Who's your Big Daddy?
Written on June 4, 2009 by Matt
Sure, a Big Daddy looks cute in rag-doll form
More E3-ness (although I’ve been meaning to talk about this one for a while), more and more details have been trickling out of 2K recently about BioShock 2, a game I’m very much waiting for. I picked up the original quite late, which proved nice price-wise, but I kicked myself when I played the game for not having bought it sooner. The thing I loved most about it was the art direction. The underwater city of Rapture drips with 1920′s style architecture and class. The character design is brilliant too, with most of the residents of Rapture having long ago succumbed to being “splicers”, genetically altered and mutated freaks on a constant search for Adam (the catalyst for all genetic modification).
What worries me however, with the upcoming release of the sequel, is that the original BioShock had a very linear (albeit brilliant) storyline and might prove a little difficult to follow. But the dev team seems to be taking pains to remain true to the original game in matters of design and gameplay, so hopefully it will prove itself good in it’s own right.
BioShock 2 puts you in the hulking boots of a prototype Big Daddy, the enormous, scuba suited bodyguard to Rapture’s Adam harvesting Little Sisters. By the looks of things this prototype is a fair bit more agile than the Daddies you encounter in BioShock 1, and also will have it’s own splicing abilities too. 2K released a gameplay trailer a little while ago showing off the weapons and abilities of your Big Daddy, and introducing the Big Sister, who is presumably the game’s protaganist. Amongst the new features are the ability to combine splices (the video shows flaming cyclone traps) and the ability to take the Big Daddy out onto the sea floor.
The game is also going to be introducing multiplayer, something that was lacking from the original. Players will take the role of genetic modification test subjects from early Rapture, which sounds cool as it’s also supposed to give a glimpse of the underwater city before it fell into disarray. From the sound of things, it’s going to have it’s own little RPG kind of feel to it too, with players slowly building up their splicing abilities and attributes in their own little apartment of Rapture between matches. Neat to see a game taking on both a sequel AND prequel element in one package. Hopefully it proves worthwhile, because while the pressure to add multiplayer is almost overwhelming these days, not every game actually needs it (something which the original BioShock proved).
Still, eagerly anticipating this one! Would you kindly go and pre-order?
