14 DAY TRIAL // The biggest fun I had in BioShock 2 was dying four times in a row. I do not use the VitaChambers or however the respawn points are done, so I reloaded five times before I could finally get through one section of the game.
The good thing is that the deaths themselves were not caused by a Big Sister battle or by taking on a Big Daddy, as I aimed to free a Little Sister and get me some more ADAM. I died four times in a row while trying to protect that Little Sister for enough time so that she can harvest a body. The last stand battles that happen when harvesting are the toughest elements that BioShock 2 can throw at you and also the most fun.
The fun part comes from actually being able to plan how to approach the battle. There's a body on the ground, filled to the gills with ADAM, where the Little Sister is dropped. She needs time, which can be reduced through the use of a Tonic, to extract the stuff, and any enemy that comes too close will interrupt the process.
So, a gamer needs to balance the need to take out enemies near to the Little Sister so that the process can move along with the need to protect themselves. It's hard to determine the level of attention that needs to be devoted to each of the tasks, especially in the later stages when the enemies include some Big Daddy alternatives that can be quite the pain to take out.
The beauty is that shaping the battlefield is half the actual fight. There are trap rivets to be popped into walls, slicing incoming Splicers, trap spears to be strung around, offering a nasty shock to incoming enemies, mini turrets to be deployed to offer some firepower support and proximity mines to be spread around liberally.
There are enough ammo dispensers and corpses to search to make sure that lack of ammo is almost never a big problem and BioShock 2 is at its best when it allows the player to look around, judge the situation, spread some traps and then put the Little Sister down to do her dirty work while the gamer fights to keep her and themselves safe while taking out all the Splicers in sight. The only big issue here is that enemies tend to come out of areas you cannot actually explore, making the whole fight feel a little unfair.