Andrew Ryan built the happiest place on Earth — and even its kiddie rides have a hidden agenda. Don't miss this world-exclusive peek at a new in-game mission where iconoclast Ryan himself wants to mold your mind...

“What? Andrew Ryan is in BioShock 2?!” If that’s how you reacted to the previous paragraph, then you know just how we felt hearing his voice in a recent demo of the upcoming sequel. Truth be told, the entrepreneur is not alive and well in BioShock 2: he’s still dead. But such is his presence, his power — and the impact of his death in the first game — that almost any BioShock fan will be a bit stunned to hear his recorded speech in this portion of the game.

“My name is Andrew Ryan. I built the city of Rapture for children just like you, because the world above had become unfit…” he intones. The place is Ryan Amusements, a theme park designed to show young children how scary the surface world is, and convince them never to leave their underwater home. The year is 1968 — nearly a decade after the events of the original BioShock. And you’re a Big Daddy — the very first one, as it turns out. For more details on where you are and what you’re doing, read on…

Before The Now

Before embarking on our demo of the Ryan Amusements level, which is about two hours into the game, 2K Marin creative director Jordan Thomas offers some more background info on the single-player campaign — with prominent gaps to avoid spoilers. Unlike BioShock’s hero, Jack, who arrived in Rapture as a stranger with no idea he was related to it in any way, your character in BioShock 2 is an important part of Rapture’s history. “You’re a living example of how good ideas went bad, and of how a city founded to exalt personal liberty ended up building slaves,” explains Thomas.

So the game’s intro depicts your life in Rapture’s pre-BioShock past. You were deployed as the first Big Daddy, you had a Little Sister with you, and something went wrong; now you’ve somehow awakened in 1968 wondering what the hell happened. Part of the story of BioShock 2 will be finding out what occurred right before your memory lapse and why you ended up where you did. Early in the game, you’ll encounter two familiar people: Augustus Sinclair (mentioned in one of the fi rst game’s diaries, and owner of Sinclair Spirits [BioShock] and Sinclair Solutions) and Dr. Bridgette Tenenbaum (who freed you from Fontaine’s mental control in BioShock, and encouraged you to save the Little Sisters). They both agree to help you if you’ll help them, and your first stop is Ryan Amusements, where you’re currently trapped and need to find a new plasmid before you can move on.

Daddy Hungry

Key to getting that plasmid is acquiring Adam, and for that, you’ll need to nab a Little Sister, who can sniff out Adam-filled corpses. As you enter the El Dorado restaurant, you find a Bouncer and his girlish companion, but you need to eliminate him so she’ll bond with you.

What’s the best way to beat a fellow Big Daddy? With careful planning and strategy, taking advantage of both your plasmids and your weapons. You might place a Cyclone Trap for him to step on, or, as 2K did in our demo, lay down a row of Trap Rivets; these proximity weapons shoot approaching enemies, and are special ammo for your Rivet Gun. In our demo, our Big Daddy machine-gunned the Bouncer to get his attention, threw a barrel at him with Telekinesis, and then sneakily lured him through the row of Trap Rivets. As in multiplayer, the new ability to launch plasmid attacks and fire weapons at the same time makes combat easier and encourages combos like following up a sizzling electro bolt with a booming shotgun blast. Poor enemies.

Once her Daddy dies, you can adopt the Little Sister and she’ll begin scouting Adam. Because you need lots of it, this mission poses several scenarios where you need to keep Splicers from snagging your Sister while she’s harvesting a corpse. “These aren’t escort quests where you’re protecting her,” Thomas emphasizes. “They’re efficiency encounters where you’re trying to keep Splicers from making it through your defenses and grabbing her, which will attract even more Splicers.” So while you could play them run-and-gun–style — sticking to weapons like your drill for blood-spurting chainsaw attacks — you’re best off rigging the environment as well: laying Trap Rivet fences, hacking turrets and health stations so they injure opponents, and so on.

Awfully Rand-y

As you roam Ryan Amusements in search of Adam, you can’t help but gawk at the surroundings. Naturally, they’re gorgeous — in a rundown, defiled sort of way — with lots of fascinating details that radiate BioShock. Walking by a ruined rollercoaster, you hear Ryan’s voice preaching Objectivist learnings to the young passengers...well, if there were any. Near another ride, a Splicer tries to crush you by rolling a Bathysphere down some steps; take him out, and you can take a moment to appreciate this attraction, where visitors once rode a rickety Bathysphere while listening to Ryan’s rants about the government seizing their personal gains.

In any other game, all this lecturing might seem like high-brow nonsense, but with what we know of Ryan and Rapture, it’s captivating. Displays with giant hands (“Government”) blocking artists from their easels and pushing down bold scientists are an intriguing reminder of Ryan and cohorts’ deeply held beliefs, and of just how much they loathed land-dwellers. Moreover, these elements are clearly grist for an overarching story. “In BioShock 2, there’s a new character from the player’s past who has very different ideas than Ryan — he’s an old political rival,” Thomas tells us. “The Splicers serve that character, and you’ll see them defacing the rides, watching the beginning of those ideas taking over in this space. As you hear more and more of Ryan saying what he believes, this new character pipes in and points out that this is where everything went wrong — you, the Big Daddy, case in point.” These comments were disabled in our demo — for now, 2K is keeping this new character firmly under wraps — but we’re eager to learn more about him, and more important, to know if he’s friend or foe.

Twisted Sisters

Ryan’s recordings are engrossing, to be sure (“Armin Shimerman totally nailed them,” beams Thomas, praising the returning actor). But as you near the end of the theme park, you’ll have other things on your mind. Passing through an animatronic workshop — where you’ll be oh-so-tempted to grab the dummies with Telekinesis and hurl them at Splicers — you reach a safety vent where you have a time-honored choice: harvest or save your Little Sister. Good folks that they are, our 2K hosts save her and move on to the House of the Future, which holds the plasmid you need...

...and some dynamic music kicks in. Menacing music. You’ve attracted the attention of the Big Sister, the former Little Sister who’s returned to Rapture and is making new Little Sisters. Throughout the game, she’s watching everything you do with the little Adam collectors, and the mystery of who she is dovetails with the mystery of who you are. Soon after you grab the plasmid, she appears — and she’s not friendly. She’s a fierce opponent, fast and agile, and as she leaps around nimbly and stabs at you with her giant Adam-harvesting needle, she can also throw fireballs and use other plasmid-powered attacks, and heal herself by extracting Adam from corpses.

As Thomas tells it: “The Big Sister is a strongly connected story character. You always get a reward for beating her, but you can’t suppress her permanently — she’s special, and tied to the history of the city. She originally feels like a boogeyman, but she’s not just a monster; she’s a human being inside that suit, and that matters.”

At the moment, that human is kicking our Big Daddy butt. But with some melee moves (like uppercutting with the drill) and skilled use of Incinerate and other plasmids and weapons, our hosts fend off the Big Sister, and she teleports away. We’re safe...for now.

The demo ends there, and for a Big Daddy, we’re feeling surprisingly vulnerable. Especially when we remember that we haven’t seen any of the special, “alpha dog” Splicers yet — the ones who’ve been splicing for more than a decade, and who will, as lead designer Zak McClendon notes, “hopefully scare the crap out of you...and make you back up a bit when you see them coming.”

That’s a freaky thought, but Thomas puts it in context: “Condemned-style scares were not BioShock’s strength; it was more about loss and creepiness; about character-driven psychological horror. And in BioShock 2, with this man-stuck-inside a-monster, we have a lot of opportunities to mess with your head. We’re exploiting those rather than trying to be Condemned....There will be a mechanical challenge with a great, kickass shooter along the way. But the scares come from moral context, and from the sense of vulnerability and sanity.”

As gamers and BioShock fans, that’s a message we can really believe in.

It's War

When we think BioShock, we think “alone.” So it’s hard to convey just how surreal it is to step into a game of BioShock 2 multiplayer. For the first few minutes of actual play, you can barely believe that you’re surrounded by other human beings. Of course, the fact that some or all of them want to kill you helps make it more familiar.

Before we describe our experience, though, let’s pause to acknowledge the borderline-genius premise for the multiplayer game. Whereas BioShock 2’s single-player campaign takes place nearly a decade after the events of BioShock — long after Jack’s adventures in Rapture — BioShock 2 multiplayer is set a year before the first game, during the fall of Rapture. You’re a product tester for Sinclair Solutions, trying out their “home-defense products” (i.e., plasmids and weapons) in the field. Idea-wise, it’s double awesome: not only does it let BioShock 2 be both prequel and sequel, but it also makes sense. The mayhem and infighting accompanying the city’s collapse seem like the very essence of multiplayer combat.

The same story-oriented thinking clearly went into your apartment — the waiting area you’re in before you actually walk into a Bathysphere to enter a multiplayer match. While here, you can check leaderboards, customize your character, and change your loadouts (of which you can have three, and switch between them at respawns). If story’s not your thing, you can just jump into a match, but if it does interest you, you’ll get messages from Sinclair as your character ranks up to level 20, each level offering a new bit of narrative.

To raise your rank — achieved by acquiring a certain level of Adam — you need to get in a game and play, which is where our hands-on actually began. We played as Jacob Norris, a welder; among the other five characters are a housewife, a football player, a pilot, and a businessman. Each character has a unique melee weapon, such as Jacob’s wrench, the football player’s trophy, and the housewife’s — what else? — frying pan. Character-specific weapons and verbal comments add some nice variety when you’re in a full 10-person game.

And the matches themselves? Fast-paced and tense, whether you’re in free-for-all or team-deathmatch mode. With BioShock 2’s new dual-wielding control scheme (left trigger fires a plasmid, right trigger fires a weapon), you can use a plasmid and a weapon simultaneously, allowing for the same devastating combos as single-player mode. Slow a guy down with Winter Blast, then waste him with a shotgun. Leap into him with Aero Dash (a plasmid unique to multiplayer), and then, while he’s stunned, shoot him with your crossbow. Or do a triple combo: Geyser Trap to fling someone into a wall and get them wet; then Electro Bolt (which is amplified by the victim’s temporary wet state); then a quick melee move to finish ’em off. With all this mix-and-matching, the gameplay feels a bit like Shadowrun, and that’s a compliment.

Other factors make the action even more hectic, including hackable turrets and vending machines; environmental hazards (like oil slicks that magnify Incinerate flame); customizable plasmids and weapons; and finding Eve to keep your plasmids going. And let’s not forget a Big Daddy suit that randomly appears! Nab it and you become an extra-tough Rosie-style Daddy, wielding proximity mines, a Big Daddy Stomp (to repel enemies trying to melee you), and a Rivet Gun. Despite limited vision and mobility, being a Big Daddy is good fun offensively; of course, it also puts a big target on your back, as killing you yields more Adam than any other kill or assist.

With so many elements, multiplayer gives you a lot to think about, but for anyone who’s played either BioShock, the shared play mechanics make the human-on-human game fairly intuitive. And all the complexity certainly makes it feel BioShock-y. Judging by our hour-plus playtime on three maps, it seems like good, solid fun — not mind-blowing and not necessarily poised to overshadow the single-player game, but a definite bonus that game owners should enjoy.

A few wild cards could up the mind-blowingness, however. One is the third, as-yet-unrevealed multiplayer mode; 2K did confirm that it includes Little Sisters, which could make for a pretty entertaining game dynamic. Another is the narrative formed by Sinclair’s messages, which we haven’t seen but are very intrigued by. And finally, there’s another story aspect — the details spread throughout the 10 multiplayer maps, all of which are repurposed locations from the original BioShock. Elements like the toilet stall on the Kashmir map (which contains usable explosives mentioned in BioShock; they caused the New Year’s Eve explosion) make compelling content for fans of the first game, and could be a real treat if sufficiently fleshed out. Regardless of how these pieces pan out, though, we’ll be ready to play product tester come November 3.