Well, I finished Bioshock 2 yesterday and I think I have to say I misjudged it. I really enjoyed the last half of the game, the storyline wrapped itself up nicely and all the loose ends I mentioned in my last post were taken care of in a quite convincing manner. Also, the series change of focus from a commentary on Objectivism to being about a commune styled utopian "family" was a very interesting and fresh change for Rapture.
That said, I’m sticking with my opinion that the combat was my issue with the game, but I’m changing my mind about it being solid enough to keep my interest. What I realized is that my problem with the combat, and in retrospect I had the same issue with the first Bioshock, is that the game starts off far too difficult. Enemies do way to much damage, they attack from multiple angles with weapons that obstruct player vision upon impact. Your arsenal is also hardly up to snuff early on in the both games. Yet by the end of the game you are essentially a walking tank. I could hold a room from an assault of twenty guys without breaking a sweat by the three quarter mark. With proper preparation I bet I could do it without using a med pack, though since both money and med packs flow like water by the end. Once I got to this point in both games I had a great time with the combat. The weapons allow for so many options that fighting off hordes of Splicers never gets old and setting up elaborate preparations to defend the Little Sisters became a game by itself.
This makes the second half of the game a blast, but the first a chore. Luckily the game offers a solution for the early difficulty, Vitachambers. Anytime you die in Bioshock 1 or 2 you are immediately revived in a nearby Vitachamber and any progress you’ve made, including damage dealt to your enemies remains unchanged. Therefore no matter how many times you die it doesn’t matter, you could technically run out of ammo with all your weapons and melee a Big Daddy to death over the course of twenty minutes if you were stubborn enough. Naturally, I think this is a pretty lousy solution for poorly paced difficulty. Unless I was being super careful I was using a Vitachamber during at least a quarter of my fights early on. During each major fight I’d be lucky to die and be revived reeking of failure and incompetence only once per boss while the game gently added insult to injury by telling me to keep whittling away at that Big Sister. Then for the last five hours of the game I never once even came close to dying, laughing as I passed by countless unused Vitachambers armed to the teeth with rockets and EVE.
Games often get easier as you progress through them for several reasons. For one, players tend to get better at games the longer they play them, but a larger reason is usually unlocking newer and better powers as the game progresses. Generally you fight tougher enemies to counteract this increase in strength, but games almost never up the difficulty enough. I understand that it must be a difficult line to walk, there’s always at least two variables determining how hard the latter half of a game will be and both of them vary based on each players personal improvement and dedication to finding every powerup. That’s still no excuse for the stark contrast in difficulty Bioshock 2 has from start to finish.
Making a few of the better weapons available earlier, or lowering the health of some of the earlier Splicers would have gone a long way toward making the beginning of the game as enjoyable as the ending. Even being more generous with the med packs early on rather than later when they aren't nearly as needed would have been a huge improvement.
I wrote this post because I changed my mind about Bioshock 2 so I should probably reiterate I still think the game as a whole is enjoyable and by the end I was quite impressed. It’s definitely a worthy sequel, it’s just a shame they didn’t improve upon such an obvious problem from the first game. Or maybe I just totally suck and no one else had this problem. My pride says this isn’t the case and it's usually right.
