This was a really strange game.
Spoiler free discussion below:
I just beat it, and the first 2 hours of the game and the last 2 hours of the game are spectacular. But everything in between is just sort of boring filler and background noise.
The game had a ton of atmosphere at first that it seemed to lose as the game dragged on, and as a result the world wasn't very convincing...it quickly degenerates into waves of baddies in industrial locations.
EDIT: I got BioShock 2 thanks to Playstation Plus - is it worth playing? I enjoyed the original BioShock, but never felt the need to go back to rapture at the time to play BS2.
I am inclined to agree. Something about it just doesn't resonate as well as the middle of Bioshock did, mostly owing to the fact that the entire world falls apart around you for what seems like no reason at all. At first, it's the self-fulfilling prophecy of "he's the false prophet, lets all kill him" which brings the entire city to war, but later on, you go through a tear into a universe where the Vox were armed to the teeth and destroying the city. The problem is that feels purely like a coincidence, a byproduct of your (ultimately pointless) efforts to acquire an airship by bringing the gunsmith back alive.
Like Yahtzee points out in the ZP review, I couldn't help but keep saying to myself "why don't they just jump out of the city with a parachute?" The first and last couple hours are lathered with such transcendent tone, and tackling concepts that are so far out there, that having to ask these kinds of practical questions throughout the majority of the game feels wrong. I want to be focusing on the crazy plot, but instead I spend half the game in slums like it's Bioshock 2.5, this time with Jeremiah Fink as the evil businessman. It triesto shoehorn in Bioshock's working class uprising through the Vox Populi, but into a game that was about something much, MUCH bigger than a unionized rebellion against the man.
The ultimate loss is a proper explanation for... everything? Who are the Lutece's? Where did they come from? Why do they possess such command interdimensional travel? Did they create Elizabeth? How did they create Elizabeth? Why? Was their intention always to give her to Comstock? Why? So she could one day blow up the world? But again, WHY? Did Comstock use her to see the future? How could a simple religious man possibly comprehend what he was seeing? How and why did he create this gargantuan floating city? Was it so that Elizabeth could one day use it to destroy the world? How did he know that future would be the one to come to pass if an infinite number of futures exist? How did both Booker and Comstock end up in the same universe? Why did the Lutece's need Elizabeth if they were capable of creating the tears themselves with machines? Putting such a power into the hands of a human seems dangerous, so why would they risk it?
I could go on with these questions all day, but ultimately, much like Lost or Prometheus, it left me awestruck, but unsatisfied and confused in the extreme when it came to the nuts and bolts of the narrative. It strikes emotional highs, it has its big twist, and at times, the atmosphere is like no other game you'll ever experience, but it's more confusingly plotted and pieced together than probably anything I've ever experienced.
