"Bioshock 2" Review (Xbox 360)

Dinner last night may have been great, but it's not so great when you heat up the leftovers for supper the next evening. Maybe it's soggy now. Or lukewarm. It just doesn't taste the same, despite consisting of all the same ingredients. Which brings me to "Bioshock 2." I loved the original. It was one of the greatest, most original and atmospheric games ever released. It may have been the spiritual successor of the equally amazing "System Shock" series, but it was entirely its own thing. As for its sequel, well... I liked Neil Marshall's horror flick "Descent" too, but that didn't mean they should have made "Descent Part II," a pointless, unoriginal retread that had very little new to offer, and what was new wasn't very good and reflected negatively on the original. I feel exactly the same way about "Bioshock 2."

I never saw the need for a sequel to begin with, in all honesty, as the first "Bioshock" wrapped itself up quite well. Now, "Bioshock Infinite" is in the works, almost acknowledging that a straight "Bioshock" sequel was always a bad idea in much the same way as the "Prince of Persia" franchise decided to go back to what worked with "The Forgotten Sands" after that next-gen reboot that might as well have played itself. Granted, "Infinite" is trading an underwater city for a flying city (very imaginative), but it's DIFFERENT. It has the potential to do what "Bioshock" did the first time around -- take what we love about that game but make it fresh again. Basically, everything that, I feel, "Bioshock 2" failed to do.

In "Bioshock 2," you get to play as a Big Daddy out to rescue his abducted Little Sister, and that's about as far as the game goes toward forging its own identity. You still tool around in Rapture, which looks almost exactly the same as it did when you last left it. You still scavange everything you can find while squaring off with those Adam-addicted freaks. The gameplay is identical in almost every way, but with one difference -- we've already done this, and there's no compelling reason to do it again when you could just as easily pop your far superior copy of the original "Bioshock" in and give it another playthrough. Even the game's most tauted feature, playing as a Big Daddy, is weakly executed. You feel every bit as fragile as you did in the first game, and aside from your armored hands filling the screen, it's hard to tell you're not the same protagonist from game one except for the fact that you can now march around with a Little Sister riding on your shoulder and directing you toward the next source of Adam.

I think critics put on the kiddie gloves when this game stepped into the ring earlier this year. My admiration for the first "Bioshock" doesn't cloud my judgment though when it concerns the sequel -- in fact, quite the opposite. The overwhelming feeling of sameness just kept creeping in on me during my time with "Bioshock 2," like I'd done all of this before only better. The first game's story was far superior on top of it -- especially the "Would you kindly?" revelation near the end, perhaps gaming's best ever "Gotcha!" moment. There are no such moments here, although the chance to see things from an entirely different and very eerie perspective near the game's conclusion is certainly the best moment in "Bioshock 2." But it can't hold a candle to learning the truth about your supposed benefactor in the original game.

And that's the problem. There's just not enough that's new here, and what is new just can't compete with what came before. Even the whole playing as a Big Daddy angle, were it executed better, still wouldn't be all that fresh since something similar essentially happens at the end of the first game. Basically, there are two camps of people who "Bioshock 2" is for -- those who missed the first one (Why?!), and those who played the first one several times and still can't get their fill of Rapture. On those grounds, this glorified expansion pack is certainly worth its weight in gold. But if you loved the first game, and let's face it you probably did, but expected much more out of a proper sequel, you'll probably be just as disappointed by this return to Rapture as I was. This makes it a hard game for me to actually score, but let me put it this way -- I was playing this and "Metro 2033" at around the same time, and constantly found myself being wooed away to the mutant-haunted tunnels of Moscow and turning my back on the undersea mess that was Andrew Ryan's supposed utopia...

Final Score: 6.9 (Fair)