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Whenever I play a game that features dual-wielding of any sort, I think back to two key formative gaming experiences for this mechanic: Halo 2, and BioShock. Halo’s wildly popular sequel made picking up different weapons in each hand a core gameplay feature, but I’d argue that 2007’s Ken Levine-designed BioShock really perfected the technique, at least as far as first-person-shooters go.
This undersea adventure through a nightmarish city casts you as a nameless mystery man who can hold a gun in his right hand and shoot weird magical spells out of his left hand. It combined and synergised those two things in all sorts of fun ways, allowing for different elemental and tactical combinations that let players develop their own unique play styles as they made their way through the game. The visuals combined with smartly designed controls that made it easy to seamlessly switch between different powers, and it got even better in BioShock 2 and BioShock Infinite. The raw idea of “combine powers with other things” wasn’t the most original, and the game owed a great debt to the earlier System Shock games that came from some of the same minds, but the execution of the franchise was so well done that they’re all still easy and fun to play even years after their releases.
