What Happens At The End Of BioShock 2?

There’s hope yet for “BioShock 2.” It’s not like there was ever really any question about how good the follow up to one of 2007’s best games would be, but, there was one fatal flaw with the original – the last boss encounter.

 
After hours upon hours of both challenging and rewarding gameplay throughout the sunken city of Rapture, Jack Ryan works his way up to (spoiler alert) fighting Frank Fontaine in, what should have been, ultimate fight to end the game. However, for all the greatness that went into the rest of the game, the final fight was a bit of a letdown, feeling flat, and fairly easy compared to some of the other inhabitants of Rapture that Jack had to battle.

 
At a recent demo I asked “BioShock 2”’s Creative Director, Jordan Thomas, about whether or not whatever the end of his game holds a similar encounter, and, while there was very little he would actually confirm, here’s what he had to say: [Continue Reading]

Teaming Up For Bioshock 2’s Multiplayer

While “Bioshock 2″ has been in the spotlight for a good couple of months now, there’s still plenty left out their to be discovered for the sequel to 2007’s game of the year. Today, more details emerged on what will be included in the final package once “Bioshock 2″ sees its release on November 3rd. But this isn’t any juicy info on the game’s hush hush single player campaign, this is news on the multiplayer front.

2K Australia senior designer Dean Tate told Gamespot today that they were handing over the multiplayer reigns to Digital Extremes, the people responsible for hellishly, fast-paced multiplayer hits like “Unreal” and “Unreal Tournament.” [Continue Reading]

A Night in Rapture

I got a chance to download the Bioshock demo tonight for my PC [vista enabled 5gb dual core *2, 512mb nvidia GC rig] . I will pick up the full game later this week so I can loose myself in it over the weekend after being teased by this demo. Below you will find my general impressions and some screens that I took while playing.

Besides the obvious fact that this game looks good, it plays just as well. There was an interesting difficulty setting in the game called “You played a lot of Shooters!” that was not selectable. I was very annoyed by this as my brethren are aware of my love for taking on an impossible challenge. That must be the insane setting because playing it one difficulty lower will be challenging enough for most players. Even though that’s the case the game still plays well, rewarding you just in time so that the difficulty does not appear to be too harsh. While playing I had a heighten sense of all the objects in the game, and this is a must if you expect to survive.

If dirt was the leading elemental character in Motorstorm, then water takes the spot light in Bioshock. Mind you the game is running on limited settings. Though I was able to max out the settings on my PC, there were few options that were not made available in the demo, specifically shadow highlighting and all that volumetric mama-jama nerds go gah-gah over. But looking at the above picture, with the game running at a mere 800*600 resolution, do you really need it? Then again I was running it on Vista, so take note.

The entire feel of this game is something to talk about, from the audio, characters, and the themes used to get a design point across, this game is top notch. Though the default PC control layout was questionable, once you have it set to your liking, everything works beautifully. It’s tough to get an FPS to feel right, and this game ebbs a level of smoothness that I haven’t felt in a FPS for quite sometime. The default sensitivity is a little high for my tastes but this is adjustable as well. A key setting that should be adjusted as you will have several foes attacking you at once. During the insanity of switching between plasmids, and weapons, and dealing with the roster, the game maintains a solid frame rate. My hat’s off to 2K for this game as I haven’t been impressed by a demo this much in a long time. Expect my full review soon, Click “more” to check out extra screens.

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