venture outside of Rapture, but exploring the sea is so limited as to make it completely redundant: you simply walk an entirely linear route from one hatch to another, with no fighting, no exploring, and not even any swimming.

Thankfully, developer 2k Marin have implemented some changes as far as the Little Sisters go. Whilst you are mercifully spared the chore of escorting one for the duration of the game, deftly avoiding turning Bioshock 2 into a Caged Tiger At The Zoo simulator, you do on occasion have to use one to get ADAM for you. It works like this: upon killing a fellow Big Daddy, you are given the choice to either Harvest or Adopt their Little Sister. The former gives you a limited but painless boost of ADAM, whilst the latter has the sister guide you to a nearby corpse from which considerably more ADAM can be sourced. But the process takes time and comes at a cost: harvesting is a red-rag to the Rapture hordes, and you will often find yourself cursing the slow progress bar as you fight off wave after wave of Splicers in order to protect your precious companion whilst she works.

As before, those splicers (amongst them, the creepy horror of the Spider Splicers, scrambling in the vents above your head, the clang clang of their razor claws haunting your dreams) are the bread-and-butter enemy of the game, but 2k Marin have furnished you with the occasional new enemy to fight, most notably the Brute and Big Sisters. Whilst the former is little more than a nuisance reminiscent of a nearly identical enemy in Sin Episodes, the Big Sisters represent a genuinely difficult and terrifying prospect: they dart about the screen with a speed that’s difficult to combat, packing a punch that proves a match for whatever level of gene or plasmid upgrade you showed up to the fight with. Their impact is somewhat ruined, however, by the most out-of-place element in the game. As their banshee cries ring around whichever makeshift arena you happen to find yourself, their impending arrival is signalled by text on the screen, as though you’re waiting for a Street Fighter 2 boss. “A Big Sister is coming. Get ready! 3…2…1… FIGHT!”. That it breaks suspension of belief is bad enough, but that you have to sit through that same baffling element *every times you die during one of the fights* is unforgivably annoying.

So, too, is a gameplay mechanics carried over from the first game: Vita Chambers. Ostensibly designed to remove the need to manually save by throwing the ‘dead’ player back into the game at a nearby part of the level, these reload points serve only to turn the game into a pointless war of attrition, in which dying has no meaning. In doing so, the player is actively encouraged to save Eve (which powers your plasmids) and turn instead to simply bullets, because in a world in which you cannot die, why waste the good stuff on killing an enemy quickly when you can just drill them with cheap bullets until they fall over?

Worse, they allow you to skip large parts of the level on numerous occasions. In one chapter, you’re required – in that grand FPS tradition – to obtain a keycard to unlock a door blocking your path. The key just so happens to be located on the top floor of a hotel teeming with splicers, who begin to swarm the area just as soon as you pick it up. As alarms go off all around and screams echoing down the corridors, you charge at the nearest splicer, drill gun spinning, but you’re soon outnumbered and they overwhelm you, sending your metal frame crashing to the ground. Dazed, you awaken in the nearest Vita Chamber, some distance from the action. Thankful for the breather, you step out only to discover that… you’ve just skipped that entire bloodbath. You soon realize there’s no point in fighting to get out of situations, because you can simply run blindly to your goal, safe in the knowledge that with two or three of these deaths you’ll have piggy-backed your way to your destination, inadvertently making you feel like you should be recording this as a Speed Run.

Thankfully, one thing that has improved is the story. The first game was widely lauded for its story, and rightly so: it was mature, well developed, and shocking. But, infamously, the plot completely collapsed towards the end and, with it, the game. If I was to draw a graph of player enjoyment of Bioshock 1, it would look a lot like a sheer drop. Not a slope. Not a steady decline after a magnificent ascent. No, it would literally drop into nothingness; *beyond* nothingness into negative numbers I would need a second and third page of graph paper to draw accurately, and even then not to scale. The sequel has no specific moment as magnificent as your coming-upon Andrew Ryan, but what it does have is consistency.

Sophia Lamb is as worthy a successor to an incredibly iconic and powerful character as you could hope, with nuanced voice acting and great scripting making up for her comparative lack of societal rhetoric. Eleanor, whom communicates with you throughout the game, guides you lovingly through the underwater maze, driving you on in a manner not altogether-dissimilar to Irishman Atlas. The pace gathers steadily as the game progresses and you are driven naturally to the kind of conclusion Bioshock 1 should have had, were it to have avoided the proverbial self-destruct button. This ending makes total sense and satisfies almost completely, relying on neither a twist nor *shudder* a final boss, and in doing so completely nailing the one thing almost every fan clamoured for.

There is something to be said for polishing, and the polish here is of the finest standard. Though the Vita Chambers persist, as does – depressingly – the lack of NPCs, many of the mistakes from the first game have been fixed (the hacking subgame is far more satisfying now, for instance) and the quality is unusually high for what many feared was a cash-in sequel. But I find myself torn on whether to praise developer 2k Marin for essentially piggy-backing on the work of their pioneering predecessors. So much of what you see and do in the sequel is enabled almost entirely by ideas, assets and mechanics from Bioshock that it amounts to little more than a glorified expansion pack.

Critics will argue over the lack of originality and new ideas, and though I share the spirit of their concerns, I don’t share their bitterness. Like many people, I desperately wanted a prequel and am still lost as to why they didn’t exploit that for the rich setting and NPC opportunities it would have granted them, but this is still a wonderfully accomplished title that will surprise those who feared the worst. It is equal parts fun, scary, inspiring and relentless, and originality is nothing without those things. They come in spades here, and together they make Bioshock 2 utterly worth your time.

Still no merchandise though. *Fuck*.