It's all a charade. There is no real choice in Bioshock, there is only the good, and the better. You either harvest the Little Sisters for more Adam, or rescue them for the stuff that really matters (did I mention that the evil ending is really cliched and lame), you can either blow something up with tons of med-kits and ammo, or you can kill a Big Daddy in a matter of seconds with security bots and turrets pounding him from every angle as you set him on fire with plasmids.
Much like Oblivion or Mass Effect, games that are actually RPGs, the game doesn't restrict you at all, it only depends on how YOU restrict yourself, which makes the game incredibly lax based on your decisions. You can do practically anything with no consequences. If you want to randomly splurge on plasmids and ignore the urge to go for only the things that will benefit you and your playstyle it won't cripple you at all.
This makes the game very lenient, this makes the game very easy, and what makes this game even easier are those terrible Vita-Chambers.
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Relax! RELAX! RELAX GOD DAMMIT GUYS, CALM THE FUDGING QWERTY KEYBOARD DOWN. WE GOT THIS HERE VITA CHAMBER YOU SEE? WE CAN PERPETUALLY REAPPEAR AFTER WE DIE AND BEAT THE WHOLE PRETTY FASCIST ARMY OURSELVES!
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Vita-Chambers are little respawn stations. And they are the worst pieces of crap ever. Unlike System Shock 2 where the reassemblers would take a nice chunk off your cash and assorted crap, there's no penalty to death in Bioshock. Unless you're going for the Brass Balls achievement on the 360 version (play through Hard without using a Vita-Chamber) you can essentially just let yourself explode into pieces then become back and gradually chip away at your enemies.
It's very tedious, and once you realize that there's no penalty to getting yourself turned into a sort of slimy custard, you'll soon get bored during the more difficult stages of the game. Boss fights are turned into mere road bumps, simply slowing the pace of the game down. Fortunately, there aren't many of them, but they aren't even that hard in the first place when they aren't just plain stupid.
You know you did something wrong when you yourself place a "Disable Vita-Chamber" option in your game. But then you say, hey, "Why didn't you just use that option?" and I say "Because I don't play a fucking game just to spend my time avoiding the terrible design decisions made by the pork headed developers". As I said before, restriction and proper use of that restriction is the key. You've got some pretty free-form areas in Bioshock, they're structured and unlocked piece by piece, but you can usually go where you want when you want and go back to places you were before. The thing is, too many restrictions are placed on the places you CAN go, and not enough restrictions are placed on the things you can DO. Even if the environments are freeform, you're still following a linear path.