So much of the fun of Bioshock 2’s combat comes from finding interesting angles from which to approach an encounter, and that’s just lacking here entirely. I didn’t find the defense segments in the base game to be all that annoying because you had the capacity to lay traps with the inventory you’ve been building up, and they were also spread out throughout levels. However, doing so many in quick succession and with no control of your loadout really takes the fun out of it. I do like that the preselected loadouts require you to engage with absolutely every corner of the game’s sandbox, but these missions are also so easy (lacking a hard mode completely) that I don’t really find myself doing the kind of on the fly problem solving that defines the main appeal of the game for me. The sandbox is still really solid, and there’s a handful of trials here that I got a kick out of, particularly the one where you can’t earn money, but overall this just feels like they’re trying to make a different genre of shooter out of the bones of an imsim and it just doesn’t work for me.