BioShock 2
Put a shock in it.
The drill changes a lot of that, providing every kind of player, regardless of their approach to combat, with something devastatingly satisfying to focus on from the off. The torrents of claret that ensue every time you chew into an enemy might be there to disguise the fact that the animation itself doesn't have the greatest sense of connection, but the feel of the weapon, and the ease with which you can chug through Splicers with it, gives BioShock's often rather cerebral approach to death-dealing a much-missed visceral kick.
Nothing in Rapture ever comes for free, mind, and the drill has a cruel hunger for fuel to keep it spinning. That gives you one more dial to keep an eye on, and one more reason to loot the bodies of your enemies. Even when it's out of juice, however, you can still swing the thing in a brutal melee move that is, weirdly enough, a lot more visually satisfying than the stronger attack.
Aside from the drill, there are other new weapons to try out, like the rivet gun. It looks like something Heinz Wolf's steampunk granddad might have constructed to kill wasps, and it fires weighty slugs that punch into your enemies but leave an agonising pause between rounds. It takes various types of ammo, too, such as trap rivets, which give you even more options to get the drop on your foes when you're running low on Eve.
The best new gadget revealed in BioShock 2's opening hours isn't a gun, however: it's a research camera. Liberated fairly early on in proceedings, it allows you to sound out Rapture's baddies for weaknesses, gaining permanent perks and damage boosts in the process. The rub is that unlike the original game's camera, you can only capture the info you need by recording enemies while you're attacking them - a move which creates a pleasantly terrifying scramble as you switch the camera on and then start dealing out damage before someone puts an open-ended adjustable wrench through your islets of langerhans. (Google it. Actually, don't.)
The camera adds a pleasant twinge of extra challenge to the average Splicer, but it's truly unnerving when you fumble to use it against some of the more dangerous foes like Big Daddies - particularly since you need to mix up melee, ballistic, and plasmid attacks in order to get the data you need. At the very least, it's an excellent means of forcing less imaginative players like me into embracing the levels of complexity that truly bring the series' combat to life. I tried new things out because I had to - and then I started to wonder about what other things I could try.
New weapons call for new enemies, and that means hulking nasties like the Brute Splicer, a huge damage tank who lobs pieces of scenery at you, and sits somewhere in between common grunts and Big Daddies in Rapture's ecology. He may have wandered in straight from Left 4 Dead, but we're happy to have him, and at least he put a shirt on.
Then there's the Big Sister, decked out in braces and leg supports and stomping into combat like the world's narkiest polio sufferer. Her semi-regular appearances are accompanied by an unpleasant screeching as she bounds acrobatically around the scenery. A match for you in both brawn and brain, Big Sister Moments tend to end explosively, indicating 2K Marin has inherited Irrational Games' (yay!) fearsome stage-management skills.
Even when you're pitted against the regular foot soldiers of Rapture, BioShock 2 ups the ante. As a Big Daddy, you're often required to protect a Little Sister as she harvests Adam, an activity which also happens to throw the local crazies into a frothing frenzy. For a few magical minutes whenever harvesting occurs, 2K's classy dissection of 20th century philosophy becomes a very pretty take on Smash TV; such impromptu arena moments are the final proof that 2K Marin's made the combat a lot more immediate and enjoyable.