Following on from my Burial at Sea review last week, I decided to play through the entirety of the second piece of DLC due to the fact I’ve purchased it all well after their original release date (The advantages of Steams summer sale and late purchases you see). Please be warned, this review will contain spoilers, so if you have yet to play the DLC or are planning on purchasing it and don’t want the plot points spoiled, look away for now and come back next week.

So the game starts off with you playing as Elizabeth, walking around the beautifully created Paris talking and meeting different passers-by as you explore the streets. Eventually, you chase Emily, the main girl Booker was chasing in part 1 of the DLC, and finally wake up to find yourself looking into your dead fathers eyes. Looking up, you find a group of gang members playing Russian roulette with your life just outside of the vent where Booker was trying to pull Emily out. You tell the gang (that turns out to be Atlas’ gang) that you can bring them to the surface, out of their depths to get back to rapture and let atlas have his revenge on Andrew Ryan. In doing so, you also tell the lie that you’re one of the chief scientists assistant, meaning you definitely know how to get the gang out. So hence forth, your mission is to get to the scientists lab to then save the city, getting Emily back from her captors. 

The game starts out with a pretty big plot element, as well as gameplay element, with Elizabeth finding her dead body against the wall in the starting area, meaning this is a new Elizabeth who doesn’t have the ability to open tears in time. I say this is a big game play element, as it now means that Elizabeth has to rely on her skills in sneaking around and knocking people out rather than her brawn that Booker relied so heavily on. This is explained quite nicely, but also can be seen as a little annoying considering we’ve seen Elizabeth open tears for 2 games, and this time cannot do it ourselves.

Burial At Sea part 2 is long. Very Long. For a piece of DLC this could have been a game in itself, with myself putting in 7 hours of game time, with barely any proper exploration and missing 2 audio tapes. This is partially due to the fact you play as Elizabeth, a fact the game pushes you to understand every few moments whenever you encounter enemies. This is due to the fact Elizabeth is not a fighter, so cannot take much damage, meaning the gameplay differs from other Bioshock games in the way it is no longer an action game, but stealth. Throughout most of the game, I was crouching the whole way, ensuring no enemies would see or hear me as I traversed Raptures darkest places. This was actually fairly refreshing for a game that relied far too much on its action sequences, something that hasn’t been toned back in part 2, but has been tweaked to make the experience more enjoyable.

The game is split up like a traditional Bioshock game, with the main task at hand on the opposite end of the world, with enemies between, and when you get to your location, you find that you actually then have to go elsewhere before you can continue with your progress. It’s one way to extend the length of the game, but can become quite tedious, as you know nothing is ever as easy as it seems. Each section is broken up into parts where you sneak behind enemies and knock them out (using either your tranquilizer crossbow, or smacking them on the head), then a section where you get to take in your environment, and another to explain a bit more story. It all becomes predictable after a while, meaning you know that when you take out the next few enemies, you’ll be able to continue to explore the environment, looking for coins and audiotapes to find out more about the world of Rapture.

My problem with this DLC and it’s mechanics stems more from the location the DLC takes place rather than the actual playability itself. The game pushes Elizabeth into a setting she didn’t really need to exist in in the first place. Bioshock 1 was beautiful, and amazing, but didn’t need to justify its existence through Elizabeths powers. The whole thing just feels like a prequel to Bioshock 1, something that didn’t need to be done at all.

The aesthetic of rapture hasn’t changed much from part 1 of the DLC, but the opening scene in Paris, and the return to Columbia makes the dark, dreary corridors of Rapture seem even more dreary after visiting bright and lovely places. Graphics, as always, are brilliantly detailed whilst not being too demanding for your computer. It’s crazy how much detail and art irrational manage to squeeze out of the Unreal engine, especially considering how little geometry there is in the world and how its all textures. The art department at irrational deserve a pat on the back to say the least.

Burial at Sea episode 2 was a fantastic piece of DLC to play through, but only for its new mechanics rather than the extra story it introduced to the Bioshock universe. The whole thing felt very much like when everyone complained about the ending of the TV show Lost, with it feeling like nothing had actually ever been accomplished in its own right. By all means, enjoy this second part of the Bioshock DLC, but know this: it won’t feel like you’ve done anything at all or worthwhile in the grand scheme of the narrative.

3/5

Bioshock Infinite was one of my favourite games of last year, given its fantastic story and fairly unique setting. Ken Levine is a genius when it comes to setting up these lavish cities, where your imagination becomes a reality, and so it was a welcome piece of news that the first true piece of DLC for Infinite would take place in Rapture, a place we all find so dear considering how much Bioshock imprinted on gaming culture forever. The problem is, as much as rapture is so loved, Infinite opened the doors to the Bioshock potentially going anywhere, much like assassins creed 1 opened the door for the series to go to any culture in history and stake its mark, Infinite was full of potential, so its a shame that they decided to squander this potential by returning to an already visited location.

The game starts out with you taking control of Booker Dewitt, a man you’re already accustomed to by now, in your office of investigations, sleeping the night away. A lady decides to wake you up, and upon seeing her face, you realise this is Elizabeth, the girl you spent the entire main game with. She asks you to take up her job of finding a little girl called emily who is supposedly dead, and will show you the way to find her. This start part is similar to the start of infinite in that it introduces you to the world of rapture before all of the chaos and disaster of the first game, meaning you get to see how people once lived in this beautiful metropolis under the sea. This is good for slowly easing you into the world, but you soon start to feel disconnected from the world being shown, as people around you speak once, then never speak again, repeating the same animations over and over. It all feels jarring, and pulls you out of an otherwise great and immerseful world.

Before long, you start getting into some action sequences, with plasmids and gunplay taking centre stage. Gone are the columbians that are out to get you for being the chosen one that takes the lamb, which are all now replaced with splicers. These splicers aren’t like the original splicers of Bioshock, and instead are still human, albeit with some mental difficulties. Plasmids play a role in the combat, but I found the little time you play the DLC meant you couldn’t upgrade the plasmids to their full potential, meaning most of the time I relied on the guns of rapture to get me through, due to their ability to instant kill enemies with a headshot, and the plethora of ammo enemies drop after they meet their demise.

Through some weird coincidence, the sky crane, a staple from Infinite that was unique and not seen in rapture before, is now in rapture, with its use limited and rare. I found myself never using it in combat situations like I did in the main campaign, and it felt like it was there more for window dressing or a way to melee kill enemies than an actual gameplay mechanic.

It’s hard to go into too much detail in regards to the story of the DLC without giving out massive spoilers about not only the main campaign, but also this piece of DLC itself. The story has its usual twists and turns, with booker getting to one location with Elizabeth, only to need a new plasmid or item in order to continue forward. All I can say on the story side without spoiling anything is that I definitely enjoyed it. I found that it had enough plot twists, along with enough audio boxes to find to give proper depth to this new reason for being back in Rapture, something I didn’t feel the DLC would be able to do.

The DLC is beautiful, both graphically and artistically. I was stopping once every few moments in the beginning of the game to take as many screenshots as possible, as the amount of detail in every scene is staggering. Light rays gleam around figures beautifully, objects around the world are fantastically furnished that you wish you could actually reach out and grab them for their authentic 60’s look; the world of rapture has never felt more alive than in this.

The music was catchy, and constantly in the background, meaning you had a permanent reminder as to what decade you were meant to be fighting in. Having no internet at the moment means that I can’t find out whether the music was authentically taken from that error, or whether it was all made originally for this game; either way, it’s all a beauty to behold.
I suppose I could sum up my time in rapture for the first part of DLC as enticing. The DLC gives enough story beats and justification for its own existence, but I still can’t help but think that it wasn’t needed at all. The DLC comes off another timeline from the game we played through in Bioshock Infinite, and although that can be seen as a good thing, I found myself wishing Bioshocks DLC would have gone to another place, with a new sprawling metropolis to discover all over again. Rapture is a place we’ve explored in every game in the series so far, nothing about it is new apart from the people within it, and they just aren’t that interesting when the game tries to justify the DLC’s existence through people you don’t really care about.

3/5