Bioshock 2

Yahtzee tore this game a new asshole, and I can't figure why. After reading the first reviews I expected a rerun, basically an expansion pack, and I would have been fine with that. Yes, my standards are appallingly low, but then Bioshock is a game that I replay about once a year - not to fret, I can do the thing on a short weekend now. Yes, I like it that much and I think it is one of the all-time greats.
Bioshock 2 plays a decade after your exploits as Fontaine's sockpuppet-assassin. Now you are playing as a big daddy, a big daddy who can use plasmids and has some sense of self-preservation. You have to find your little sister in a dilapidated Rapture. It's the same city, but different: The years have taken their toll, corals have bloomed in the courts and ballrooms, the ocean has taken over big time. Sometimes, you walk through completely flooded sections of Rapture, surrounded by silence. At first it seems that after slamming objectivism, this game is about the sins of collectivism: A psychoanalyst named Lamb has created a cult which swore off the sins of Ryan's utopia, made a u-turn and ran about 20 miles too far into the opposite direction. For this cult, the "Family", you are a dangerous remnant, a monster. Your moral compass will be sorely tested. You are, again, able to decide whether to save or harvest the little sisters for a short term gain in power. But at times you will also meet "semibosses", for want of a better name, and it's in your hand to kill them, or to leave them be. While there are some game effects based on your decision, they are generally removed from the cost-benefit analysis of the shooter, leaving you with your role in the tale. Everyone calls you a monster: Do you act like one? How do you treat those who would use you like a tool? Do you take revenge, if opportunity permits? There's at least one figure that keeps score. I never had the feeling of just re-playing the first game, but being immersed in a story that took up some elements of the first game's treatment of personal ambition and utopia gone wrong and presented a different angle on these things - Lamb's megalomania, couched in high-minded worry about the human race and painting every new atrocity as a necessary act of love, a broken Ryan being defeated by someone using his principles against him, and the splicers, the saddest monsters I've ever encountered as a gamer.
The mechanics of the game have kept the best parts of the first, streamlined a few bits that could use some streamlining, like the plumber's hack minigame. Some stuff is new, but it never distracts from the ambiance of Rapture. Some of the voice-acting is a bit over the top, but at least Lamb's voice acting hits the nail on the head - you've heard this voice before, from the mouths of psychology-majors, self-important lecturers and other callous pricks the world over: Lamb just knows she is right, she feels your pain and she just wants the best for everyone and if you suffer, she will feel really bad about it - probably even worse than you. See, she is even better at suffering than you are.
I do not think that this game degrades the experience of the first Bioshock. I'm sure I will return to this game like I did to it's predecessor - maybe once a year, for half a weekend.