To put it simply, BioShock 2 is a companion piece to the first game. Never trying to recapture that wonder of first seeing Andrew Ryan’s underwater dystopia, Rapture, it delves further into the mythology of the saga, exploring aspects of it that weren’t even touched upon in the original. It assumes that you know the world, its past and its nuances – but it’s not a diminishing return. The sequel suffers from some of the same narrative shortcomings as BioShock, true, but it’s certainly as articulately constructed, and many elements have been improved to accompany an almost entirely new premise.

BioShock 2 finds Rapture in an even sorrier state, ten years after the events of the first game. It’s now in the iron grip of Sofia Lamb, a leader who regards humans as fractions of a much greater whole and is therefore the opposite of Andrew Ryan in philosophy and attitude. Rather than uniting the remaining citizens under one utilitarian umbrella, though, she’s managed to tear society further asunder by overestimating herself, much like Andrew Ryan did.

Rapture remains a visually identifiable location, with its turquoise hue and series-consistent art direction, but it’s clearly been irretrievably broken after years of slow decay and ongoing misery. You, playing as Subject Delta, a sentient Big Daddy created in the time before Rapture’s collapse, have to find your original Little Sister, Eleanor Lamb, amid all this chaos.

Now, however, Sofia Lamb has positioned Eleanor as the saviour of the city, meaning that most of the residents regard your intent to find her as a threat to Rapture’s future. Your path, therefore, is treacherous. Everyone’s out to get you, meaning that the threat level within Rapture is higher than that which faced Jack; new Splicers roam the corridors, now driven even further into madness after a decade of addiction to augmentation substance ADAM, while newer, tougher foes lie within Rapture’s corridors.

There’s a key difference in being a Big Daddy, though. No longer are you a faceless, weak automaton trying to wrench your way through Ryan’s underwater hell. Playing as one of the Little Sister’s guardians represents a complete transformation of your place within the world. For one, you have the drill and rivet gun weapons, both overpowered compared to anything in the first game, but Delta’s status also changes your relationship to the Little Sisters: they can be adopted and used to extract ADAM from corpses, before being rescued or harvested in the previously established way.

BioShock 2’s sense of progression is admirable. Plasmids feel deadly when they’re upgraded: Incinerate turns into a fireball, then an incendiary explosion, before finally becoming a flamethrower in its third and final form. The other powers follow suit, as Electro Bolt spreads between multiple enemies, Cyclone traps expand in radius and can be combined with other Plasmids, and so on.

Weapon upgrades have stronger effects, reducing recoil, extending ammo clips and, in the drill’s case, deflecting bullets and grenades when given a swing. No longer do these upgrades feel incremental. Every step forward has a noticeable impact on the power of your abilities, a fact that generally encourages more experimental use of the tools available to you than it did before.

Besides, the extraction process performed by Little Sisters demands extensive use of Subject Delta’s arsenal – the task isn’t as simple as plonking them down, picking them up and wandering off again. In reality, the Little Sisters begin to harvest and Sofia Lamb sends waves of enemies to stop you, fluctuating in population and resilience depending on your point in the game.

… continued