Bioshock 2 - No Spoiler Review

[bookerman]

Picked this up on Tuesday night for the 360 and managed to beat it yesterday. If you've played the first, the mechanics are very similar. You can dual wield a plasmid and a weapon instead of switching back and forth. Research is back, except now it records you fighting enemies and awards points for variety. It wasn't real hard and some of the rewards are worth it. You have the game long choice of rescuing or harvesting the little sisters which provide you with ADAM to purchase plasmids. In addition, there are 3 other morale choices you have to make at various stages. All involve either killing or leaving alone someone important. If you are going for achievements, then you'll want to rescue all of the little sisters and leave the 3 people alone. I failed at this in that I took out 2 of the 3, even though it doesn't impact the ending so much. The choices among the 3 get progressively harder to make.

 

As in BS1, there's a twist in the plot, although nowhere near as dramatic as the first game. You'll get some different perspectives than the first game (besides the fact that you are a big daddy).

 

Overall, this is a pretty good game. Not as epic as the first one (I beat this in about 10-12 hours), but still fun to play. Unless you are an achievement freak and want to do EVERYTHING, you can complete a lot of the achievements in one playthrough. If you're like me and a casual gamer, then you might want to rent this and see how far you get. You can likely get at least one run through of it and then decide if it's worth the purchase. It's not as epic as ME2 or DA:O in terms of game length, but it's a solid FPS that offers some variety in playstyle. You can actually get to a point where your minions are doing most of the dirty work for you if you want to play that way. Or you can go the drill melee route and be constantly in the thick of every fight.