Bioshock 2

I bought Bioshock 2 last night, but I didn’t really get to play it until this morning. It’s pretty fun. Nothing groundbreaking so far, but there are a few improvements.  The biggest one, in my opinion, is that you’ve got plasmids in your left hand and your gun in your right, so you can quickly and easily hit someone with a plasmid mid-combat without getting hit while your switching between the two. My personal favorite combo using plasmids and weapons is shocking the enemy while I’m reloading, especially the LeadHead splicers. Then they can’t hit me while I’m “defenseless”.  Another change, some may consider it good, others bad (I could go either way) is that while there are still Gene Tonics, they are not separated into combat, engineering, and whatever the third category was (sorry). Instead, you have multiple rows (3, I think) in which you can put any tonic you have. That means you could have 7 combat tonics and 5 engineering tonics if you wanted. A downside, though, is that you only start with 4 slots unlocked. You have to buy the rest. In Bioshock (1), you had the three categories and 3 slots out of 5 (I think) unlocked at the beginning.

While the plasmids-in-left gun-in-right combat is the biggest improvement, the biggest change is that you play as a Big Daddy (but you probably already knew that). As far as I can tell, you are a Rosie model instead of a Bubbles model (Bubbles is the one with all the “eyes”, and I think Rosie is the one you dressed as in Bioshock (1) ), but you get the drill that the Big Daddies are famous for. You can use the drill attack by holding down the right trigger (on Xbox 360), or you can press the right trigger and release (or the B button, they do the same thing) to do a “drill swing”. It’s exactly as it sounds. You swing the drill to hit a close enemy. Using the drill attack (spinning the drill by holding right trigger) takes fuel. You can collect fuel as you would any other ammunition in the game, except that occasionally you can find fuel pumps that will fill up your fuel for free. I miss the wrench, though.

Hacking is also different. Be aware that in Bioshock 2, when hacking, it doesn’t pause the game. You can still move, fight, and be attacked while hacking. This may sound impossible, but not with the new hacking system. Instead of complicated mini-games, you get a simple meter with a needle going back and forth and you have to stop the needle (press the A button) when it is within a green section (or a blue section for a bonus). If you stop it in a white section, you will get a shock, be ejected from the hack mini-game, and will have to start over (you will have to hit a green/blue section multiple times to hack the system). You also have a new, unheard of gun that can shoot hacking tools to hack from a distance (helpful against turrets), auto-hack (again, at a distance. there’s no close-range auto-hacking tools), or the third ammo for that gun. I know that’s really vague and lame of me, but I haven’t gotten the third type of ammo for the gun yet and I don’t want to look it up for the sake of the article. If I did, it wouldn’t be my information.

The research camera makes a comeback, but it works a bit differently as well. Instead of a picture camera, it is a video camera, and you don’t have to buy/find film! How it works is that you equip the camera like you would any other weapon, find an enemy (but make sure you don’t have a red circle-cross-thing over the shot), and press the trigger. It will start the camera rolling and will count up research points as long as the enemy is alive (in most cases). It counts up slowly (approx 1pt/sec) if nothing is happening, but when you attack it, the research goes up by hundreds at a time. When the enemy dies, the camera automatically stops recording and you get the points added to the research track for that enemy type.

Well, I think that’s all I have to say for now. I’m not very far in yet, so I’m sure I don’t know much about the whole story, but it’s fun. I’m going to bed. ‘Night.

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