The Protector Trials DLC

After the last four DLC instalments for BioShock 2 had basically amounted to a couple new maps and a cluster of new multiplayer characters, The Protector Trials Pack is the first to be an actually legitimate single-player game. Imagine a single-player Horde Mode against reams of Splicers and you get the general idea. PTP functions like an extended mini-game of that.

You're an alpha series Big Daddy, hi. Pick up a Little Sister, piggy-back her over to a corpse, let her try and extract a bit of ADAM, and aim for the Splicers flailing their way into the room. I say extended mini-game because it's six-areas in total, areas that harken back to a few of the old locales from BioShock 2: the Adonis Baths, Simon Wale's chapel, the Atlantic Express. It's a little blast back to early 2010 and Rapture is looking about as rusted and steam-punkish as you'll ever remember it being.

But more than anything PTP exists so that you can essentially just shoot at more Splicers while protecting the kid. It's BioShock 2 distilled to its purest, action-oriented state. Lil' Sister is in the corner mopping up ADAM and Splicers will come trundling like a pack of drunken teenagers, stumbling and screaming their way out of a night club, wailing at you with a wrench in ways that only teens from Hackney would do.

Each in-game area offers up three different trials, with each trial handing you a different arsenal of weapons. The implication is that the different trials will relate to the level's difficulty as much as it will to a particular playing style. Trial 1 might hand you over a rivet gun and a ahotgun. You might get Insect Swarm and Incinerate to round that off. You could get an Armoured Shell tonic thrown in too. Trial 3 might only give you a drill and a Hypnotise plasmid. The load-outs are there to force you either into the action or force you to keep your distance; drill or machine gun.

It's a lovely touch, actually, acknowledging that BioShock's core audience demographic is a varied bunch. Some of us want our action up close and personal as we take a drill to a Splicer's face. Some want to go the guns-blazing route. It's such a lovely and perceptive touch that it will baffle and amaze fans of the series when they see that all this is a Splicer-centric gun-down. BioShock's actual gameplay was always good, but the game stood out because it was more than the sum of its gameplay and plasmids.

Its story was mature, integrating university-level philosophy into a mainstream video game. Its characters were mature, acting on various complex levels of morality. Hell, even you were mature. You could choose to save a Little Sister or not to. But the DLC doesn't have a shade of the depth of either BioShock title. There are no choices, there is no morality, you simply save a sister or have your face pounded in by crowd after crowd of Splicer mentalists. You shoot at Splicers or Lil' Sis complains about being bothered by Splicers. You save Lil' Sis or else you've failed.

The Protector Trials Pack extracts the fun of shooting stuff in BioShock 2 and turns it into an addictive albeit flyby title that relates to the original about as much as robots gunning down fleets of zombies relates to BioShock. But considering you're playing a standard Alpha Series Daddy you can't expect a hell of a lot of brain inside that thing. As a plain and simple survival-mode gun-down the game has everything in the right place. You get the drip-drip BioShock drain pipes, you get the BioShock weapons, you get the BioShock setting and you get the A-class BioShock characters. But don't expect BioShock because for 400 Microsoft Points all you're really paying for is a bot with a gun.

The BioShock 2 Protector Trials DLC will be available for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC starting August 3, 2010.