I finished it last night. It was amazing how little of the game I remembered. Essentially my memory was:
Medical ->
-> Twist ->
-> Fight Many -> Fight Final Boss
Here are my thoughts:
- The audio is fantastic. Pretty much everything is telegraphed by noise and hearing the Many talk is just creepy as hell. Similarly, hearing a protocol droid say hello to you when you are a melee heavy build causes you to find an escape route fast.
- The game is very uneven in its difficulty. The beginning is very hard when all you have is access to a wrench (and a pistol that seems to degrade with every shot), but by the time you make it through engineering, the game becomes much easier. Also, while I disliked how ubiquitous the respawn spots were in Bioshock, the uneven spacing of them in SS2 makes the beginning of every level a bit shitty, as it can really suck to die before you find one.
- It's funny how telegraphed the twist is. In Bioshock, I think it feels like a legitimate surprise, but in SS2, if you even halfway listen to what Xerxes says and know anything about SS1, you can pretty easily guess where the game is going. Honestly, the twist makes very little sense and just seems more like a "cool" idea that Ken Levine had. Why then? Why just keep going along with your puppetmaster after the reveal? Of all of the ideas that got revisited in Bioshock, this is the one that Bioshock legitimately improved upon.
- The final third (? quarter? everything in the Rickenbacker really) sucks. The final bits are completely linear and feel rushed. This is actually the biggest similarity with Bioshock 1. Both hit their climax ~2 hours early and then just kind of mope on to the end.
- The backtracking sucks too, as there's really no need for it. Nothing new happens, hell, most enemies have already been cleared out of the areas you go back to (except for the respawns). I mean, it was relatively quick and painless, but it was just tedious and unnecessary.
- Leveling up was annoying as it is pretty cryptic and until you get a feel for what enemies you are going to be facing, you have no idea if the decisions you are making are the correct ones. The beginning "4 years" feels just like college. You learn a bunch of random stuff and you have no idea what will actually be useful until you get into the real world.