I don´t know how to feel about this game. I enjoyed the overall experience, and would recommend it to others, but there were times I didn´t know what to think of this game.
I´ll start with the good. The things I found better than the first game. The gunplay was majorly improved. The gunplay in the first game was sub-par to say the least, and in this game, it was smooth as butter. I also liked how you could now use a gun and a plasmid at the same time, unlike the first game where you had to switch between the two. The soundtrack is also way better in this one. The locations are far more interesting now (not to say the first game´s locations were bad, but this time they just feel better to traverse). The weapons themselves are unique and satisfying to use. And lastly, the hacking minigame is far superior to the infamously bad hacking minigame from the first game, although I´m not a fan of how the game doesn´t pause in the process like it does in the original.
And now for the bad. Most importantly, the game has a tendency to crash. A LOT. And most of it has to do with either using certain weapons for too long (notably the Machine Gun and the Ion Laser from the DLC), fighting some of the new enemies (notably the Brute Splicer and the Big Sister), or simply the fight getting too hectic. Nonetheless this gets pretty annoying, as the only autosave happens at the start of each level, and if you simply forget to save, the game crashes and you lose a huge chunk of your progress, which is infuriating. Moving on, there are things from the first game that were made much worse here. I hate how the research camera works in this game. Also, dealing with the Little Sisters in this game is just tedious. Before you just had to defeat their Big Daddy and then rescue or harvest the Sister. Now, you have to defeat the Big Daddy, take the Little Sister and gather ADAM (it´s not required but in order to get the full experience and the most ADAM you have to do this), then rescue or harvest her, and upon dealing with all of them in a level and defeat the Big Sister on top of all that. It´s just time consuming and boring. The Protector Trials are just this, (minus the Big Sister fight), but I had to complete them for the achievements, which felt like it took years. And lastly, the story. I have absolutely no clue what the deeper meaning of the story is in this game. I understood the general idea of what was going on, but as far as what the motivations and the goals of the main villain were, I had absolutely no clue. Not even after the end cutscene when the credits started rolling. And that goes for most of the side characters as well. Whereas with the first Bioshock, I completely understood everything by the end of the game. Ironically enough, this is only an issue with the main game. I understood the story of the DLC perfectly fine.
But the most infuriating thing for me has to be the ending. I ended up getting the good ending and it pissed me off to no end (for obvious reasons). This really deserves its own section in the review.
On a sidenote, I was also surprised to find out that the script for this game was indeed NOT written by Vin Diesel, which is very strange considering the amount of times it mentions "FAMILY."
Overall I would recommend, because the core gameplay is more than solid, which is the most important part of a videogame for me, but as far as everything else goes, considering what this game is a sequel to, I expected better.
