Game Reviews Volume 2

BioShock Infinite Burial At Sea: Episode 2 (PS3, PC, Xbox 360)

Burial At Sea Episode 2 is upon us and it was certainly aninteresting wait. After the death of this reality's Booker DeWitt,Elizabeth is found by Atlas (Frank Fontaine) along with the LittleSister known as Sally. Atlas wants Sally's ADAM but Elizabeth insistson saving her from this life; so she strikes a deal with Rapture'sbiggest conman and revolutionary in the hope of escaping to thesurface with Sally. All she has to do is get Atlas out of Fontaine'sDepartment Store and into Rapture proper.

What ensues is a three hour stealth em-up in both Rapture andColumbia as the final threads of both BioShock Infinite and theoriginal BioShock are sewn together to create a cohesive narrativethat flows through every game in the series.

It's certainly an ambitious task and whilst in theory it works,Episode 2 of Burial At Sea is ultimately rather boring and overlylong.

The plot for the whole Burial At Sea campaign could have been told inroughly 2 hours, though when you put both Burial At Sea episodestogether it comes to around 5-6 hours in length. You know what thatmeans? A lot of padding.

Episode 2 is the worst culprit of this by making the already slowgameplay from the first episode, even slower. How you ask? By turningBioShock, a first person shooter, into a first person stealth game;and spoiler alert, it really doesn't work all that well.

Playing as Elizabeth could have been an excellent opportunity to showher character's new found strength and smarts but instead IrrationalGames provides us with an incredibly weak, and outrageously stupidElizabeth.

Starting with the stupid lies in the plot. Firstly everybody inrapture knows that Atlas is not to be trusted. Booker knew it, AndrewRyan knew it and even Elizabeth knew it. Yet she makes a deal withhim, one she full well knows he will not uphold his endof...essentially meaning that the first BioShock only happens becauseElizabeth, for some unknown reason, decided to do the bidding of themost dangerous and ruthless man in Rapture, knowing full well that hewould betray her.

Moving onto the weak we look at the gameplay. Elizabeth is notcapable of holding her own in a gunfight, she takes merely a coupleof hits on medium difficulty to die and the damage she is capable ofdealing is pitiful, which is why stealth is placed in with such heavyemphasis. But why is this so? Why does the same pistol Booker uses,which drops enemies in merely a couple of bullets, suddenly incapableof causing significant damage to enemies when placed in Elizabeth'shands? What makes it even more of a joke is that using your meleeattack is completely useless outside of stealth attacks, because itdoes not deal a single point of damage to your opponent.

BioShock Infinite also does not work as a stealth game, simply basedoff of how the mechanics of the game work. Enemy awareness levelworks on a basis of how dark a place is that you are standing, aswell as how fast you are moving and what surface you are standing on.But when your footwear makes massive clicks and clops on anythingother than carpet, it makes it very hard to sneak around enemies.This forces your hand to use the tranquillizer dart crossbow, whichhas very little ammo available to it.

You become overly reliant on the Peeping Tom plasmid to tell you thelocations and movement patterns of enemy A.I, but there is not enoughEVE around the environment to keep you topped up. Whilst on the topicof not having enough of stuff, I thought the first episode was harshwith the amount of ammo, money and EVE available to you over it'sshort run time. But Episode 2 takes it to a whole other level. Overthe course of the game I collected $200, which was enough toreplenish my ammo from a vending machine twice. Beyond that I was atthe mercy to random drops when looting which again, yielded fewsuccesses.

Burial At Sea Episode 2 feels broken in how it plays and what littlestory it had left to tell is both underwhelming and ridiculous. Ifeel cheated by it because Elizabeth is not a stupid woman, she isincredibly intelligent and very resourceful, yet she is played off assome kind of fool that allows a man who she know cannot be trusted totrigger Rapture's downfall.

Trying to tie all the BioShock titles together was always going to bea tough job, but Burial At sea does a half arsed job if there everwas one.

The first episode of Burial At Sea was underwhelming to say the leastand unfortunately Episode 2 does little to improve that despite somepretty drastic changes to the gameplay formula.

BioShockInfinite

BurialAt Sea: Episode 2 – 3/10

+EvenMore Interesting Audio Logs

+SwitchingBetween Rapture & Columbia

-Elizabeth'sStupid, Nonsensical Decisions

-PaddingBeyond Belief

-StealthBioShock Is Not Fun To Play