This weekend I took a break from what I hope will become a (reborn) routine and opted to play some video games. Last week I grabbed Bioshock 2 and The Force Unleashed 2 on Amazon and finally had a chance to give them a try this weekend. My (relatively spoiler-free) thoughts on them are below:
Bioshock 2, so far, feels both familiar and exceptionally limited at the same time. Those who played the original Bioshock are familiar with the seemingly limitless capabilities of the protagonist; you can fight any enemy, pick up any weapon, and follow any quest (within limits), and that Big Daddy suit is only forced upon you when the plot (perhaps unnecessarily?) demands it.
I had spent some time this weekend, while replaying Bioshock 1, thinking about how Bioshock 2 would be different. The first game wrapped things up pretty neatly; how were they going to engage the player (me) again?
Bioshock 2 manages, so far, to do that. Despite being fitted from the start as a Big Daddy and only kind of referencing the storyline of Bioshock 1, the sequel manages to bring back enough elements (research cameras, other Big Daddies), improve on old elements (hacking, especially), and introduce new elements (Big Sisters) that Bioshock 2 feels both intimately familiar and somewhat foreign all at the same time. Thus far, it’s a perfectly executed sequel. I just have a feeling that this Sanders character is going to be the mid-game twist.
Switching gears to The Force Unleashed 2, we come to a game that seems to do the impossible: bring a character who was, in no uncertain way, killed at the end of the first game. And yet, here we have a sequel featuring the same hero. Please, LucasArts, tell me that you’re beyond this.
The workaround to this rather inconvenient truth it at one natural (for Star Wars) and groan-worthy. If you care enough you can probably guess it is. Within about 15 minutes I remembered what I hated so very much about the first game: this is an endless button-masher. Got a boss coming up? Mash some buttons. Surrounded by hapless Stormtroopers? Mash some buttons. Yes, the response to most things is probably to mash buttons, but the fact is that button-mashing is not the mark of a good game. It is, in fact, the opposite.
I have yet to finish the second major objective in the game (which, oddly enough, is basically the opposite of the second objective in the first game) but to quote practically every major Rebel character, I have a bad feeling about this. Perhaps this is why the game is only $20 on Amazon.
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