The Reticule

It’s very hard to write this review. I adored the original Bioshock for its ability to deconstruct some of the major issues with videogames, the mindless subservience to the designer’s whims. It was so surprising and powerful that what short comings the game had, and there was a fair few, were immediately overlooked. With its parent casting such a tall shadow, can Bioshock 2 possibly pull another surprise out of the bag?

In truth, no, it can’t.

Some time has passed since Jack’s murderous rampage across Rapture, although not that you’d really notice that from looking. Rapture is instantly recognisable as the same cesspool of human detritus that it was before, from the deformed inhabitants to the rusted and dilapidated city itself. Following the first game, a power vacuum has installed Sophia Lamb, a sort of Anti-Ryan, as the dominant figurehead in what remains of this underwater utopia, and she doesn’t much care for you.

As the pre-release gubbins has no doubt made you aware, Bioshock 2 places you in the armoured boots of one of the very first Big Daddies, Subject Delta. In a fitting introduction to the character, the game begins with your zealously protecting your adorable charge, a Little Sister, by brutally slaughtering a few splicers. It’s that power you remember from the first game, the terrifying Big Daddy with the power to bat you across the room with a flick of the wrist and the speed to catch you before you hit the ground. You’re a badass with a drill for an arm, and this is just the opening cutscene. Then Dr Lamb rocks on up with the Big Daddy controlling Plasmid from Bioshock 1 and makes you shoot yourself in the face.

My first thought when this happened was along the lines of ‘Why couldn’t we do that in the first game?’, closely followed by a moment of confusion as the game begins proper with you waking up. I knew Big Daddies were tough, but man! It is at this point where the game gives you control and the charming veneer begins to slip.

For a game that places great emphasis on you playing a Big Daddy, it never really manages to pull off the feeling that you are one of these behemoths. Even towards the end, weapons done up to the nines with shiny baubles that make you sneeze lightning, you’re still too fragile. The real Big Daddies have the same amount of health as a mountain, requiring you to slowly chip away at them while trying to maintain your distance. There are times you can stumble across them crushing a group of splicers easily. You, however, can be felled by a handful of lucky shots.

In the first game this was forgiveable. Jack was an outsider, unspliced and fresh faced, and was therefore allowed to be squishy and weak. Delta is a genetically modified giant welded into a metal suit, and yet this has no impact on the game at all. When you jump you may hear the clang of metal on ground as you land, but for all intents and purposes you may as well be wearing a flannel shirt for all the good it does you as armour.

This is not for want of trying, of course. The weapons you wield are suitably Big Daddyish, from the drill arm and the rivet gun to the mini-gun and the hilarious speargun. But there is a disconnection between them and you that doesn’t sit right. The rivet gun is the main offender in this regard, the in-game model being gargantuan when sat on the floor and disturbingly tiny when held in hand. The drill doesn’t fare much better. Once upgraded it does become astoundingly hilarious, grinding a hole through various foes as they writhe in agony, but all the while an irritating fuel gauge saps some of the joy out of it.

There are only so many issues that can be explained away by the polyfiller that is the word ‘prototype’. Yes, Delta is a prototype Big Daddy, but putting constraints on a player character that similar NPCs don’t have is just annoying. The other Big Daddies could survive a direct hit from a nuclear bomb, leave their drill running for days and defeat an army, so why can’t you?

That’s not to say the game hasn’t made some improvements. As a game, the mechanics are now quite a bit tighter, especially when it comes to hacking. The previous game presented you with a water rerouteing minigame, the splicers around you politely waiting for you to finish tinkering with your turret before they returned to braining you. Bioshock 2 has done away with this, replacing it with a much shorter minigame that doesn’t pause the action. This means that combat hacking is much more dangerous to do, leading you to having to decide whether taking that turret is really worth it.

Or it would, if it weren’t for the invention of hacking darts that allow you to tap into a system from a distance, even ignoring the minigame altogether if you use the rarer variety.

This is how Bioshock 2 seems to work, for every innovation it makes (like a free item from a vending machine for a particularly difficult hack) it detracts from it with something daft (such as the painfully linear nature of the game). This is made all the more painful because so many of the problems are things that the original game dealt with quite well and have merely been reintroduced in the sequel.

But nothing in the game is more frustrating than the Big Sisters.

The ADAM gathering missions with the Little Sisters tend to be rather fun, give or take the odd bit of computer cheating by spawning splicers in dead end corridors, and when it comes to shoving the little tyke into a vent or sucking our her brain slug you can’t help but feel you’ve bonded with her. Every time you harvest or heal one, however, there is a chance that you will earn the ire of a Big Sister.

A deathly shriek will sound, the screen will blur, and ‘Warning, a Big Sister is approaching!’ will flash on the screen. You have scarce seconds to prepare your defences, ready your weapons, and then in she strolls, lithe and athletic in her raggedy uniform. In she strolls to kick your arse.

The Big Sister, as well as being a bullet sponge and demonic gymnast, has some serious Plasmid action going on. They are everything the Big Daddy isn’t: quick, athletic, psychic and unashamedly hostile. This is not a problem in and of itself, everything else in Rapture is out to kill you after all, but the sheer frustration caused by one battle with a Big Sister is unbearable. As they leap, stab and burn their way around the room, you’ll notice that even a top level plasmid and firearm will do little against them, and it all seems so arbitrary.

If you recall, the original idea all those years ago was that Bioshock 2 would focus on a number of disappearances from the mainland, all orchestrated by one spooky Big Sister. This same Big Sister would stalk you throughout the game, an ever-present enemy that could strike at any time. In the final game, the Big Sister’s are random encounter bosses rather than characters, dropping by to annoy you and ultimately die after a painful battle of attrition. The feeling of trepidation just isn’t there, replaced with the knowledge that the Big Sister’s shrill howl signals five or ten minutes of abject vexation.

And this is all so ultimately painful because Bioshock 2 could have been as great as its predecessor.

I like the characters for the most part. Lamb is a poor replacement for Ryan, but he is a tough character to beat. Your new radio operator is entertaining too, and there’s a particular character you meet later in the game who delivers some fantastic lines. And while the story is no-one near as coherent or self-aware as the original’s, it is well maintained by the return of audio logs, continuing to flesh out the Bioshock universe even in a tangential manner.

Special mention goes to a certain section of the endgame, and you’ll know it when you get there, which is so charming and beautiful that it seems so out of place. You get a glimpse of what everyone wanted Rapture to be, which serves to not only heighten the feeling of sadness at its current state, but also the pity felt for its inhabitants. You get a window into their madness, and suddenly it all makes sense.

And this is why Bioshock 2 is so disappointing. Throughout the experience it feels as though it’s trying to emulate its father rather than create its own impression. For every problem it fixes it creates a new one elsewhere, and it’s lacking that one identifiable moment where it all comes together, that one big reveal. It is and can be a fun game, but it never really does what it sets out to do. You never really feel like a Big Daddy, the Big Sisters are never really a source of trepidation, the story doesn’t quite feel right. Although, that said, the one thing it does very well is make you care about the Little Sisters you adopt, which is something in its favour. A little scamp giggling ‘X his eyes, daddy!’ as you immolate a wayward Splicer does wonders for the father/daughter bond.

I know it sounds like I’ve been railing on the game, but I have to make it clear that it’s not a bad game. Any other game from any other series would probably be getting praised at this point, but Bioshock 2 feels like a step back from its predecessor in a way. It does many things right, but not enough. If you liked the first Bioshock you will get some enjoyment out of this game, but don’t go looking for anything as awe inspiring as the first time around. It just doesn’t quite manage it.

Good but overshadowed by its big daddy

At this point the rules have largely gone out the window.  If I want to make this good, I’m going to need the ability to ignore some of the little points, so I am.  It’s still mostly true to the game, certainly recognisable, but certain embellishments will have to be made.  The following takes place during Chapter 1 Episode 2: The Crash Site.

Somehow, we survived the crash. Ava woke me up with her soothing screeching, and the world slowly flopped into focus. For a moment I saw the figure of a man clawing at what remained of the nose of the plane, but he was gone by the time my eyes focused, a stifled scream being the only thing that proved to me that he hadn’t been a trick of the light.

My head settled and, as if to punish me for deigning to regain some composure, the plane shifted violently. It was at that moment, as the wreckage plummeted another twenty feet, that I noticed we had been strung up in the foliage of a tree. Then the wreckage collided with the ground, my head collided with the instrument panel in front of me, and everything went fuzzy for a little while.

Ava, being the same spry devil she always had been, managed to avoid both potential concussions and was waiting patiently for me to wake up. Apparently British women are unwilling to kick open mangled steel doors when there’s a half conscious American around. Still, I persevered and opened the door with only marginal noise-induced head trauma, something not exactly improved by the environment outside.

The island, or whatever the place was, didn’t look right. It was beautiful and green, bathed in sunlight and had a tropical rainforest sort of a vibe to it, but it was all wrong. It shouldn’t have been there, not the trees or the sun or even the island itself. It stood against every map I had ever seen, and even my grade-school understanding of geography. I should also mention that bright sunlight does not mesh well with a crippling headache, but being a man I chose to conceal this fact from Ava. Not that she seemed too bothered by the whole ordeal in general.

The view was spoiled a little, however, by the corpse a few feet from the door.

I knelt down and looked at the man. Logically, this would have been the man I thought I saw on the nose as I first came too, but he injuries didn’t seem to fit. I’m no doctor, but that sort of a fall would break bones, not leave huge tears in the flesh. Oddly, there was little blood, despite the severity of his wounds, almost as if he had been drained. I can’t be too certain of this, you understand, as I’m not really trained to stare at corpses. Looking at him long enough to determine if he was dead is about as far as I was willing to go.

Given his terminal condition, and our situation, we did the only intelligent thing and wandered into the forest for some clues as to where we were. Ava claimed she had spotted a village during our crash, although how she had managed to see anything during the stomach-churning spin is something I probably should have asked. The woman had a remarkably good internal compass, although I suppose that comes naturally if you’re born in an imperial power, lots of countries to get lost in after all.

The forest was hot but not as humid as I had expected. The paths between the trees, somewhat well worn and thankfully shaded, were wide enough to avoid that terrible feeling of oppression you can get from nature. If you’re in a suitably isolated place, alone, it can be hard not to feel as though the trees are sneaking up on you, closing in. It’s a foolish fear, and not one I needed at the time, especially as something else was closing in.

There was something in the forest somewhere making a weird sound. It was like a rusty bell being played through a ancient horn, a metallic growl that made the ground shake and myself wince. There was no way of accurately telling how close it was, but we didn’t want to hang around to try and work that out, so we ran.

We ran in what Ava assured me was the direction of the village, deeper into the forest. The shade was more than welcome now but the sun never seemed to be too far away, peeking between the leaves. Our panicked flight caused us to trip and stumble a few times, once almost fatally as we crossed an imposing ravine via a fallen tree, but we had no desire to see the source of that noise. Ultimately we reached a small drop, a point of no return, and stumbled down it.

On reflection, it was the perfect place to set a trap. Had my wits been a little less scrambled I might even have noticed that. As I didn’t notice, we were greeted by the business end of the most ludicrous assault rifle I have ever seen, slowly emerging from the vines at the base of a nearby tree. The man behind the weapon was dressed similarly to the corpse at the crash site, although my cursory glance of said corpse meant that I hadn’t really noticed what he was wearing at the time. Tight fatigues and a strange sort of gas mask. He looked military, perhaps special forces, but I didn’t know of any initiatives that he would have slotted into. He looked us over for a moment, lowered his weapon and ordered us to take cover.

I think his intention was to ensure the area was clear, whether to shoot us or interrogate us or merely introduce himself I cannot say. His sweep ended abruptly when a creature dropped from the canopy above, snapped his neck as one would a cocktail stick, and disappeared back into the brush. The light glinted off of the creature as it vanished, and I realised that it was no animal but a metal man.

My mind shot into overdrive. We’d crashed into some sort of secret war between the West and the Fascists, it was the only explanation. Everyone knew all-out war was brewing, and you’d have to be foolish to think that the intelligence agencies weren’t already taking shots at one another. I’d been briefed on some of the fascist super-weapons before I was let go, mostly fanciful occult nonsense that would never get off the ground, but nothing like this. I couldn’t tell if the metal man was merely a well-armoured soldier or some sort of automaton, but the agile nature of his decent from the canopy did point towards the latter. Had we managed to blunder into a black op, government soldiers sent to secretly undermine this new fascist super-soldier? It seemed plausible at the time.

Either way, getting to the village was our only course of action. We didn’t know where we were and we had no supplies so any form of civilisation was a blessing really. The soldier had been well armed, so Ava and I grabbed a ludicrous rifle each and continued our trek. We could hear the automaton moving around in the trees, sometimes even catching a glimpse of the sun bouncing off his metallic body, but he left us alone for the most part.

Until he dropped a boulder on us.

I’ll elaborate on that. The path led us through a small rock tunnel which he collapsed on us halfway through. We were separated but again unscathed, and by this point I was beginning to think that the luckiest and unluckiest days of my life had managed to coincide. All sorts of life-threatening events seemed to have been squashed into this one day, and yet I was surviving them all.

We continued on our separate paths to the village, the automaton’s shrill metallic laughter following me as he observed my movements. The forest opened out into a series of ruins at one point, vast stone structures that looked faintly familiar, crumbling into dust as the centuries ticked by. Navigating them made the journey considerably longer, and the odd bullet hole and weird scorching kept me constantly on edge. I moved steadily but never too swiftly, not wanting to give the automaton chance to get the drop on me.

Eventually I reached the entry to the village, a giant stone door in the shape of a leering beast. It was vaguely draconic, long sharp teeth and evil eyes glaring down at the rather elaborate entry way. The entire journey up the steps to the door seemed to be designed to draw maximum attention to the already conspicuous door, and it worked like a charm.

I reached the door and pushed it open, although quite how I managed it considering its size and apparent weight I cannot be sure. Perhaps it had well oiled hinges, or some form of counterweight. Then the shrill laughter struck again, and the automaton landed on my back.

It clawed at my back and neck, tearing at the skin. I tried to throw it off, or slam it into a nearby rock or the ground, but the damn thing moved so fast I wound up only hurting myself. It might even be fair to say that I did more damage to myself than it did, winding myself in a mistimed attempt to get the damned thing off me, ending up on the floor with it staring into my eyes.

It definitely wasn’t a man. At this range I could see that there was no room for a man inside such a form, so thin were the appendages and joints, the neck especially. One electric eye crackled in its head, arcing off the socket in a weirdly hypnotic sort of fashion. It chuckled at me directly from the throat, lacking a mouth, and its hands closed on my neck.

Then a gunshot, and the grip loosened. The automaton slumped onto my chest for a moment, before being dragged free a little too roughly, the slack fingers still grazing my skin a little. Ava flung the body onto the ground and helped me up, a traditional British one-liner accompanying the act. I had a cocky reply all prepared, you don’t get far in the armed forces nowadays without knowing how to deal with the wit of an allied nation, but we were both stopped short when we noticed the village.

It had been well hidden behind the stone door but now, in full view, sat the single biggest ziggurat I have ever seen, and into its very walls was built the village.

In the last week I have done the following: vanquished hundreds of alien antagonists; saved humanity (again); flown spaceships; pushed people out of windows; laid a honey trap for a particularly dangerous and horny alien lady; delivered a perfectly placed right hook to a nosy journalist; played the Bad Cop (badly) and fired a nuke at a giant robot. In short: Mass Effect is back, and it’s brilliant.

(more…)

The land of Brittania in the age of Arthur and Merlin is a strange one, various Sir’s, Ladies, Knights and Kings travelling around various provinces with footmen, bowmen and other-worldly creatures in their retinue. It is a world where Scotland is but a note in a Chronicle, a place where the mystical Bedegraine forest guards hidden secrets.

(more…)

Played Mass Effect 2 yet? If not, probably best not to read this if you take offense to some spoilers. Saren kills Dumbledore, if you’re wondering. Consider yourself warned.

(more…)

And we begin with the game’s introduction.  The opening tutorial doesn’t count, that’s just a tutorial, so we start at the moment we meet William Grey, protagonist and hero.  You have no idea how pleased I was that his name wasn’t a variation of “John Jackson”.  This fills the spot of the opening scene, up to the impact onto the island, wherein the game’s version kicks back in.  It’s written in the first person, told by Will Grey.

A word to the wise, if you’re planning on starting a freight haulage company, base it in Nassau. It’s beautiful, warm and there’s not much in the way of local law enforcement to double check every damn thing you’re contracted to carry. Hey, there’s a reason the pirates loved it all those years ago.

It’s also a good place to go if you just want to get away from the world, which God knows I did back when I was there just before the war. I’d had a bad couple of years, culminating in getting drummed out the Air Force. I won’t go into details, but considering the fact that everyone knew a war was brewing with the fascists, and that a fresh set of grunts was probably going to be very useful soon, it should suffice to say that it wasn’t a simple matter.

When you’ve been a pilot, the only thing you know how to do is fly. You could have been to an Ivy League school, born with a silver spoon in each orifice, but once they let you fly nothing else matters. When they take that away from you, or you make them take it away from you, you can’t help but find a way back, even freight haulage.

Don’t get me wrong, I like hauling crates around the world, but it’s stressful. Money is always tight, and breaking even is the best you can hope for. There’s always someone cheaper, with a shinier plane and blonde hair, ready to steal your customers, and even the most understanding bank will only extend credit so far. I suppose that is how it all began really.

It’s not good business to limit what you can and can’t carry, but I’ve always been wary of government contracts. From time to time I’d get approached by suspicious men in trench coats, or people in finely pressed suits that are precisely the wrong things to wear in the Nassau weather, and they’d always offer me a handsome sum of money to ferry a disproportionately small package for them. I always declined, but there’s only so long you can turn away paying customers before the wolves start knocking at your door.

The package was big this time, which was actually relaxing in a weird way, although the assertion that a special courier was required to oversee the whole thing seemed unusual. If they wanted whatever it was guarded then why didn’t they have the military ship it? The government never cease to confound, they even took out the contract under the guise of an obvious front company. No-one would name their company “Smith & Smith Exports”.

They delivered the package about an hour before the courier arrived, a perhaps to allow time to load it onto the plane where it would be safe from the fallout. Clearly, the government doesn’t understand the work ethic of the self-employed pilot. I had only just finished wheeling the crate from the gates to the plane when a black sedan pulled up behind me. It was polished to a shine, not a hint of rust, and the wheels crunched across the gravel in a mocking tone, as though no other vehicle matched up to this one car. It pulled to a stop and she got out.

Most men have ghosts from the past, but very few have them thrust upon them out of the blue with no conceivable means of escape.

She feigned ignorance, but Eva was never one to go into a situation blind. At the time I was too stunned to realise this, but in hindsight it should have been the first sign that something was wrong. She was as beautiful as I remembered her being from all those years ago, with that British twang adding a touch of the exotic to her. If a woman comes from far away it’s rather hard to resist her.

But that had been a long time ago, and now she was cold. Back then she had been vibrant and exciting, but I had hurt her and that warranted little more than a snide remark and an icy glance. She never was big on forgiveness, but I would have thought a couple of years might have at least taken some of the sting out of it.

We exchanged few words, her momentary display of surprise allowing the following exchange:

‘Will?’

‘Eva?’

And that’s about all. I loaded the plane as quickly as possible, ignoring the telling looks from my friend and navigator (whose name I am leaving out of this record as a means of respect). I’m not sure where she went, but until we were ready to fly she was noticeably absent. Made things easier for me, I suppose.

We set off as soon as the plane was loaded, even thought it was getting dark and the weather was less than ideal. I could have postponed the flight, it was well within my rights as a pilot to do so, but the thought of a whole night of judgement from the ex was scarier than the prospect of flying into a storm, and harder to deal with. Besides, it was a simple trip, and a proper storm was exceedingly unlikely. I’d drop the crate (and the girl) off quickly and be back in Nassau with enough cash to pay off my debtors and have enough spare for a colourful drink.

It took karma about an hour to catch up with my hubris. The sun had finished setting by this point and, shock of shocks, I had flown right into a storm. Ordinarily I could have flown around it, or even turned back, but a combination of British Death Glares and disputed airspace meant that the only option was to plough straight through, into the Bermuda Triangle. In a thunder storm. At night.

I wasn’t a superstitious man at the time. The Bermuda Triangle’s mysterious powers didn’t seem particularly plausible at the time. Hell, the only evidence that anyone really bothered to use was the strange disappearance of the USS Cyclops, and with that sort of name I had expected it to have smashed into a rock or something. You don’t expect the captain of such a ship to have much in the way of depth perception. The other disappearances were just as easily attributed to human error as some paranormal phenomenon, especially when it came to the various aircraft that had vanished.

The storm went bad quickly, visibility becoming a serious issue. I was using the frequent lightning strikes to scout ahead, although the one advantage of flying into such a storm is that most pilots are intelligent enough to make a detour, leaving you a clear path. So it came as a shock when something sped past the cockpit at a fantastic speed.

It moved so fast that I barely caught more than a glimpse. It didn’t look like any aircraft I had ever seen before, and I didn’t spot anything I could identify as an engine. A black disc, somehow in flight. For a moment I assumed it to be a trick of the light, the lightning dazzling me and causing me to misidentify a stray reflection on the windscreen, but Eva shattered that illusion.

She squealed and turned to me for an answer, but before I could give one the engines gave an almighty stutter. Perhaps they’d been clogged by rainwater, or perhaps my constant failure to get the damn thing serviced had finally caught up with me, but for whatever reason, the engines had died. I tried in vain to restart them when the lightning struck again and out of the darkness loomed a spire of rock.

Evasive manoeuvres were futile at this point, but I tried anyway. I swung the plane to the left as best I could, gambling on the strength of the wind to give enough of a push to save our lives. It wasn’t enough. The turn was too sharp and into too much wind, the tail section swung round and smashed into the spire, shearing it off completely. The cargo and my friend disappeared into the darkness, along with two thirds of my aircraft, and what remained began to spin uncontrollably.

We pin-wheeled through the air for what felt like an eternity, the thick darkness being punctuated by thunder. I tried to counter the spin, but the lack of a tail section made the entire thing little more than a vain attempt at survival, having to do something because you feel you should be rather than actually having anything to do. It’s automatic, the human mind can’t accept a sudden and imminent death, it has to fight.

There was a final crack of thunder, and through the lightning and the nauseating spin I saw what looked to be an island directly ahead. We were going to hit it, and at this speed I wasn’t sure we could survive the impact.

Before me stands a glowing golden tree, erupting through the remains of a shattered greenhouse. A whispery voice implores me to venture forth and take the glowing item hovering above the bridge. It’s my new heart, I’m told, I’ll need it to live. Yep, this is going to be a weird one.

(more…)