BioShock 2: Minerva’s Den

BioShock 2: Minerva's Den

Minerva’s Den is a single-player downloadable content campaign for the 2010 first-person shooter game BioShock 2. The player assumes the role of Subject Sigma, an armored human or a Big Daddy. Sigma must travel through Minerva’s Den, the technological hub of the underwater city of Rapture, to download a schematic of the city’s supercomputer. The game was initially released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles in August 2010, and later released and reissued on other platforms.

About BioShock 2: Minerva’s Den in brief

Summary BioShock 2: Minerva's DenMinerva’s Den is a single-player downloadable content campaign for the 2010 first-person shooter game BioShock 2. The player assumes the role of Subject Sigma, an armored human or a Big Daddy. Sigma must travel through Minerva’s Den, the technological hub of the underwater city of Rapture, to download a schematic of the city’s supercomputer. The game was initially released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles in August 2010, and was later released and reissued on other platforms. It was well received by critics, who praised its story, characters, and gameplay; reviewers, including those writing for Kotaku and Paste, considered it one of the best video game expansions of all time. New enemies include security robots armed with rockets or laser weapons, flame-wielding Brute Splicers, and ice-throwing Houdini Splicer. The final sequence of the game contains no combat; the player walks through Porter’s living quarters, where he apologizes for trying to bring his wife back using the Thinker, and says he has decided to go back to the surface in a bathysphere in a bid to undo Sigma’s programming and undo the damage he has done to the city. The expansion adds new items, including the Ion Lance, a laser weapon wielded by Minerva’sDen’s Lancer Big Daddies, and the Gravity Well plasmid, which stuns and pulls enemies towards a vortex.

It can be completed in between three and five hours, with the player using similar weapons and plasmids in a different order, with an increased emphasis on hacking security. The story takes place in 1968, eight years after the events of BioShock 2’s story mode, in the technological district of Minerva’s Den. As Sigma progresses, the environment becomes increasingly threatening due to the thinker’s sophisticated defense system and interference from Wahl and his private army of splicers. The gameplay is similar to that ofBioShock 2, with new enemies and weapons. The experience of creating a small, story-focused project inspired Steve Gaynor and other 2K employees to form The Fullbright Company and create Gone Home. The team decided upon a small story about identity and free will, which explores an unseen part of Rapture’s underwater city. The player must work with the scientist Charles Milton Porter to acquire the plans of his creation, a supercomputer known as the Thinkinger, to escape Rapture. Porter’s true identity—that of Porter, who was turned into a BigDaddy after being handed over to authorities by Rapture’s Big Daddy’s.