BioShock 2

Let's Adopt

But the most important part of being a Big Daddy is, of course, your relationship with the Little Sisters. As with the first game, how you deal with them affects your progress — but this time you’re fighting with, rather than against, them. Having dispatched the first group of Splicers, we go on to rescue a lone Little Sister from Splicers that had slain her protector; in the game it’ll be you doing the slaying and then slotting in as the new, slightly blood-streaked father-figure afterward. Little Sisters are so strongly conditioned that they can overlook this, and will willingly hop on your shoulders and go Adam-hunting.

If you let them. This is the first big choice in BioShock 2: harvest or adopt. Harvest kills them for a big Adam hit to boost your Plasmids and a massive karma ding that you’ll pay for later. Adopt, and you can rescue them as in the first game — or keep them as an Adam-harvesting helper. “The adoption mechanic, fairly importantly, is a direct rebuttal to the horrible escort quest that you may have played in other games starting with BioShock,” laughs Thomas. It’s not a simple escort mission: whenever a Little Sister harvests a corpse, she draws every nearby Splicer to you, triggering what Thomas calls an “opt-in siege.”

The battle we saw through the helmet of a heavily upgraded Big Daddy in the foyer of Fontaine Futuristics was spectacular. A few minutes’ warning gave time to throw down cyclone traps around the Little Sister before the Splicers came swarming through the doors and windows. The struggle that follows is fast and messy: the player flames one Splicer, lures another into the cyclone trap, only to turn around and see a third hacking at the Little Sister. These “gathering” encounters will be challenging, with large numbers of normal Splicers, but as you progress you’ll meet newer versions that pose even bigger problems.

“Splicers that have managed to survive all this time have had to become apex predators,” describes Thomas, “slowly splicing themselves into something that can survive. There are new Splicers and a lot of them are significant threats to a Big Daddy.”

PREV1234NEXT