A shock to the system

The game of the week reviewed by JOE GRIFFIN

BIOSHOCK 2 *****

18 cert, 2K Games, Xbox 360, also on PS3, PC

Welcome to the world of tomorrow! Even though the year is 1958, Rapture will make you feel like you’ve stepped into the future. Marvel at the oceanic beauty of this underground city. Revel in the new world order that eschews the flaws of both capitalism and communism. Savour the advancements made by Rapture’s team of groundbreaking scientists.

In this first-person shooter you’re bombarded not just by violent drug addicts and overzealous robots, but by an internal marketing campaign. Despite the ubiquity of jaunty commercials and upbeat music, the underwater city of Rapture is a leaking, wheezing, violent dystopia.

Anyone familiar with the first BioShock game will already be aware of the disparity between what you’re told and what you see. Like its predecessor, BioShock 2 is bursting with detail. For the first hour or so of playing, it’s easy to become distracted by the game’s look and sound. Ragtime and swing warble creepily from old radios and warped gramophones. Old-fashioned ads are plastered everywhere.

Along your way you find old recordings by former residents of Rapture. It’s a welcome device, painting a compelling picture of a failed society, without any of those pesky animated scenes that can bring videogames to a shuddering halt.

The BioShock games have a lovely pace. While they’re not as relentlessly frantic as, say, Modern Warfare (1 and 2), they also don’t have the patience-taxing lulls of the Hitman series. Wandering through the crumbling art deco cityscape, your character is a mutated hero, grafted into a metal diving bell and determined to save the city’s “little sisters”, girls who have been kidnapped from the surface by Rapture’s tyrannical leader, Sofia Lamb.

Standing in your way are the inhabitants of Rapture, including feral, drug-addicted “splicers” (who serve the same narrative purpose as zombies), mini-helicopter robot security guards, and a few genetically modified surprises. Mysterious helpful voices guide you along via walkie-talkie, and there are Jules Verne-style gadgets to help you. In addition, you can genetically modify yourself to, among other powers, shoot lightning from your hands, levitate objects and even fire swarms of insects from your wrists.

The controls system is fluid and intuitive, even more so than in the first BioShock, and the moral dilemmas add a level of narrative depth absent from most other games on the market.

While an astonishing piece of work, BioShock 2 is not quite flawless: the online multiplayer games are fun, but surely it would have been easy for the developers to give an offline two-player option as well? Also, a small number of the compulsory tasks can be laborious, not least having to use a camera to record your enemies. That particular chore results in surprisingly obvious morsels of game-playing tips.

Mixing elements of The Shining, HG Welles, George Romero and David Cronenberg’s body horror films, BioShock drips with atmosphere, boasts exciting gameplay and has an original, terrific horror story. It’s no wonder that director Gore Verbinski (Ring, Pirates of the Caribbean) plans to adapt the games as a big-budget film. That might produce the first truly great film to begin life as a videogame.