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Which leads into another question: what exactly is everyone eating down there? It's a question with the same problems as the first. Are we to believe that there is a ten year supply of food just sitting in some storage locker? Or maybe that the splicers split their time between maniacly running through the halls shooting people and working in a food processing plant. Someone has to be going back to the surface pretty regularly.

These are just the types of issues that chipped away at Bioshock 2's credibility for me. The straw that broke the camels back is in the story itself. In Bioshock 2, philosophical subtext doesn't coexist within the narrative, but instead is imposed upon it. What made Bioshock so compelling -- and self-contained -- is that the Ayn Randian objectivism that Rapture was founded upon was inextricably tied to Andrew Ryan. When Ryan falls, so too does Rapture. It's a wonderful metaphor, and a connection that Bioshock 2 fails to recognize.

2K was clearly under the impression that Rapture exists separately from Bioshock's philosophical undertones. In their mind, Rapture was a city that just happened to be ruled by a hyper-individualist. When he died, they believed that this left the door open for a new philosophy to take hold, enter Dr. Sophia Lamb, exemplar of Determinism. To say nothing of the fact that doing a complete about face and having your new villain represent the exact opposite philosophical ideals as your previous one is a bit lame as an idea, the real issue is that determinism just doesn't work within the world they've created.

Ryan created Rapture as a place for artisans, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals to come and escape the confines of their government, religion, or group responsibility. As Bioshock 2 unfolds it's revealed that Sophia Lamb is obsessed with communism, singular thought, and group will -- everything that Rapture was meant to leave behind. Playing through the game feels like a contradiction. Sure they made Rapture look the same, but it isn't the same. And it wasn't the art-deco style or leaky steam-punk inspiration that made Rapture -- and Bioshock -- so enthralling. It was the specific vision and execution of Rapture, its citizens, creed, and megalomaniacal founder.

So now we come to it. When you take away the one thing that separated Bioshock from the thousands of other shooters on the market, what you're left with is at best, a decent horror/FPS. Bioshock 2 may place you in the rather large shoes of a Big Daddy, the lumbering behemoths of Bioshock, but don't let that fool you, this game plays identically to the original -- that is to say, competently. Only a few new weapons have been introduced, none of which offer any real change to combat strategy; environments are recycled, bearing no qualities that would distinguish them from any environment in the first game;  and all of the thrills that made Bioshock so eerie -- things like flickering shadows, or noises in the distance -- are all predictable and uninspired, like watching a movie over again.

Bioshock was a unique work of intellectual entertainment; it wasn't a perfect game, but the story, which played upon themes of objectivism, unchecked capitalism, addiction, and free-will, provided food for thought in a way unlike any other shooter before. While you can't fault a game simply for existing, it's hard to shake the feeling that Bioshock 2 is like the 2010: The Year We Made Contact of video games. Nobody asked for it, the original works better without it, and most importantly, it completely misses the point.