Finished up Bioshock 2:
+ Almost everything about the gameplay mechanics much improved and better balanced
+ New enemies are generally good
+ More intense moments that can exhaust you of ammo and health.
- Level design got weaker and less interesting
- Most NPCs are bland at best, shit at worst
- Retcons a lot of BS1 to replace it with a worse plot
Guns are way more useful now, NPC health doesn't seem to skyrocket midgame. In fact I found the simple Rivet Gun (basically the pistol but a much cooler replacement) to be the best general use weapon for most of the game. With the headshot tonic and damage upgrades it kills almost every basic enemy in 1 or 2 headshots and bigger enemies in 3-4 headshots, or 1-2 headshots with the heavy ammo. And its highest upgrade burns enemies which imparts a stun most of the time, so it's just an excellent weapon. Generally better mouse controls along with me discovering that you can press T to aim down ironsights (which makes pistol perfectly accurate) mean headshots are quite comfortable to perform. The SMG and Shotgun (upgrades to 6 shells and electrical damage) are both good backups. The Drill was my early game way to take down big daddies and big sisters, a bit lame but you can just stand there drilling away and eating a few med kits. Funny enough I didn't really use the higher tier weapons much. The spear gun was just kind of slow to reload and seemingly lower DPS than the faster rivet gun, while the rocket launcher I just didn't use much since strong stuff likes to get in your face even though it was fairly powerful. Making a ranged hack weapon and making hacking take real world time was a great change that I suggested for BS1, and it makes security something to at least be slightly feared. However, I discovered that even when detected you can simply hack the thing that detected you to instantly cancel the alarm. Due to this there wasn't much risk in hacking, even if things went bad you could just back off and fire the auto-hack. The camera change to dealing different types of damage after photoing something is kind of a meh change, but its a lot less grindy so that's good.
Plasmids I had a lot more fun experimenting with since you get a lot more ADAM this time around, enough to max out a good amount of plasmids. Aside from the BS1 plasmids I used (lightning, bees, fire, decoy, freeze), I quite enjoyed the ability to spawn defensive robot flier things. They tank a lot of damage and with the right tonics you can heal them fairly cheaply with Eve. Lightning combos well to stun enemies while reloading, bees for seeking out random enemies around you while defending little sisters, and freeze for stopping the boss enemies and just continually drilling them to death. Summoning Eleanor for the final level was neat. I think I was way too good for what the game expected at the hacking minigame so I never needed to invest in any of the hacking tonics, which gave me a lot more plasmids to play around with.
Being able to use plasmids and weapons at the same time is great. It feels almost like a mech simulator what with being in a giant big daddy suit and with the amount of stuff you can do at once (swapping between up to 8 plasmids, swapping between 7 weapons, swapping between up to 3 ammo types per weapon). And zooming in for ironsights and higher accuracy temporarily stops you from using plasmids, so there's a choice to be made there as well. It's really kind of overwhelming, I think the game could actually benefit a bit from being a bit slower and more wide open, with more time to switch tactics. All of the hard enemies are gigantic HP tanks that rush you in melee, which basically just leads to a panicked switch to shotgun or drill and blasting away while firing away with whatever plasmid you have (because managing to switch your plasmid and weapon and ammo at the same time is kinda hard in 0.5s, and every plasmid sort of works as a disabler anyway). I do have to complain about the hotkeys, there's no good way to rebind them. Even if you rebind your useless weapons (the ranged hack and the camera) away from #3 and #5 and bind your useful weapons to 1-6, your weapon bar at the top of the screen still says the default numbers which gets confusing. Re-ordering plasmids is weird, you can't actually place them in order and instead have to re-order them all from 1-6 every time you want to change the order. Additionally plasmids overlap with the weapon bar so that you can't see your plasmids at the same time or shortly after switching your weapons, so remembering your plasmid order on the fly is tricky and something you have to re-learn every time your change your plasmid loadout.
There's only three new enemies which is a bit disappointing. The Big bruiser that rushes you is the first normal enemy that can actually catch you in melee if you are backing away from the attack, so dealing with them is kind of tense. The Big Daddy Alpha is a bit of a let down. They are sort of like the ranged big daddies but have way less health and are fairly normal enemies encountered rather often. Trouble is they really need more durability, they come so late that, for me, I had a fully upgraded rivet gun that still took them out in 3 or 4 shots. They aren't really mobile or anything so its pretty easy to take them out. The Big Sisters are like the uber-big daddies, much quicker and more deadly. But the drill still takes care of them just the same and you only encounter them alone (aside from 2 in the penultimate area's boss battle), so it kind of doesn't matter. If Big Daddy Alphas were about half way between where they are now and Big Sisters it'd be much more scary to face them and give those rocket launcher homing rockets a real reason to be used.
In terms of resource starvation and overall difficulty the game is still dreadfully easy. You'll run around most of the game with $800 and almost full ammo/supplies. One good change was dropping the number of hypos/medkits you can have from 10 to 5, but they are also stronger now since they are always a full rejuve so by the end game it's almost the same. There are a lot more high-intensity moment now, since you have to fight big daddies (kind of hard), then take little sisters around to extract ADAM from corpses while waves of enemies attack (can get tricky depending on how exposed the corpse is), then after doing this will all little sisters on a level you fight the Big Sister (get fucked if you don't have drill fuel and 5 medkits ready the first time this happens). This is definitely a lot better, it gives areas a nicer sense of pacing with a crescendo near the end rather than the endless 1-2 enemy encounters you had throughout Bioshock 1 levels. It also gives defensive items like traps and tonics that incapacitate/distract the enemy a lot more usage than in Bioshock 1.
Area design is a lot weaker and almost entirely linear. Basically every level leads you to a hub with 3 or so areas that are entirely separate from another. It looks complex when viewed from the map but once you figure out the hub system it becomes a letdown. Each of these sub areas tends to be fairly linear on their own, or at best a circle that you can walk either direction in. They are also a lot less interesting thematically. I can still remember how Bioshock 1 had a medical level, with a medical theme and a mad doctor boss. I remember the garden/market level. I remember the art level with the mad artist cliche boss. The final areas were the weakest since they were... apartment themed? Boring! Now here comes Bioshock 2 and the first level is... poor apartment themed? Not exactly leading well. Then the next area was... another garden theme but far weaker? Yeah, really not doing it here. The game also seems overall shorter with less areas to cover, which I liked, there's no dreadful final third where you run around a lot just to listen to the backstory of the "twist" like in Bioshock 1. I do have to complain that there is one level right in the middle where you are penalized by finishing the story objective by flooding the rest of the level rendering it unexplorable. Every other area gave a very big "press this button and you finish the area, go back to do everything you want before continuing forward", so the fact that this one level didn't, and I missed out on an upgrade machine I was saving along with a little sister, pissed me off.
As far as NPCs, I really got a large SJW vibe from the game. A lot of Bioshock 1 is retconned to put Sofia Lamb in as a prime driver of events and to paint Andrew Ryan as some kind of despot. Bioshock 1 was pretty clear on this I think (correct me if I'm wrong), and the whole reason Rapture fell was because Ryan was way, way too hands off with everything until it was far too late and everything was already blowing up in his face. Basically what a meme radical ancap would act like. But instead we have our Mary Sue Sofia Lamb who is a strong, independent female communist vegan psychiatrist with semi-magically empath powers who found her calling protesting the US nuking of hiroshima, and you get to listen have debates with Ryan over morality and shit where the crowd ends applauding her. For all intents and purposes she may as well be SJW Jesus, the only thing needed to fully 2020 her would be to make her a tranny lesbian refugee with danger hair. Her hair may actually be danger colored, I think she's only shown in black and white. Her character makes no sense. Ryan allowing her down in rapture in the first place makes no sense, yet they somehow end up in some duel of ideologies ending up with Ryan going full Hitler/Nazi medical experiments on her to try and keep control away from her. WTF. There's also her lackey in the first area, another strong independent female who is also black, who I didn't even realize was supposed to be some kind of antagonist until 10 mins before she calmly answered the door and asked me why I wasn't killing her defenseless in cold blood (she being very brave and just standing there as a resolute, proud communist). Then you go to the next level and the moral choice character to kill or not is white male who did lots of bad things, is trying to cover it up, and is pathetically begging for his life after forcing you to help him cover it up. Christ. Your guiding NPC is Sinclair who is... there? most of the time. There's not much going on until the penultimate level where he has to make a heroic sacrifice and you kill him, which was supposed to make me feel sad or something. I guess he was OK. Eleanor Lamb is herself another semi-mary sue created to be super smart and other stuff, but she's OK because she's your daughter, she's nice and cute, she helps you in a big sister suit, I like the parent/child relationship in games in general. Its a shame that the first 2/3rds of the game is all about Sofia and Eleanor only really becomes important near the end.
But lets talk about the plot twist. I actually wasn't expecting it. The twist was that there really wasn't a twist, except that Sofia Lamb just proves herself to be a complete piece of shit who would kill her own daughter to get back at you. Good idea there. If the game had tried to convince me that Sofia was right and I was the bad guy for stopping her, or some similar such bullshit, I think I would have dropped the game right there. Its a shame that we never kill her and instead just escape with Eleanor. I guess you weren't allowed to cinematically beat a woman to death like you did Ryan even back in 2010. Sadly she gets saved in the "good" ending.
Overall, hard to say if its objectively better than Bioshock 1. It does a better job with core mechanics, I think there's genuinely something good here that you can point to and say "other games should learn from this", which is absolutely not what I would say about Bioshock 1. I like games that give me that unique feeling of something I can point to as innovative in their genre. The overall better pacing and mouse controls are also good. But still... Bioshock 1 had by far the more interesting plot and locations. I'd say Bioshock 1 would be a more interesting game the first time, Bioshock 2 makes for better replays. After playing BS2 I really don't want to go back to BS1 and struggle with the worse controls and simply running around whacking everything with the god-wrench.
