I have done a terrible job of a) posting and b) responding to comments recently, for which I can only apologise. I was having some severe motivational issues and needed to take a break. 

Here’s a fun game you can play when reading a review of Prey on a mainstream gaming outlet. Do Ctrl-F, and count how many times the reviewer mentions Bioshock. Then do the same thing for System Shock. Then correlate those mentions with a score, or the overall tone of the review. I guarantee you the better reviews will have name-dropped System Shock at least once; these are the ones that really understand where Prey is coming from, because it’s System Shock 3 in all but name.

The distinction is important. I enjoyed the first Bioshock game, but it was very much a product of its time: released a couple of years after the start of the 360 era, it was designed to bring across something of System Shock’s open world and pseudo-RPG nature into the (at the time) modern console age. It succeeded thanks to certain compromises it made on mechanics and game structure, but those very compromises are what has caused the series to age very ungracefully between Bioshock 1 and Bioshock Infinite’s full stop; Infinite presented an extremely pretty world to the player filled with interesting things, but the only way you could interact with them was by shooting them in the face. If Prey was simply an updated Bioshock I’d probably be slating it along with half of the gaming press, as there’s very little mileage left in that concept.

That’s the last thing Prey is, fortunately, and that Bioshock is the closest analogue most mainstream games journalists can reach for is a pretty damning indictment of the paucity of their experience and knowledge. No, Prey is something very special indeed. The concept is very similar to the first System Shock: as protagonist Morgan Yu (who, excellently, can be either male or female with small details changing depending on which one you pick) you wake up on a gigantic space station infested with strange alien beasties and killer robots, and you have to figure out what’s going on, contain the outbreak and escape. This took me about 17 hours on my first run, so it’s not a trivial task. There’s the usual shenanigans you’d expect from what is now referred to as the “immersive sim” genre¹: you can pick up injectors called Neuromods that function as skill points for buying powers and passive abilities, there’s computers stuffed full of emails to read, and audio logs left scattered around the station that provide a lot of backstory as to what happened before you woke up. That certainly sounds a lot like a Bioshock game so far.

If I had to pick one thing that differentiates Prey from Bioshock, though, it is the level design. Prey has been developed by Arkane Studios, who also did the Dishonored series, and Dishonored 2 was extremely my shit thanks to the way it approached the level design. Arkane are now arguably the best developer in the world at structuring levels, and this is because they think about how their environments would work as real places as well as levels in a game. They’ve extended this philosophy to the huge, kilometre-long Talos 1 space station in Prey, except where in Dishonored 2 each level was an isolated entity, the various areas of Talos 1 (and there are about a dozen) have been designed in such a way that they connect together seamlessly. You could take the layout of each individual part of Talos I that you visit and fit them together into a blueprint of the whole thing that actually makes sense — and in fact it turns out this is basically what Arkane did.

The fact that the interior environment of the entire station exists in the game has some extremely beneficial knock-on effects for the rest of it. For starters, it’s incredibly open. Your movement at the start of the game is restricted by one locked door. Once you’ve hit the appropriate point in the main plot to unlock that door (which could be done in minutes if you were speedrunning, but which took me an hour or two) you can go pretty much anywhere in the station without having to wait for more plot to occur, just so long as you can find your way there without dying to the various high-level monsters you’ll find in later game areas. Past that opening tutorial segment, Arkane do not have to worry about restricting the player’s movement down a single critical path — everything outside the station is a microgravity vacuum that presents its own hard limits on exploration, so why introduce artificial ones when you’ve gone to the trouble of making everything inside the station a real, explorable environment? Similarly, Arkane do not have to worry about masking areas of the station that do not exist with the hoary old videogame tropes of barricades, wreckage and unopenable doors blocking your path. Any time you come across a locked door in Prey there’ll be some method of opening it to get to what’s the other side, and often more than one. Even the emergency hull breach containment doors you occasionally run across aren’t abused at all, as later on you get the ability to venture outside to the station exterior through airlocks scattered along the length of Talos I, and whatever part of the station you’ve run across that’s open to space will always be accessible from here. Except for the nearby Moon which Talos I orbits, the general rule of Prey is that if you can see a place you can get to it, or through it, somehow. The trick is in figuring out how.

This is tremendously refreshing. I have a very specific approach to playing first- and third-person games these days: as soon as the tutorial finishes and the game blesses me with free action, I immediately go looking for the limits of the simulation. Back in the early ‘00s Old Man Murray rated games by their Time To Crate, so I guess you could call this measure Time To Invisible Wall. Most games usually don’t last more than a couple of minutes by this metric before I run into something rather uncomfortably gamey that keeps me on the straight and narrow. – open world games have a higher TTIW thanks to their scope, but eventually you’ll run into some decidedly unnatural geography designed to hem you in. By contrast, Prey arguably doesn’t have a Time To Invisible Wall. Technically you could rate it at around two hours, as this is the earliest point in the game where you can get outside the station and start jetting away from it indefinitely using your suit thrusters, at which point Prey has no choice but to kill you because modelling local Earth orbit is somewhat beyond the scope of what it’s doing — even here, though, they’ve put some thought into it and presented some fairly convincing in-game reasoning as to why this happens. Other than that first locked door after the tutorial I managed to explore pretty much the entire station without ever advancing the main plotline, and the game accommodated me quite happily even though I was breaking the sequencing on some of the sidequests pretty damn hard — one of them I managed to complete before I even picked it up by hacking into a container in the cargo bay, but in general Prey is good at providing some sort of acknowledgement of the fact that you’re doing things out of sequence, even if it’s a throwaway voice line.  Prey is the first game that I have played, ever, that completely rebuffed my attempts to break it. And of all the games that have had the “immersive sim” label retroactively plastered on top of them, Prey is, perhaps, the first to truly earn it.

I can’t begin to tell you how impressed I was with Prey once the almost total lack of bounds became fully apparent. It’s something best experienced blind, but if you haven’t bought it yet you probably need some convincing and for my money the Talos I station is by far the biggest and best selling point it has to offer. Of course because this is Arkane the station environment is complete, connected, and detailed, with a flashy art deco facade for the station staff and visitors giving way to more practical and utilitarian maintenance spaces behind the walls that run pretty much exactly where you’d expect maintenance spaces to go. One of the gimmicks of Prey’s alternate history world is the Looking Glass technology scattered throughout the station; this is a viewscreen that’s more than a viewscreen, as it presents a flawless 3D image of whatever you’re looking at that’s like peering through a window or onto a stage. The primary gameplay purpose of the Looking Glass is so that you can plausibly view cutscenes as a helpless observer (it’s a damn sight better than unbreakable glass windows, anyway), but Arkane then ask themselves: how else might this technology be used? Especially on a space station where space and resources are at a premium. This is why there’s more than one waterfall in Prey that isn’t actually a waterfall at all, but is instead a Looking Glass screen presenting a facsimile of a waterfall that’s indistinguishable from the real thing – and that you can smash and get behind the workings of if you manage to figure out that it’s a fake. Talos I is stuffed full of secrets like this and ferreting all of them out is immensely pleasurable, like deconstructing an incredibly intricate puzzle box. It’s also important to note that at no point does Prey break character in anything it does; where it has to make concessions to the fact that it is a game it’ll always come up with a believable in-game reason for why a thing is the way that it is, and that’s a principle that extends to both the level design and the more general gameplay mechanics.

Now, as to how Prey plays out in terms of the moment-to-moment activities of sneaking, fighting and listening to the ubiquitous audio logs, about the worst criticism I can make of it is that its weakest areas are no more than genre standard. The sneaking is perfectly functional, and the three working firearms in the game do exactly what they say on the tin; they are perhaps a little unspectacular, but then Prey is neither Dishonored or Doom. It simply makes some provision for you to play it like Dishonored or Doom if that’s what you want to do. More interesting are the non-firearm weapons and the powers you can pick up by scanning alien lifeforms and researching their abilities. Something that struck me a couple of hours into the game was that there really are only three weapons in the game that are primarily intended to be weapons — a pistol, a shotgun and a short-range stungun. Everything else is a jury-rigged experiment or an actual tool that you might believably find on a space station of the future, such as the Gloo Gun – this fires gobs of quick-expanding sealant that harden instantly and which are intended to be used for sealing atmospheric breaches (and there’s some sidequests where you use it to do literally this), but it’s also handy for immobilising enemies or for spraying onto walls to create impromptu staircases. Ditto the Q-Beam, which is a sort of high-powered welding laser, and the Huntress Boltcaster, which is actually a toy crossbow that fires foam bolts; it’s absolutely useless in a fight, but for pushing buttons from across the room and creating distractions for enemies that track movement or noise there’s nothing better.

Because you have very few actual weapons, and very little ammunition for those weapons, you’re forced to get creative when taking down your alien foes. Immobilising them with the Gloo Gun or the stungun before whacking them with your wrench — yes, Prey continues the fine Shock tradition of having a wrench be your primary melee weapon — is much preferable to taking them head on with an unupgraded shotgun, as even one kinetic blast from a Phantom will take off nearly half your health. For bigger enemies you need to disable their more damaging abilities via EMP or psi-nullifying powers before taking them out. Prey’s weapon selection mostly being a set of tools is mirrored in you using them like tools: each one has a specific application, and you switch between two or three when fighting a given enemy.

Prey follows a slightly different design path when it comes to the alien powers. You unlock these by scanning the various alien enemies you encounter with your Psychoscope doohickey; once you’ve scanned four or five of a given enemy type you’ll unlock the appropriate parts of the alien skill tree that corresponds to the abilities that enemy has, at which point you can purchase those abilities yourself using Neuromods and use them against their erstwhile owners. Here Prey does something that I very much like to see games doing: it applies the same rules to both you and the aliens. They look weird and scary and until you get the Psychoscope they’ll show up in your HUD as a series of ??? marks rather than a named organism, and the start of Prey is correspondingly incredibly tense as you creep around the station trying to avoid bizarre monsters with unknown capabilities. That lasts up until you scan and research them, at which point the tables are turned: nearly every single alien ability that exists in the game is something that can be scanned, bought and turned against them. Eventually you learn that a Thermal Phantom is just something that can lay fire traps and has innate fire resistance, both of which become available to you after doing the requisite research. Etheric Phantoms are immensely confusing to fight until you realise they only have one active ability: Phantom Shift, which teleports them a short distance while leaving a clone of themselves to distract the enemy. Again, that’s something that you can research and use yourself. It’s not quite universal, and they can do some things that you can’t, but you eventually get access to all of their best toys.

This design ethos of providing you with a universal toolkit rather than a weapon or powerset mostly succeeds in keeping Prey’s combat from becoming stale, but if Prey has one single weakness it’s that it doesn’t pace itself quite right in terms of encounter design. It’s not so much that the enemies you face are badly designed in and of themselves, it’s that Prey runs out of new ones to throw at you about halfway in and they don’t increase in threat while you continue to jam Neuromods into your head, powering yourself up to the point where even large groups of enemies are nothing more than an inconvenient speedbump. This is probably unavoidable when Prey has to cater to so many different styles of play — there’s a big thing around the morality of injecting yourself with alien abilities, so potentially a player only has access to the passive Human powersets (hacking, repair, more damage for weapons etc.) or even none at all, and the game still has to be completable for those players. It just means that for somebody like me, who found the Neuromod fabrication plans about thirty minutes into the game (I love that it let me run across them that early) and spent the next sixteen hours obsessively picking up every scrap of exotic matter they could find to make more Neuromods, the last half of the game was rather lacking in challenge.

A brief word about crafting: as a system it’s pretty basic and functional, but the in-game process for it is tremendous. You can pick up many different junk items in the game and, when your inventory gets too full, feed them into a Recycler that breaks them down into their constituent components: Organic, Synthetic, Mineral and Exotic. You then take those raw materials across to a Fabricator, call up the desired plans and plug in the required number and type of components to build the thing you want, which is 3D-printed in the air in front of you. Very simple, but I mention it for two reasons. One is that it means exploration is always worthwhile, as exploring a new area will always yield new items that, no matter how seemingly useless they are, can still be fed into the Recycler for more materials that can be used to create items you do want– it also means picking up duplicate guns has a point as these always have a very good yield when put into the Recycler. The other is that recycled materials are physically deposited into a hopper next to the machine for you to pick up, and the sound of them clattering into the slot is one of the most satisfying things ever.

The last thing I should mention is that Arkane have done some serious work on one of the areas I’ve historically regarded them as being a little weak on: their world-building. Between this and Dishonored 2 they’re the undisputed champions of making fantastic environments that still have an entirely plausible layout, but Prey also couples it with some surprisingly good writing, dialogue, and incidental details. Take the Nerf crossbow I mentioned above: in one of Prey’s many incredibly neat touches of characterisation the plans for the crossbow can be found in a dozen places on Talos I because the people who work there are huge nerds and really into their office Nerf wars, which is also something that comes across in their audio logs – despite the fantastic environment the staff of Talos I are for the most part extremely relatable people, which makes it an extra-hard punch in the gut when you’ve been getting to know them via their voice recordings for five or six hours and then come across their helplessly eviscerated corpse. I’ve always looked down on audio logs as being a second-rate method of storytelling that are relied on far too heavily as a crutch, but games like Prey and Horizon Zero Dawn are making me revise that opinion; it looks like developers are finally figuring out how to use them effectively. If you buy Prey, don’t do what I did and dismissively ignore the logs for the first two hours of the game since you’ll be missing out on a lot of detail.

Prey is one of the most complete games I’ve ever seen. I was going to say I couldn’t recall the last time I played something that so successfully delivered on nearly everything it attempted, but then I realised that was a lie: the last time I played a game that left me feeling quite as satisfied and appreciative of the state of modern game development was Witcher 3. Prey isn’t as ambitious a game, but modelling an entire space station in minute detail should be plenty ambitious enough for anybody. Importantly it confirms Arkane as the custodians of the old Looking Glass² spirit; Prey is a game that takes those old System Shock concepts and updates them almost flawlessly, blending in a little of Deus Ex, Thief, Dishonored, and more besides. It’s certainly a far better heir to the title than than the comparatively anaemic Bioshock games. I don’t namedrop all this stuff lightly but Prey definitely deserves it; it’s one of those rare games that redefines what I consider to be the standard for the genre, and serves as a timely reminder that this isn’t such a bad hobby after all.

The post Thoughts: Prey appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

After the last diablog was so rapturously received (by which I mean three people said they liked it) Jim and I decided to team up to review another game we’d both been playing recently: Bioshock 2.

Jim: Sometimes you’re watching TV, around about the hour when you’re starting to give up on being a productive citizen, and you’ll catch a glimpse of a half-remembered childhood hero, trying to make it big in America as a singer, or filling in the rubbish cooking quotient of Celebrity Masterchef. “Gosh”, you think, “are they still going?” Similar thoughts crossed my mind when Bioshock 2 flashed up in the Steam sales. I mean, Bioshock had been big when it was released. Big Daddies were an iconic design of 2007, the incredibly meaningful choices were more heavily trumpeted than the walls of Jericho. Then everyone played it, realised a lot of that was blustery bluff that masked a reasonably pleasant, novel-looking shooter, and moved on with their lives. 2K weren’t done, however, and brought out Bioshock 2 a few years later, to a chorus of world-weary shrugs. What the hell, it was £3.75, I reasoned. Let’s see what it’s like.

Hentzau: The road to hell is paved with cheap Steam purchases. I enjoyed Bioshock for what it was; an inoffensive enough shooter that didn’t do anything to justify stealing the “shock” nomenclature from System Shock, and which ended up being an average game attached to a spectacular opening as a result. The sequel, though. The sequel’s hook is that you’re playing as a Big Daddy, one of the lumbering armoured juggernauts of destruction that features so prominently on the publicity material for both games and which is the Bioshock franchise’s signature monster. How could they possibly screw that up?

Jim: You still had these memories, didn’t you, of battling those diving monstrosities in the first game. I loved that I had to work up to those kinds of fights, setting elaborate plans and traps and just generally thinking before I shot.

Hentzau: Oh yes. Dodging red-hot rivets, losing half my health to the drill attack — part of the morbid attraction of that kind of power asymmetry is that after dying for the umpteenth time the player mutters under their breath about what they’d be able to do if they had those weapons and that obscene health pool. Bioshock 2 was supposed to fulfil this wish; the concept as stated is pretty much the dream of anyone who played the original Bioshock.

Jim: And so you wake up as said mini-godzilla, espy a splicer bearing down on you and begin to laugh at his puny gun and his puny armour and…oh, you’re dead. Bioshock 2 did not trust you with that level of power, so it made a compromise – you can keep some of the attributes of the Big Daddies, but not all. So out go the obscene levels of armour and health, the powerful attacks and the inbuilt rocket launcher, but you can keep the incredibly slow movement. And the drill.

Hentzau: Except the drill now does sod-all damage to begin with. And has an ammo supply. Which, when depleted, forces you to clumsily flail at nearby enemies with all the brute strength of an enraged flamingo. A power fantasy this is not.

Jim: Basically, they decided that you should play a human who just happens to be wearing a fancy suit. You were forced to mainly use guns, to go for headshots, to be precise and stealthy and everything one of those massive fuckers definitely is not.

Hentzau: The in-game excuse for this is that the player is supposed to be an earlier model of Big Daddy, one which is, and I quote, “a more streamlined and agile type of Big Daddy, meaning they are not as heavily armored, but are faster and more maneuverable”. They got the not as heavily armoured part right, but strangely they forgot the part where the player was supposed to be faster and more maneuverable. In Bioshock 2 — at least to begin with — you move at the speed of a wounded sloth. Just getting from point A to point B is a chore, and you can forget actually trying to strafe or dodge in any way, which is kind of a pain when every single enemy in the game will take off at least a third of your health bar in one hit. There were times when I wished the game was third-person because it would have been quite comical to see this hulking behemoth being beaten to death by two thugs wielding iron pipes.

Jim: And so the game’s response to that difficulty is to literally slap a band-aid on it. There’s a lot of medpacks around and you guzzle them like there’s no tomorrow. It was rare I could make it through an area without needing one or two, and I know I was playing it on hard difficulty (because this year isn’t onerous enough), but it’s weird that you had that problem even on medium and being the world’s greatest manshooter.

Hentzau: Well I probably wouldn’t go that far, although it’s worth mentioning the aiming reticule is a massive empty circle which actively dissuades precision targeting. But yes, even on medium I was chugging at least one health pack after every fight. At the beginning of the game, before I had a full stock of gene tonics and health upgrades and my Big Daddy was at his most fragile, I even dipped into the difficulty settings to check that I hadn’t accidentally managed to misclick Hard when I’d started it. But no, this was medium. I really didn’t feel like I should be coming out of a fight with a couple of basic enemies nearly half-dead. This absurd level of vulnerability is completely incongruous with what you are supposed to be, and did an awful lot to turn me against Bioshock 2 from the outset.

Jim: Given your size and noise made it impossible to get the drop on them until you get that one tonic that makes you invisible, yeah. The other way they tried to balance it was via the vita-chambers, presumably. If the difficulty was too high, if you ended up dying a lot, well, didn’t matter, you could just jump out of that magical tube, sparkling new. I loathe the very idea of those things, though, it takes away all tension in a fight if you know you can never actually die..

Hentzau: Admittedly it’s just an active gameplay substitute for your average FPS player’s standard operating procedure, which is to quicksave every sixty seconds. However, I feel the vita chambers are more insidious than that because they basically remove the penalty of failure that underpins all FPS games. Die in Bioshock and — oh no! — you have a thirty second walk back to where you were, with everything else being exactly as you left it. Actually it’s often less because the damn things are so ubiquitous.

Jim: I did disable them and quicksave like the spawny git I am, but I still curled my mouth into a dismissive sneer every time I walked past one. And that’s just the fundamentals of fighting, there’s an awful lot that Bioshock staples on in order to try to keep these things exciting. Plasmids, for example, were one of the big selling points of the original game, a sort of organic magic that, once again, Big Daddies didn’t have but you do for no reason this time because you’re special.

Hentzau: Did you ever use any plasmid that wasn’t the electro-stunning attack?

Jim: Occasionally I had to melt ice to get some ammo, and I quite liked the one that summoned security bots, but honestly it was a chore switching between those things in combat. If an enemy chucked a bin at you, I estimate he’d have to do it from around thirty miles away to give you enough time to switch to the telekinesis one to fling it back.

Hentzau: This is especially annoying when a lot of the mini-boss fights are built on using specific plasmids within a split-second window. Electrocute the Big Sister to stop her crawling over the walls! Catch her firebombs and throw them back at her with telekinesis! There were all these special attacks that I was supposed to block with plasmids, but which I had to soak up because I had no chance of switching to the correct plasmid and firing it off correctly in the heat of the moment.

Jim: Most of the fights in the end do devolve into a sort of frantic slow-motion backwards jog, firing off rivets in the general vicinity of the opponents heads and hoping they connected. Occasionally you’d spam out some electricity and see what happened. The key thing missing, I suppose, is control. You never felt master of the fight (until right near the end), you were this breakable, endangered diver boy who was constantly hiding in alcoves.

Hentzau: The thing that gets me about this is that there are a couple of gene tonics — Drill Lurker and Natural Camouflage — that are actively supposed to promote stealthy gameplay. Stealth. Gameplay. In a game about a one-ton armoured bastard carrying around guns roughly the size of a filing cabinet. The approach to the whole thing is just so conventional and completely backwards to what it should be.

Jim: You’re also an investigative Big Daddy, don’t forget. Early on in the game you stumble across a camera and the most ludicrous concept of all is introduced: research.

Hentzau:  This is yet another of many, many things which have been recycled wholesale from Bioshock. It worked in the first game when you were a stranger to Rapture; you’d never seen any of these mutated monstrosities before and the existence of a magical doohickey that let you find out their strengths and weaknesses made thematic — if not exactly logical — sense. Here, though, you are a mutated monstrosity, and instead of laying waste to your foes you’re wandering around taking holiday snaps of them so that you can gather research points to get a small bonus to damage or whatever.

Jim: It was another layer of ballache onto the already horrible mini-boss fights that you were constantly having, too, a couple of times I’d sweat my way through some big daddy fight only to find that I’d forgotten to get the research done at the start, which I knew I was going to need. And let’s not forget that amazing research bonus for the thuggish splicer.

Hentzau: Ah yes, that fantastically complex technology that you had to perfect through hours of painstaking observation and analysis of your opponents’ behaviour in combat: a bigger wallet.

Jim: I was already crying with laughter when I realised there was a wallet cap, and that you could expand it just sent me over the edge. Back to those bossfights, though. Bioshock’s marketing was all about the confrontations with the Big Daddies, as we’ve already mentioned. Bioshock 2, unsurprisingly, is exactly the same. How many times would you say you’d slogged through that exact same fight?

Hentzau: Fifteen, I think. Or at least, that’s roughly the number of Little Sisters you can rescue/murder, which means that’s the number of Big Daddies you have to kill.

Jim: And then every time you kill them you go through two more identical “stand here and get rushed by waves of baddies” fights as your adopted Little Sister gathers Adam from appropriately glowy corpses for you.

Hentzau: That’s if you made the decision to save them, mind. Killing them presumably circumvented the whole tedious process, as did just stuffing them into a vent straight away (the game doesn’t tell you this is an option, though). However, in order to get over the difficulty hump and become less fragile you need gene tonics, which means you need Adam, which means you need to stand over the Little Sister and protect her from hordes of splicers while she gathers Adam. Skipping straight to vent-stuffing is only a viable option after you’ve unlocked most or all of the plasmids/tonics and you don’t need the Adam any more. It’s a remarkably unpleasant, repetitive gameplay mechanic which, yet again, is lifted wholesale from Bioshock 1. Except that game at least had the good sense not to make you do a pair of tower defence missions every time you wanted to save one.

Jim: Splendidly, about halfway through the game they run out of ideas and remove even the pretence of that gathering being optional, when that newspaper man tells you that he’ll only lift the barriers if you rescue three little sisters. Because they…..have….a genetic memory or….just do it alright. Your objective is to do the optional metagame objective.

Hentzau: Here’s what I don’t get, right; Rapture is apparently a functioning society because you’ve got all these characters who have survived there for years with no problems, and this guy sends you after the Little Sisters because he’s concerned with his standing in this society and doesn’t want certain plot-sensitive information to become common knowledge. Yet the Rapture I walked through was a leaky dystopian hellhole full of monsters. I doubt they’d have cared much about his dirty laundry.

Jim: My only theory on that is that the only people alive now are people who managed to lock themselves in a booth. Almost every character you interact with has placed themselves behind the unbreakable plexiglass so presumably they can’t be got at. It’s maybe even more worrying that the only time you’re allowed into a room with a person who isn’t a raving monster, is when the game is leaning on you very heavily to kill them.

Hentzau:  It was like the game was telling me I couldn’t be trusted to be left alone with these people, that I had to be supervised and separated from them at all times lest I do something stupid. Your interactions with the NPCs in this game are basically a series of prison visits, conducted through a glass screen and a two-way intercom system. And that’s why, every time the game wanted me to kill someone, I didn’t. Not out of any moral concerns or because I was trying to get a certain ending, but because it was my way of giving two fingers to the developers and their ridiculously constrictive, on-rails level design.

Jim: The whole game was “follow this compass arrow”. Not because it was interesting to explore, not because the world invited a sense of wonder, not even because you wanted to get to the bottom of this awful plot (and it was so tremendously awful), but just because it was there. I was paying as much attention as I could and, honestly, I still don’t know what the plot was about. I understood the words they were using, yeah, but it followed so little logical sense. Despite the hundred little recorded diaries, the constant intercom announcements, all I picked up was a constant squabbling static.

Hentzau: There’s one part towards the end of the game that’s particularly absurd; you find a message from a man who knows he’s going insane and wants you to kill him. To this end, he has left you detailed instructions on exactly how to do that. Except they’re not all in one place, because that would be far too simple and — dare I say it — logical. Instead he’s decided to scatter them across a pair of levels in easily-digestable bite-size chunks that automatically play whenever you finish the next step of his ridiculously elaborate plan. It’s an approach which certainly avoids taxing the attention span of the player, but which is absolutely nonsensical when placed in the context of the game world. How do the messages know to play only for you? Do they play for every random splicer who walks by? And why did he split the plan up anyway?

Jim: That’s it, though, the game world makes no sense, it has no structure. Bioshock was a game that was actually fun to explore, you had the pleasure palace, the run-down slums, the farms, the orphanage and so on. I remember more standout interesting moments from the original game, and I last played that about four years ago. The only things they’ve changed, they’ve made worse. Hacking, for example…

Hentzau:  In the UK we have something called a driving theory test which you have to pass before they let you behind the wheel of a car for real. Part of this test is hazard perception, where you watch a video of somebody driving and click the mouse button whenever you see a potential hazard. Clicking the mouse button too late will result in failure but — hilariously — so will being particularly observant and clicking the mouse button early as soon as you spot the danger. Instead you have to click the mouse button when the person who made the test thinks you should spot the danger. And this is the best analogy I have for Bioshock 2’s hacking minigame, which sets you the pulse-pounding challenge of clicking the mouse button inside a series of steadily decreasing time-windows three or four times per hack. I know Bioshock’s Pipemania minigame got a lot of stick, but even that was nowhere near as braindead as this is. And of course the worst thing about this is that everything in the game can be hacked. Everything. They even introduce a remote hacking tool so that you can hack places that would normally be inaccessible to hacking!

Jim: Hacking on the go for today’s busy professionals who are trying to juggle their home and work commitments.

Hentzau: It’s utter garbage, it really is, and failure either giving you a damaging shock or summoning security bots to kill you is just the shit icing on a cake made of shit.

Jim: Okay that’s a great big list of complaints there, and they all boil down to the utter lack of innovation or care about this gameworld, relative to the original. What Bioshock 2 mainly is, is a poor-quality copy. So many of these things we’re complaining about have just been transferred straight across, apparently without thought on how they’d fit into this alternate viewpoint. Bioshock was if nothing else, glorious to look at and explore. Bioshock 2 is a mess.

Hentzau: Is there anything you liked about the game, Jim?

Jim: I liked the seaweed. The seaweed was ridiculously pretty, there were these shoals of fish swimming about that looked like real shoals. You?

Hentzau: There was a bit where you’re walking around an animatronic display about the building of Rapture and this rickety dummy scientist raises his arms in celebration after making a discovery, only for a pair of giant hands to descend from the ceiling and take it from him. That was good.

Jim: Yeah there were a couple of really nice moments. You get a brief glimpse of Rapture at its peak, right at the end, a swathe of mahogany, velvet and dinner parties, and after tramping through this rusty tin can for many, many hours, it was a lovely sight. I would also add that, once you threw enough upgrade juice at it, the combat finally became a little bit fun, you finally felt like this halfway-invincible ironclad.

Hentzau: If the difficulty curve had started there I’d have had far fewer complaints about the game. As it is it’s ass-backwards; starts out diamond-hard and steadily becomes easier as you unlock more passive bonuses and expand the amount of ammo you can carry. It wasn’t until the end of the game that I felt I had enough bullets to really go hog wild on the basic splicers instead of saving all the good stuff for the inevitable miniboss fights.

Jim: Ah well, there’s always Bioshock Infinite eh?

Hentzau: I’LL KILL YOU.

Has Jim crossposted this to his own blog this time? Who knows. You should probably go there and find out.

The post Diablog: Bioshock 2. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.