I put in a lot of time over the last three days into BioShock 2, and just finished it off tonight. My original scheme of playing it on hard with the Vita-Chambers turned off was turning into a grueling slog though, so I wound up turning it down to medium.

Overall, I enjoyed it a lot. The plot was familiar-feeling, with an extremist ideologue villain and someone with a dark past and of questionable trust helping you along, but it added enough twists to keep it interesting. The ending felt like a satisfying payoff, even without a traditional Big Bad Boss Fight. There were some pretty good set-piece fights and escape sequences, though.

Combat was a lot more chaotic than it was in the first one. I preferred the drill and electric shock combo a lot in the middle sections, but fights became just a frenzied blur. Towards the end I started relying on the machine gun and rivet gun along with the bee swarm most of the time, for a more traditional ranged fight. It worked well enough that I never really bothered to try out the other weapons like the spear gun and launcher very much.

Of course, now I should play through again on hard to get the achievement for that (now being free to use the Vita-Chambers) and see what happens when you go the evil route. But…time is limited, so I think that’s enough BioShock 2 for now.