Turbo Boss Battle! Daily Gaming. Daily Exploding Shotgun Shells.

Boss Battle: Bioshock 2 vs Paul

Bioshock 2 attacks: Shoots fire at Paul! Paul's on fire!

• Vastly improved game play - dual-equipping guns and plasmids speeds up action
• Most levels are more interesting and varied than in Bioshock 1
• Smoother difficulty curve doesn't leave you pissed off at the end like Bioshock 1
• Some genuine spooks, shocks, and disturbing set-pieces
• No crappy final boss battle
• Better hacking mini-game
• A pleasure to revisit the world and mythology of Rapture

Paul attacks: Drains some life

• ...Doesn't add anything that crazy to the Bioshock and Rapture experience
• Not many new or impressive plasmids
  
• Been-there, done-that weapons and ammo
• One or two boring levels (design-wise)
  
• Protecting Little Sisters as they harvest Adam gets tedious
  
• Fighting Big Sisters not as fun as fighting Big Daddies, doesn't require and different technique
• No "Welcome to the Circus of Values" clown voice

Battle summary:

I've already waxed poetic about the original Bioshock being my quintessential next-gen (current-gen..) game, but in many ways Bioshock 2 is the better game. The game plays a lot faster and is thus more fun, and the difficulty is much better matched to your character's progression. The scenery in this jaunt through Rapture is much more interesting, and the overgrown, luminescent parts of the city have a particular haunting beauty to them.

I never bought into people saying that any sequel to Bioshock would be inferior because it was a perfectly contained story of a journey through Rapture. I won't say the story is any better or worse than Bioshock 1 (because I never thought that story was that fantastic), but it was interesting and actually touching enough to keep me shooting and zapping. It does take some liberties with the world of Rapture, but the story is a worthwhile spin on the objectivist individualism of the first game.

Battle results: Bioshock 2 sets Paul on fire. Paul runs to next room. Bioshock 2 finds Paul, defeats him with bolt-shotgun.

About Paul

Paul has been playing games since he cut his teeth on an old Atari 2600 in the early 1990s. He has played every console generation since, and currently jams on Playstation 3, Xbox 360, and DSi. He proudly does not own a Wii, and goes back and forth on whether he'd want a gaming PC (he did his fair share of Mac gaming back in the day though). Games-wise, Paul came up in the world a pretty big JRPG nerd, but now he's mellowed plays mostly anything good or weird. He does maintain a pretty impressive collection Playstation 1-era RPGs.