izigame.me

I'm writing this review because I feel like BioShock 2 is kinda overlooked when compared to it's brothers. The biggest draw is obviously that you play as the funny tin daddy. I feel BioShock 1 players may have played that one part near the end of BioShock 1, nearly died of tedium, and avoided 2 based off the fear that it may even be half as bad. I'm glad to say it isn't, in fact, the game is pretty much completely enjoyable. The developers actually handled this installment really well, the gameplay especially is improved over the first installment of the BioShock series. The hacking mechanic is a good example, it's now a quick reactions based minigame instead of the pipe puzzle and it doesn't awkwardly pause the game every time you stop to hack something. While the pipe puzzle was admittedly more creative, it literally gave you impossible puzzles in later stages provided you wanted to save your gene tonic slots for something more fun. Certain sequences in the first game just felt like the developers had to rush to get the game out the door, BioShock 2 feels a good bit more polished. Weapons aren't reused and most of the new ones (especially the speargun) are visually interesting and fun to use, plasmids are mostly the same. On the topic of difficulty, I believe I played on the highest difficulty and it wasn't very hard, particularly after I got the bees (which will allow you to cheese most weak enemies.) Big daddies are also less of a pain to fight (they're still kinda a pain but that's the point.) I've read complaints about the story but it really isn't too shabby. I do think that the first BioShock had more memorable locations, better horror sequences and an improved plot, but BioShock 2's story is still competently done and most locations are still very imaginative, it is after all BioShock. I'd also like to add that it's very interesting to learn about the various characters, who are all at the very least fairly well written, and learn about their differing motivations. There are also plenty of great voice logs that really help sell the world and the voice actors have done some very good work overall. Graphically, the game seems to hold up fairly well (I think I'm easily impressed by game graphics so take this with a grain of salt.) I didn't bother with the remastered edition as this one seems to hold up fine graphically, but the game is still buggy. I've heard the remastered edition might be worse in terms of bugs though. I'm playing on Windows 11 with an nvidea graphics card and the most annoying issue was the constant crashing but the fixes in the Guides section seemed to have worked (many thanks to everybody who contributed to those,) namely turning off DirectX 10. I also recommend circumventing 2K's pointless launcher (which they tacked on years after the game's release) and trying one of the audio fixes. I'll try to link the ones that worked in comments. Personally, I would recommend trying to get the BioShock collection on sale as you get the DLC for every game (Minerva's den is a fantastic self contained story by the way, you can find it in "downloadable content," which I overlooked) for a really good price. I probably wouldn't play full price for a game you have to fix yourself. If you already have this game and you are willing to struggle a bit to get it working (which shouldn't be hard if I, of all people, could do it) I'm late to the party by 14 years but I'd say it's a better use of time than playing something like palworld (god forbid,) at least it'll stimulate the imagination a little.
(did I mention that Minerva's Den is awesome?)