So. Just finished Burial At Sea Episode 2.
Liked: Again, gorgeous game and captures the claustrophobic environment of Rapture much, much better than the first (which leaned much too heavily on props from Columbia inserted, inexplicably, into the underwater city. Those elements are still here, but downplayed - no pointless skyline insertions. The combat is completely difference, worked to be much more stealth-oriented, and for the most part works decently well. Levels are incredibly tight on med kits and ammo, and Elizabeth herself is frail.
Luckily she finds the Peeping Tom plasmid fairly quickly. This is the key to the stealth - it lets her see enemies through walls and become invisible for short periods of time. The stealth hangs almost entirely on this, but it is fun to use, and you can grab upgrades for it which allow you to cloak and view enemies indefinitely while standing still. It does break somewhat though; most later portions of the game are beatable by aggroing enemies, cloaking as soon as they run up to you, and then whomping them on the head as soon as they disengage. This works even while standing cloaked in the midst of 5-6 enemies, systematically whomping them one by one. It is ridiculous, but it does help Elizabeth to feel like less of a helpless girl.
Disliked: Man the story in this DLC is confusing as balls.
- Spoiler: show
- Episode 1's plot ran thus: Elizabeth, now all grown up, tracks a version of Comstock to Rapture where he fled in self-imposed exile after his attempt to snatch another reality's Anna resulted in the baby losing not her pinky, but her head. Elizabeth uses her godlike powers to meet Comstock, now working as a PI under the name Booker DeWitt, and contracts him for a case. This leads them to Sally, a Little Sister that Comstock has grown attached to. Elizabeth turns up the heat on Sally in an attempt to lure her out of hiding - upon doing so, Comstock grabs her, and of course enrages her Big Daddy, who impales Comstock. This being Elizabeth's plan all along. It was a decent little story, self-contained and small in scope. As far as getting us to Rapture is concerned, it did the trick and little more.
Episode 2 though... I don't even know. Elizabeth is alive in this version, but one of the first actions you make is finding your own dead body. Apparently the Big Daddy's rampage didn't end with Comstock, and the Elizabeth of the first game is... dead. So who is our protagonist? Who knows - the narrative suggests that it's a version of Elizabeth that regretted her other version's cruel treatment of Sally, contracted the Luteces in getting her to Rapture to save Sally, despite this apparently meaning the end of Elizabeth's godlike powers of time and space? It's clear as mud. In a similar vein, Elizabeth is constantly having conversations with Booker through the course of the story - a Booker that repeatedly tells her that he doesn't exist and is just a figment of her imagination (or perhaps a splintered personality formed of the memories her her omniscience) but his presence is similarly vague as hell.
Elizabeth's mission in Ep 2 is ostensibly to rescue Sally (for which I imagine omnipotence would have been handy, but wtfever) and this takes her to Suchong, mad scientist from the original Bioshock, who sends her back to Columbia to retrieve a lock of (her own) hair and a Lutece particle to raise the sunken department store in which Atlas and his men are trapped (thus allowing the plot of Bioshock 1 to happen). It's a fairly contrived way to get the story back into Columbia and makes disappointly explicit a lot of the hints made in Infinite proper - that there was collaboration between Rapture and Columbia, for example. This is all fine, but was already pretty obvious from the main game - the Columbia excursion seems to only be telling us things we already know.
Worse still is Daisy Fitzroy, who it turns out (in what has to be some of the most blatant backpeddling ever seen) was instructed to take Fink's son hostage, in order to provoke Elizabeth into murdering her and thus harden Elizabeth's personality. It's a horrible rewrite of an already horrible plot point - Daisy's transformation from revolutionary into mad dog was jarring enough, but changing her story to make it so that this impassioned leader decided to take a knife to the back because the Luteces told her to? It just rings incredibly false. Daisy Fitzroy may eventually get the story she deserves - this DLC did not manage it.
The ending is also baffling. Elizabeth strikes a deal with Atlas, and almost immediately realises that he will betray her the first chance he gets. She states over and over again that she has a plan, but this never surfaces - she then gets repeatedly captured, tortured, beat up and coerced into doing more of Atlas' dirty work. It's brutal to watch and begins to feel utterly pointless, since as Elizabeth herself muses, Atlas is never going to release Sally and he will kill Elizabeth when she ceases to be useful.
This is exactly what happens - Elizabeth raises the department store with the Lutece particle and brings Suchong's "ace in the hole" to Atlas (the trigger phrase "Would you kindly", kicking the events of Bioshock into motion) and then is immediately and brutally murdered. In her last moments, she has a flash of omniscient memory - that Jack (protagonist of the first game) would be the one to save the little sisters, including Sally, after all. Despite the grand, ambitious scope of Infinite's ending, Elizabeth dies alone and powerless in service of the original Bioshock.
All in all, I find the Burial At Sea DLC to be a strange bird. It's as if Irrational were dismayed with Columbia and, having little faith in Infinite's own merits, decided to take the opportunity to tell another Rapture story. In so doing, though, they take Columbia and they make it feel small, a weird side-project to its more genre-defining forebear. Everything in Columbia turns out to be cribbed from Rapture, such that, at the end of Burial At Sea, Columbia feels like a knock-off, a weird Chinese copy of Bioshock 1. It's hard not to get the impression that this stems from Irrational coming to basically the same conclusion, and it's disappointing to me because there's so much potential in Infinite. That Burial At Sea chooses to end the story of Infinite (and possibly the franchise) by abandoning most of Infinite's ideas and revisiting a setting from a decade ago, not to mention ending on such a low note, depresses me.
