Fortunately for the band, Pieces turns out to be a strong at times even spectacular album, one that finds the band evolving from where they left off with Echoes while restoring some of the old hope that indie kids have, indeed, learned how to dance, and no longer have to be quite so obvious about it. What the Rapture have returned with is a sound less concerned with retaining the raw, gritty punk half of the equation: From the fade-in harmonies and discrete four notes of bass-synth that announce the album, it's clear the group is going for a cleaner sound, surely helped by Paul Epworth and Ewan Pearson, who man the boards for eight of 10 tracks.
While nothing on Pieces reaches the velveteen club-readiness of "I Need Your Love", the band's previous muddy immediacy is replaced by a more meticulous approach: the keyboards polished to a glossy sheen, the guitars eased back into a supporting role, percussion real and programmed blended seamlessly. It's impressive then, that even with this newfound attention to detail, the Rapture still maintain a flailing energy and enthusiasm that most of the other dancepunk bands could only fake.
The idea that one can, you know, actually dance to the Rapture is sometimes mocked, but tracks such as the sharp, sax-supplemented "Get Myself Into It" and the delirious Afro-funk guitar vs. The Talking Heads were, suspiciously, largely absent as an influence upon the dancepunk boom of , but here the Rapture are avid pupils of their teachings, specifically mimicking the punk-to-funk transition period.
I'll leave it to the caretakers of music propriety to hem and haw; the Rapture do the tribute thing well, most noticeably on "W. However, what ultimately makes Pieces a step or three down from Echoes is a drop off in consistency, reflecting a higher percentage of songs that fail to ignite. Just think of all the things we could do to pass the time. It's a walk in the park, it goes:. Cuz everybody's got a little pieces of someone they hide. It's okay, it's the way we distract until the day that we die.
And though our future's gone uncertain it's gonna be alright. Cuz though I'm leaving longing leaves me ever by your side. And all our time together is tearing me apart I can't hold you tomorrow but I hold you in my heart. I can't hold out forever, but I hold you in my heart. Don't even bother tryin' to tell me cuz you live a lie. Cuz a moment or a minute I can see it through. And have a precious little second of you by my side.
It goes:. And our futuer's lookin bright. They're able to take on a Big Daddy with ease. So you're really fighting for survival. Brutes are one of these new breeds of splicer, Mafia goon-types with broken fedoras who've been caning the strength tonics in the decade between games. They're walking tanks - not a million miles from Left 4 Dead s Tank in terms of aesthetics - and they'll take a fair few smacks before they give it up.
So you can't just whittle them to death in the way that you once did. You're now in the clomping, commanding iron boots of a genetically advanced, physically-superior super-mutant, but your stomping grounds are populated by enemies more powerful than ever before. The net total of all this line-shifting is a game that feels severely similar to BioShock in its play style, visual style, format, plot and pace, and that's something that should cause furrowed brows and much concerned wibbling among those who were expecting more of a departure from the brass-and-glass underwater kingdom.
Concerned wibbles aside, it's the setting that will ultimately impress, and the opportunity to return to one of gaming's most original locations in order to rummage around bits of the -a city that went curiously unnoticed in the first game. Ryan Amusements alone is testament to the sort of quality set-piece locations 2K Marin are capable of conjuring up, dark and twisted insights into the unhinged brainwrongs of Andrew Ryan, and places as unsettling as anything you could care to dig out of old Rapture.
That's just the tip of this maddening iceberg too, the real thrill will be in uncovering the crackpots, the Sander Cohens, of this new world. And having had 10 years to properly marinate in their own lunacy, surrounded by naught but sea and splicers, they're sure to be properly cuckoo.
So, if the Big Sister none of them isn't running the show, who is? Well, it's Sofia Lamb, a woman as driven and unhinged as the departed Ryan and Fontaine, but one with an opposing philosophy.
Instead of believing that people should be judged by their merits, as Andrew Ryan did, she instead follows an altruistic path, believing that to become a truly enlightened society, we must help those around us. Exactly how a woman with this ideology made it to Rapture in the first place isn't immediately obvious in fact in an audio diary we hear Andrew Ryan cursing himself for ever having overlooked her views , but in the power vacuum following the close of BioShock she found opportunity to turn Rapture to her own nefarious ends.
Ends, as you know, are usually nefarious. In her audio diaries she talks of Eleanor, a gifted child of Fontaine's orphanage a front to attract children to be implanted with sea slugs to turn them into Little Sisters. Meanwhile Jordan Thomas, creative director, claims that while there are many Big Sisters, there's one in particular who's key to BioShock 2s plot On top of this, what drives your own character is a desire to find your own Little Sister - the one you were specifically bonded to -somewhere in Rapture.
Please feel free to guess BioShock 2s twist months before the game's release. We're hoping, however, that it's not as simple as that. Rapture Was In tatters at the start of BioSliock. Entire sections were flooded and splicers were up to their arses in seawater. The underwater metropolis was losing a fighting battle with water pressure, and was folding in on itself like a giant paper cup.
After all, everybody was dead, and that included all of the engineers and technicians who kept the place dry. There's no way you could set a game in Rapture after the events of the first game - it's physically impossible, the place should be sunk, submerged, drowned and washed away. You're a Big Daddy - actually the first Big Daddy, a prototype of the hulking great maniacs you fight in the first game.
A grown up Little Sister has gone properly mental, escaping Rapture to abduct and return to the city Little Sisters rescued in the original game. Now, with her brood of gene-sucking children back at her side, she's got it into her head that she must maintain the ghoulish balance of Rapture. She'll destroy anybody who attempts to rock this underwater boat, and that's no idle threat considering she's kitted herself out to be a lithe, acrobatic version of a Big Daddy - the deadliest creature the city's seen yet.
You're no plodding slagheap yourself. As the prototype Big Daddy you're faster and more adaptable than your successors, and most importantly, you're able to use plasmids - the genetically-endowed superpowers of the first game.
Of course, giant drills and rivet guns will be available to you too, allowing for gruesome splicer dismemberments. So is this a step away from the cautious gameplay of the first BioShock? Got it. So hacking is part of a manipulator play style - the play style that wants to have every advantage. You're a faster, more lean Big Daddy as the prototype, but you're still a burly character.
So we're having to do new evolutions of the plasmid system, and some of the other systems like hacking, that allow you to further fork your play style and still play as a subtle player if you're interested. Plasmid upgrades will have a much more immediate effect this time round, and will also be capable of being used alongside regular weapons. So sticking a splicer on the end of your drill, before grilling him with your Incinerate plasmid will be an option.
Splicers will react differently to you too, considering what you are. They'll run from you when their numbers have been whittled down enough. Hacking remains, though in what form we're not told. You'll still be able to amass a small crew of bots to follow you about the place, and now we're promised you'll be able to repair your tiny mechanical friends should you form a particularly close bond with them.
As a beta version ot a true Big Daddy, you begin without a Little Sister, and must steal one from one of the many other Big Daddies glomping their way around Rapture. Whereas previously hi you'd make strategic preparations to bring one of the beasts down before murdering or rescuing the child companion, in BioShock 2 you'll be choosing whether to murder, rescue or adopt. Little Sisters are so broken that they'll scarcely recognise that you're not their protector, instead they'll scamper over to you, excited to see that you've returned from that particularly gruesome death they just witnessed.
Adopt the kid and she'll hop on your shoulders, collecting Adam the game's primary stat-boosting resource from corpses that are strewn about. Allowing her to do this summons, as it did in the close of the first game, waves of Splicers. As you can choose exactly when to allow your Little Sister to trigger this attack, you can set trip wires and mines, prepare your sentry bots and slot in your preferred plasmids.
Succeed and the Adam is yours. Alternatively, you can pursue the short-term gain, forgoing all of this adoption nonsense and drilling the precious resource straight out of the little girl's face. Either way, your tampering with the balance of power in the city will eventually catch the attention of the previously mentioned Big Sister, the heiress to the throne that is BioSliock 2s cover. Her svelte form is supplemented by the same sort of augmentations that are flaunted by Big Daddies - although instead of a bulky drill she sports a retractable blade, which she can use not only to slice you in two, but to cling to any surface.
Her approach is heralded by the cries of Little Sisters, who'll dolefully inform you that "Big Sister doesn't want you to play with me She's a truly terrifying sight, the build up to her eventual appearance wearing you down to a quivering wreck before the mere sight of her skittering towards you, blades all a-twitter, has you lying limp on the floor, paralyzed by your own crippling, unabated fear.
You vomit on reflex, the contents of your stomach pooling around your face, the warmth of it touching your cheek, contrasting the hard, cold tiled floor as the insane niech-woinan jabs you in the gut with her knife.
Stab stab stab. That's only slightly exaggerating how scary this thing is. On the opposite side of the coin to this panic-inducing, gorey underwater hell, there are moments of absolute calm. At times, you'll leave the confines of the submerged city and stroll out on to the seabed. Eerily peaceful, the only sound is the ocean's bassy roar. Often you'll have the option to peer into flooded chambers, places you visit in the first game.
Above you, a tiny cluster of shimmering pinpricks marks the distant surface, and all around you, the city of Rapture rises silently from the bedrock. This was a sight we barely glimpsed in the first game - in fact we saw the whole of Rapture only once, and that was during the opening scene, when you were locked in a bathysphere - this time we're beholden to the glorious vista each time we're allowed on the seabed. Lessons should have been learned from BioSliock.
While the closing scenes of the original featured some of the most impressive locations of the entire game, it soon lost pace and was muddied by that most dire of unoriginalities, the End Of Level Boss. Audio logs will still propel the story, offering as the first did tertiary information intended to flesh out the game world. And, as ever, if you're some sort of thicko you can traipse through the game ignoring everything but the parts where you ram a drill through a man's torso.
Bioshock's a hard act to follow, but Rapture obscured hidden depths the first time round. Our visit showed just one segment of the city, just one vertical slice of insane characters. Doubtless 2K Marin will indulge us in exposing more of Rapture's madmen, and with some of the key development team members from the original game, we're certain they've got at least one more Sander Cohen in them.
The cynic in us recoils in horror at the thought of a tacked-on multiplayer mode intended to placate Microsoft and their precious s, but as of yet 2K Marin are not prepared to talk much about the multiplayer side of BioShock 2 other than to confirm that it exists. Co-op isn't in there - which would've been welcome - but instead we expect to be duelling with other Big Daddies in a sort of deathmatch, which will undermine the atmosphere of the main game and throw the entire experience out of focus.
Alternatively, it could be very good. We just don't know. Why must we leap to negative conclusions? Fie on our pessimism, readers. This time around, while some masks remain, most of the splicers you'll encounter have abandoned masks and show their deformities freely. We thought 'Well, if I'm a Big Daddy, there's no way that splicers will want to fight me with the same fervor as when I was Jack Hands with my chain tattoo.
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