But it makes up for that by being more tightly wound and digestible. It's a tale that lacks some of the bite-your-tongue chaos and panic of the first and, because Rapture is a familiar place now, some of the mystery. This time you play as a totally different character, a Big Daddy that's searching for a specific Little Sister. Jack, the unfortunate soul from the first game, is out. The story picks up 10 years after the events of BioShock. While it'll feel initially very familiar, it won't be long before you start to run into some of the changes 2K Marin has made, all of which are welcome and help refine the gameplay formula to make for a better play experience. The progression structure remains intact as well, so you'll move through a number of discrete stages where you'll be assigned tasks unique to that area before getting back on the path to the story climax. You use a combination of weapons and special powers called plasmids to battle your way through freakish enemies on a quest that leads you deep within Rapture's recesses, uncovering all manner of ghoulish secrets on the way. The gameplay, at its core, is largely the same. BioShock 2, unlike its predecessor, is split into single-player story and multiplayer competitive modes, so in that sense it's a bigger title. It's a rare thing for games built with this kind of big budget to take seriously a thematic cohesion between setting, story, and gameplay, yet that's exactly what we get here. As it turns out, they did a damn fine job. The bigger unknown was how the folks at 2K Marin, founded with members who worked on the original, would handle the sequel. The studio had been doing just that since System Shock 2. To those who've been playing games for years now, it wasn't exactly surprising that Irrational Games made a great title. Between all the twists of plot was woven an entertaining style of gameplay in the first BioShock, making for a mix of powerful play mechanics, mood, and joy of exploration rarely seen, and one that wound up resonating with the public, making the game a critical and commercial success. It was a city so rotten and morally oblivious it spawned Little Sisters, girls who roamed Rapture's leaky halls performing the repulsive task of plunging needles into the dead and extracting and ingesting genetic material. Gradually their sanity was devoured by their unrestricted experimentation as they ripped each other to shreds and withdrew into private pockets of insanity. It was all a spectacular failure as the civilization that developed on the ocean floor turned to genetic modification. Filling the pressurized space is a society founded by an industrialist named Andrew Ryan with the notion that there'd be no limits on what the individual could accomplish. It's set in an underwater sprawl of surface-style skyscrapers, a city called Rapture. Take a moment to consider how bizarre this game world really is.

Bioshock xbox 360 review