Eight months after the release of BioShock Infinite, the second piece of downloadable content, and the first narrative driven one, has been released. It is clear that this time was used wisely, as the return to Rapture does not feature reused assets, or the same locations visited in previous titles, but whole new sections of the objectivist utopia. Unfortunately, all of this work provides an experience, which while good, is too short and suffers from some performance issues.
Burial at Sea brings the Bioshock Infinite story to the familiar city of Rapture before the events of Bioshock. Booker DeWitt is a down on his luck private investigator who receives a visit from a notably older and harder Elizabeth. While Booker is pretty much the same, Elizabeth feels more like a noir bombshell, and her disposition towards Booker is nowhere near as favorable as it was in Infinite. It is an interesting change in the character, which is perfectly acted and immediately piqued my curiosity. Elizabeth tasks Booker with helping her find Sally, a missing girl that Booker insists is dead. Despite this, Elizabeth makes Booker curious enough that he does follow her into the streets of Rapture in search of answers. This is a different section of the city than the ones visited in BioShock and BioShock 2.
The first hour or so (depending on how much you explore) feature no combat, and much like the beginning of BioShock Infinite, allows you to experience the city and the everyday life of its inhabitants. Unlike Columbia, which is at first shown in its turn of the century magnificence only to uncover the ugliness boiling close to the surface later, Rapture is presented at face value with all its glory and ugliness exposed for all to see. It works well, after all, it is expected most players of this DLC have already seen the ultimate fate of city, and are familiar with the secrets that caused it to fall. Once that introductory section is over, the game drops you into a different area where splicers rule and the features of the city are those fans of the original Bioshock came to be used to complete with leaks, crumbling infrastructure, and ruined grandeur.
The gameplay is that of BioShock Infinite’s, with the names of some mechanics changed. Salts are now Eve. Vigors are now plasmids. The skyhook is called an “air grabber.” However, these work as they do in BioShock Infinite. You consume Eve immediately, it brings the same two weapon limit, and the plasmids are consumed orally as vigors are. During this first section you start with almost no supplies, only a revolver with a few bullets and some eve, and the game is not generous in giving any additional supplies. Ammo, health and Eve are rare, making exploration risky, but necessary. This will see you sneaking around enemies and relying on Booker’s brutal melee kills much more than in the main game, making for some very intense, fun moments. As before, Elizabeth will help by gathering supplies for you, but it does not seem to happen as often as it used to, making the lack of supplies a very real issue that I personally enjoyed working around. Once Elizabeth reveals her power to create tears, though, the gameplay is identical to the main game, complete with skyways for you to traverse the game world and drop into enemies.
And the narrative, as in most of the “shock” games, brings it all together, providing a good incentive to move from one room full of splicers to the next. The world is filled with details that reward paying attention to your surroundings and making connections. Small things, like the door in Booker’s office, or off hand comments made by the characters add a lot to the experience. It is interesting to see the similarities and subtle differences between the main game and Burial at Sea, as well as between BioShock’s Rapture and its Infinite counterpart. The game rewards knowledge of previous entries, bringing in characters from across the franchise directly and also in the form of audio logs, which gives the setting and characters extra depth. It all culminates in a twist ending good enough to keep me interested in playing the next episode.
It is a testament to the strength of its narrative that Burial at Sea kept me interested in seeing where the plot was going, as I did experience some performance issues that might have kept me from finishing other games. I had severe slowdown in some areas, and even areas where the game crashed while it loaded. The worse case came while trying to backtrack after obtaining a plasmid to explore an area the game goes out of its way to point out I needed to open with this plasmid. In this section of the game there are airlocks, which serve as concealed loading screens. Unfortunately, the door that lead back to the area I wanted to explore would not open as the rest of the level failed to load, and while it did this, I was also not able to cancel and return to the area I was coming from, leaving me stuck and forcing me to go back to the menu and reload the last checkpoint. This is puzzling, as the game is installed on my hardrive, and the main game ran smoothly from the disk. I did play the game on a Playstation 3, but a look at Irrational’s forums also reveals issues for some of their PC clients.
Burial at Sea is also very short. I finished it in three hours with plenty of exploration and backtracking. Rushing through it, it might be possible to finish it in about 90 minutes to two hours. It is very hard to see why Burial at Sea would be presented in two parts that sell for $15 in a generation that brought us expansions like Red Dead Redemption’s Undead Nightmare at $20 and Infamous 2: Festival of Blood at only $5, other than to maximize its earning potential, and maybe rush part one out before the holidays. At best, it is a prologue to a truly unique part 2, in which case the $15 price tag is still hard to justify.
In the end it’s hard to recommend Burial at Sea to anyone but the most dedicated BioShock fans. While it does offer a great narrative, a great gameplay experience, and fantastic return to Rapture, its performance issues hold it back, and it is simply too short. If you are on the fence, I’d wait until Episode 2 is out before making a decision.
