Even the admittedly dazzling setting, the underwater city of Rapture, underlined the enclosed, showroom-like nature of the series, with the games' most magnificent sights always separated from the player by a thick wall of glass.
They're absolutely the industry standard for production design, I'll grant you, but it always felt to me as if that was their only purpose. One of my deep, dark secrets as a video game critic is that I was never overly fond of the first two BioShock games. Booker may be the hero, and he's no slacker in the character development field himself, but Infinite is Elizabeth's show." It's not designed as the second half of Burial at Sea so much as a conclusive bookend to the entire Bioshock franchise."I'm used to BioShock games tucking their most important characters away in other rooms, so seeing Irrational put so much effort into someone who's at the very forefront from the get-go works wonders to make me feel more connected to the story's happenings. A story about overlapping realities and repeating patterns. It was a story about a city on the verge of a violent, doomed revolution. It wasn't just about Elizabeth trying to find a lost girl. It tied together the disparate threads of Bioshock's Rapture and Bioshock Infinite's Columbia into one cohesive story, and did so satisfyingly. It felt as if it was building towards an inevitable conclusion to everything that came before it. That's what was most impressive about Burial at Sea.
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It's the chapter that ties the whole series together, bringing back the major players who plagued Rapture in the original game. Burial at Sea Episode 2 comes with a 'Previously on Bioshock' cinematic for a reason, feeling more concerned with the overarching story. While the individual plots work as self-contained stories, they should be taken as parts of a whole. It's hard to consider Bioshock games in isolation, though, and that goes doubly for this DLC. Playing both episodes back-to-back took about 7 hours, and that included hunting down hidden collectibles and eavesdropping on NPC chatter.
Perhaps Irrational would have been better served releasing both episodes as a single package, but even then the final experience is still quite short. While the stealth gameplay worked well to build atmosphere, it also made the game feel a little padded, spending time hiding and sneaking rather than clearing rooms with guns blazing. The change-up to gameplay style doesn't come across as polished as the experience Bioshock or Bioshock Infinite provided, and we found ourselves missing the chances to truly cut loose as you could in the previous games.īurial at Sea Episode 1 was justifiably maligned for its brevity, and while Episode 2 was a little longer, it doesn't really rectify the issue. This does mix things up, but be warned - you'll be sneaking up on splicers to silently knock them out, not dropping down from sky-lines like death incarnate. In fact, armed with a nonlethal crossbow and infused with supernatural abilities, Episode 2 seems to take cues from Arkane Studios' Dishonored more than anything else. While the game could have traded on the frenetic gunplay featured earlier in the series, Elizabeth's relative fragility coupled with the claustrophobic, waterlogged passageways of Rapture makes Episode 2 a tense, stealthy affair.
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