It’s well known that Bioshock 2 came packaged with a Multiplayer mode.  My last review on Bioshock 2 strictly covered only the Single-player mode.  I want to make this quick post to give my pros and cons about this popular multiplayer experience!

Bioshock 2 Online puts you in the splicer’s shoes.  To be specific, you are a splicer working for Sinclair Solutions.  Most of the time pitted up against other splicers and occasionally 1 Big Daddy.  There are several modes you can select from at the get go in your matchmaking menu.

• Survival of the Fittest — Free-for-All Deathmatch, kill everyone!
• Civil War — Team Deathmatch, kill the blue/red guys!
• Last Splicer Standing — Team Deathmatch Elimination, kill the enemy team without respawn.
• Capture the Sister — Team Capture the Flag, grab the girl and run your ass off, and if you’re lucky enough to live… throw her in the hidey-hole!
• ADAM Grab — Free-for-All Holding, keep the little sister in your possession for 3 minutes total to win.
• Team ADAM Grab — Team Holding, keep her with your team for up to 5 minutes.
• Turf War — Team Territory War, hold several locations to rack up time for your team.

The Good:
2k Games did a great job on making the multiplayer experience feel more personal to the player.  Once in the multiplayer selection screen, just before entering player lobby, you have several options where you can make customizations.  You even have your own apartment in rapture where you can keep track of all those goodies you’ve collected on your way up the ladder.

Customizing the character you play; from choosing the character, changing masks and melee weapons, and weapon loadouts, make playing online a more unique experience for each person.

As expected from Bioshock the audio is top-notch and each character comes with some great sound clips to go with actions you might do in-game; such as, regening health, researching enemies, and sometimes they just make banter for no reason!  It’s pretty entertaining for some of the characters.  My fav’ is the Fisherman, “Ha ha!  Ficker’s I’m back to haunt ya!”

Game play was well thought out and very enjoyable.  It’s your standard shoot’em up, you can use your choice of weapons and plasmids to remove your enemies.  After felling them, hold a button and quickly research their corpse, giving you additional damage on that person; at least until they kill you again.  I’ve been playing for days and still haven’t been overly angry about any of the flaws to make it not enjoyable.

No unranked matches, makes matchmaking more populated… good idea!  I have been able to find matches quickly, albeit Bioshock 2 is still pretty new at the time of posting this.

No need to hunt for weapons that spawn on the map as you are stuck with what you’ve chose in your selected loadout.  To get more ammo or Eve you visit the closest ‘Circus of Values’ machine.  Beware!  Someone may have hacked it giving you an unwanted explosion instead of loot.

In survival of the fittest (my favorite) the big daddy suit will randomly spawn, announcing it to all players.  They we’re smart and made sure it appears in a random location everytime.  I haven’t ever come across it in the same spot twice on any map.  When you see “Big Daddy Suit has appeared in the area” the game quickly turns from kill everyone objective to hunting down the suit and kill anyone in your way.  Often times people will neglect to keep their aim at their enemies in the desperate hunt for the almighty suit.  Once obtaining the suit you have a limited amount of health and prox. mines and are suited with an unlimited ammo rivet gun, making any big daddy despite the player’s skill a very formidable opponent to take down.  Boasting extra experience after the match for becoming or killing the Big Daddy.

The Bad:
The ranking system is not really skill related in anyway.  You gain ranks by playing more… the more you play the more experience you gain granting you the additional ranks with their weapon and plasmid upgrades in tow.  The FAQ page on the Bioshock 2’s website states it will match you up with other players of equal skill.  With how the ranking system is built I don’t really see how they could match you up by skill.  Also any Jack, Dick or Jane can buy rank 50 with all the goodies in a DLC package for $4.99 on PS3 or 800 points ($10) on Xbox360.

The Ugly:
Glaring host drop-out issues.  This is what eventually killed Halo 3 multiplayer for me.  You’re in a game slaughtering everyone, first place; then for whatever reason, the host drops out.  Instead of a pause to reconnect with the host or server-side hosted matches; you get kicked out of that game, lose all your experience from killing and get to restart the matchmaking process alllllllll over again!  This always makes me start raging.  Another issue, in common with Halo 3 is spawn locations.  The game doesn’t run a check to verify enemies aren’t around you when spawning, so if you’re a clever/cheap bastard you can camp a room with 3-4 known spawn locations and g’nade the hell outta some freshly-spawned enemies for easy points.

Overall:
I’ve been a big Bioshock fan since it came out and I’ve been waiting for this to go online since the first installment.  With much anticipation and hype around it, I found it hard to review this without a bias.  I’m still enjoying this game online far after having beating the story mode.  Despite it’s short-comings this is worth the games purchase alone.  Most FPS fans won’t have any issue seeing past it’s flaws and for those of you looking for the best FPS experience available may not be fully impressed.  Though Bioshock 2 Online is easily one of the better shooters I’ve played to date.

Rating this by all it’s best and worst points in mind and what could’ve been done to improve; I will give Bioshock 2 Multiplayer a 7.5/10

Related articles:
Bioshock 2 review (story-mode)