Anyone playing it? I preordered it and played it for a few hours yesterday. while it has been fairly enjoyable so far, I have to say I'm not wowed the way I was with the first game.

The graphics under max settings seem, somehow, to be out-of-date already. It is in dire need of some AA and the textures are for the most part fairly bland. not a huge issue, but took me a little while to become immersed.

The sound effects are pretty decent. The ambiant sounds are especially good. However I am having issues with my 6 channel speakers. I had to radically adjust the different sounds settings just to balance the volume levels of the game. I'm still not pleased with the way directional sound is played through my 5.1 setup, with strange distortions, but from what I've read the game has some issues with channels... Worse, though, is that I receive no sound at all from the cassette recordings scattered around. Since there seem to be more of these in this game than the last, I'm missing out on a ton of story. And with the first Bioshock being praised for its story...

...Which brings us to the story. I'm not far in yet, and I am missing out on all those audiotapes, so largel yI need to reserve judgement. However I find the premise less inherently intriguing. to paraphrase the way my wife put it, "In the first one the whole place was a mystery. You learned about everything. In this one you don't need to do that." She has a point. While a decade of has passed for Rapture, the setting remains largely familiar. Also, thus far "Lamb" has been much less interesting a character than Ryan was, in the same role. But we shall see!

Being able to explore outside Rapture, one of the new features, is... bland? The outside areas are very linear, and aside from a few items here and there and a slight change in scenery, there is nothing to do outside. You cannot swim, there are no enemies, nor anything to discover, all in all being outside Rapture is far more limiting than being inside. Travelling the depths of the ocean is more of a narrative tool to get you between sections of the city than a gameplay feature.

Weapons and Plasmids: On par with the first game so far. The Rivet Gun's second mode places traps, which I've had fun with so far. Ammo and health items seem more plentiful than this time around, and eve-hypos less so.

Multiplayer is an area I haven't spent much time in. My one game saw me getting roughly thrashed. A lot. Looked like fun, and I'll give it another shot.

Unfortunatly the game has a number of odd key-bindings that are distracting at best. Left mouse button controls your right hand, and right mouse button controls your left. The defualt "use" key is F instead of E (as I recall it being in Bioshock, and as pretty much the genre standard). The Steam Bioshock 2 forum also has a handful of threads warning against rebinding F, as it seems to cause a bug that prevents you from hacking. I personally found if counter-intuitive that Ctrl is used to consume a first-aid kit rather than crouch, and that in multiplayer you use Esc to see the scoreboard instead of tab. You can rebind them, but I really don't see the benefit of going against established conventions. Oh, and no support for a 360 gamepad.

Bugs. Lots of bugs. I've spent as much time reading through steam's forum looking for a sound solution as I have playing bioshock. It's honestly ~50 pages of frustrated people who can't install the game/can't play the game/can't get Windows Live to work/are having strange sound and graphical issues. A few major ones? Save games are being corrupted, the game isn't working all the time with DirectX10, CTDs (I've had two so far) and a number of people having trouble with DRM. (I bought it on steam, so I have to deal with 3 forms of DRM: Steam, WL, and SecureRom.)

My recommendation? If you loved the first one you will certainly like this one. It captures a lot of the feel of the first, with some updates, but it falls a little short of the mark set by the original. It was unfortunatly rushed WAY too quickly to market, so expect a myriad of bugs, some of them game breaking. If you are on the fence, keep an eye out for patches that should adress these issues, then pick it up. There's no benefit to buying it now rather than in a month or two, aside from building up MP ranks.

Or buy the console version, as it seems to be in good shape