Something’s clearly amiss from the outset of Bioshock 2. The first thing you lay your crusty visor upon is graffiti stating that Babylon has fallen. You’ll then notice that Rapture’s once pristine art deco stairways are now taken over by luminous coral overgrowth, rubbish and, strangely enough, butterflies. Even the game’s HUD is corroded with rust and calcifying under barnacles. It’s like a corruptive force has washed over and warped the city’s very essence, wherein lies Bioshock 2’s own essence – a reinterpretation of one of gaming’s most well realised worlds more thoughtful than it’s ever given credit for.

This is most noticeably distilled in Sofia Lamb, monologue dispenser extraordinaire and embodiment of Rapture’s ideological swing of the pendulum. Collectivism for her doesn’t stop at every I in service of the we, but rather the outright elimination of self-awareness and subsuming of individuals into a singly-minded mass, a bit like a (purely theoretically) more utopian vision of those guys from that other game whose title ends in ‘Shock 2.’ She’s a well chosen opponent for a story whose stakes are so much more personal this time around, revolving around her attempts to erase the individuality of your girl Eleanor and transform her into what she refers to as “the People’s Daughter,” a prototype for the citizenry of the utopia she envisions who’ll be unable to question anything and who can fill any societal role by way of plasmids. Where Ryan and Atlas question the player’s agency, Lamb questions the player’s ethics: you can prove her wrong and even save her from herself by setting a positive example for Eleanor to follow that only Subject Delta as an individual is in the position to produce.

Your treatment of the Little Sisters is a key factor in this respect, as ever, but Bioshock 2 tweaks this mechanic so that the method of obtaining the most ADAM from them is much more proportional than before. To get the best result from rescuing each one, you need to protect her as she harvests ADAM from two corpses scattered about the area, attracting splicers, new kinds of Big Daddies and eventually the bullet sponge to end all bullet sponges that is a Big Sister. Between all parties attacking each other in the crossfire, security bots and a harsher limit on how much first aid/EVE you can carry, these sections can become legitimately tough, if not in terms of deaths accrued then certainly in resources consumed. Harvesting Little Sisters is now granted the niche of middling reward for little risk, an all the more tempting proposition if you use one of the new modular difficulty options to turn Vita Chambers off. It’s an altogether solid solution to the dilemma that led Clint Hocking, lead designer of Splinter Cell 1, Chaos Theory and Far Cry 2, to coin the term ludosudowudo-whatever.

2 revises much of Bioshock’s formula in other, similarly beneficial ways. Being able to wield a plasmid and a weapon simultaneously ties each half of the combat system together by granting you bonus damage to enemies afflicted by plasmids, allows for more flexible enemy design (brutes and Big Sisters are particular standouts, turning every environmental object into both a potential tool & hazard) and is otherwise such an obvious addition that a friend of mine misremembered it being in the first game. They say any FPS is as good as its shotgun, and while we do have one here that’s both very useful and emblematic of this series’ A+ art direction, only Bioshock 2 is as good as its gigantic drill hand, which allows for anime moments and the worst possible deaths in equal measure. They and every other weird and wonderful weapon Subject Delta comes across enjoy greater functional variety this time around too, thanks to an expanded weapon upgrade system that grants each one a unique quirk at the final, gated tier – for example, reflecting projectiles with the drill or ricocheting bullets for the machine gun.

Mechanics aren’t the only things that’ve been fleshed out, either. Bioshock 2 concentrates a veritable Metroid Prime’s worth of effort into conveying the sense that you, the player, really are inside the rustbucket of a suit inhabited by Rapture’s #1 dad. Rims of Subject Delta’s visor occupy each corner of the screen, reflect light and jolt about according to his current state. Droplets of blood, water and certain plasmids spatter and drip down its glass, which also gets fogged up by steam. Landing after a jump is accompanied by a hefty screen shake, an upheaval of lingering dust and a metallic thud. You can even see your shadow now, projected by dynamic light sources, which is used against you for at least one jumpscare that I’m aware of. A diegetic HUD of some kind might’ve helped it stand out even more in this respect, but in general and as befits a game with this kind of ancestry, Bioshock 2’s immersion dial has been turned up several notches compared to its predecessor, making the recipe of raiding long-abandoned apartments and backrooms for tidbits of environmental storytelling and other goodies feel all the more tactile.

This is all without even touching upon Minerva’s Den, but despite deserving its credit both as what should be a standard for DLC and for its influence over a subset of indie games birthed in the years that followed, I can’t help but feel that the general perception of it as the highlight of a lesser entry is erroneous. It’s really just more of what’s an already excellent game which demonstrates an intimate understanding of what made its predecessor tick, gameplay-wise and thematically, and is as a whole long overdue a reappraisal.

Revisit Rapture with Bioshock 2 and discover that what you’ve been misled to believe is an ancillary sequel is, in reality, assuredly among the most underappreciated games to have still garnered relative acclaim, as well as further evidence that the real best games usually have an average Backloggd score starting with a 3.