Little about 2007’s BioShock was commonplace. In that acclaimed modern classic, the disintegrating underwater world of Rapture was filled with thoughtful themes and iconic imagery, from stylish crumbling architecture to the unsettling Little Sisters, with their frilly dresses, dark doe eyes, and distressingly large needles. In its highly anticipated sequel, you’ll play as the most immediately identifiable of the failed utopia’s many strange residents, and kick no small amount of tail while you absorb some truly breathtaking visuals.

As the original prototype for the city’s hulking metallic protector of creepy little girls, you’re not exactly light on your feet, but with your heavy armor and heavier armaments, your Big Daddy suit could probably give a Russian tank a run for its money. If only you faced something as predictable: In the ten years since the first chapter, an entity known as the Big Sister has started kidnapping children from the east coast, and the genetically modified monstrosities who populate this joint have only gotten stronger and stranger. Every one has a heavy-duty hankering for the ADAM mutagen your pony-tailed charges collect, and they’re perfectly happy to cut you open like a can of tuna if you stand in their way.

But don’t let the constant and exquisite sense of peril distract you from the spellbinding environments you’ll encounter on your travels. “We want to give the player a sentiment of wonder and fear at the same time—a mix of beauty sprinkled with horror,” 2K Australia Level Designer Alexandre Vancomerbeck tells us. From surreal settings like a broken theme park ride to the crushing pressure of a stroll along the ocean floor, jaw-dropping wonders await around every blind corner and inside every shadow.

Bringing such striking visions to life requires an artist’s understanding of how the interplay of light and shadow can toy with our emotions—and enough graphics processing power to service the demands of an advanced lighting system. Whereas pre-rendered, or “baked,” light maps limit how much the look of a scene can change in real time, BioShock 2 uses the tried-and-true efficiencies of DirectX 10 to facilitate fully dynamic simulated sources that can change hue and intensity at any moment. 

What’s more, because every light casts impeccably realistic shadows across the visible world—from static scenery to dynamic actors and objects—extinguishing or adjusting a single source can have a profound dramatic impact on the feel of a single piece of scenery or the whole of an area. Hard-edged shadows might make even round forms seem severe and threatening, while a more diffuse cast of darkness could subtly emphasize a tortured soul’s dwindling humanity.

Add these powerful tools and options to an artist or level designer’s palette, and those talented atmospheric craftsmen can create not only bright eye-popping spectacles and murky avenues of menace, but incredibly organic environments that might journey from one end of that spectrum to the other at the drop of a scripted hat, or as the by-product of a round of knock-down, drag-out combat.

You’ll have ample opportunity to leave a trail of genetically modified corpses in your ground-shaking wake. The seasoned programmers and inspired world builders of 2K Games are using every high-tech trick in the book to stuff every moment of violence and mayhem with gorgeous detail. Fire your Rivet Gun and you’ll see bloom effects emphasize the blazing fury that erupts from the barrel, followed by tendrils of smoke sent wafting by a customized soft particle system. Spin up a .50-caliber chain-gun, and distortion effects give a rather clear indication of just how much heat that bad boy sheds every second.

Plasmid attacks are even more exhilarating. In addition to the fancy particle effects, motion blur, and custom material shaders that make fire and lightning look so realistic, skillful programming and powerful NVIDIA hardware permit each elemental force to convincingly propagate through the world in real time. Fire burns up ornate carpets and furniture as easily as clothing, and you’ll find out in a hurry that standing in a pool of water is a good way to ride a few thousand volts of thundering electrical pain.

Luckily, the wet stuff won’t be hard to spot. The bigger problem might be tearing your eyes off of it as it cascades naturally across surfaces and splicers alike, and drops between floors to form indoor waterfalls. The advanced lighting system makes every pool glisten with realistic specular highlights, custom shaders send dynamic ripples out on undulating trips to far shores, and more specially crafted particle systems generate steam and spray as fire and projectiles make contact with the liquid’s surface. The first time you see an enemy break through a curtain of coruscating seawater, you might just be too stunned to defend yourself.

You’ll see drips, boiling spout traps, turbulent swirls, pools like perfect aquatic mirrors, and more, all made possible by the ingenious use of custom material shaders, effects systems, and the latest advanced GPUs. It’s really only proper that a game set many fathoms underwater should so convincingly simulate and render the behavior of the many millions of gallons that threaten to crush and swamp Rapture’s many unusual sights.

Of course, you could just as easily get distracted from your duty as a Big Daddy by any of the wondrous talents at your direct disposal. But whether you protect your Little Sister with a father’s vigilance, or take hours on end just to experiment with the stunning interplay of fire, ice, water, and lightning, you won’t want to leave BioShock 2’s Rapture in a hurry, no matter how dangerous it gets.