BioShock Infinite: Burial At Sea, Episode 2 – Repaying The Debt

With Burial at Sea, Episode 1, Irrational brought their franchise back to its roots as Booker and Elizabeth re-emerged into a Rapture unknowingly on the brink of collapse. Yet for all of the familiarity that brought with it, a lot had changed. It wasn’t quite the Rapture that we knew from the first game, with gameplay elements and ideas making their way over from Infinite, and the relationship between Booker and Elizabeth was not the same.

Episode 2 starts moments after the events at the end of Episode 1, but it’s immediately clear that it is all change once again. For one thing, you are now walking a mile in Elizabeth’s shoes, but the mysteries and plot twists come thick and fast, with you waking up at the mercy of Atlas and his thugs, your ability to open up tears gone and no special powers.

You’re starting afresh, and this acts as a way of shifting that gameplay dynamic yet again. It moves even further away from the action packed string of battles of the main adventure in BioShock Infinite and beyond the option of stealth in Episode 1, to being all about stealth.

It quickly covers the differences as you’re finding your feet in the world. With a scarcity of ammunition, melee attacks are the best option, but these will only strike an enemy down when they are not alerted to your presence, pushing them back temporarily if they are.

A more considered and analytical approach is absolutely required, and an awareness of your surroundings is needed so that you know whether a carpeted floor is muffling your footsteps or if you should crouch to creep along on wood. Just be careful to avoid shattered glass, which will make a noise and call enemies towards you.

Thankfully, you’re still just as nimble as before, with the return of the skyhook letting you leap up to high grappling points. Don’t stay there too long, or they’ll make a horrid groan after a period of time and alert nearby splicers. Be careful to hold the crouch button as you land, too, for a softer landing, as you aren’t able to perform aerial takedowns anymore.

In some ways, it almost feels like the predator gameplay from the recent Batman games has been transposed wholesale into the world of Rapture, and this is only reinforced by the new Peeping Tom plasmid, which returns alongside Old Man Winter and a couple of others.

Peeping Tom lets you ping the surround area when stationary, to reveal enemies through walls, or you can hold it and go invisible for a period of time. Both of these abilities become more powerful and less draining of your resources if you can find the upgrades through exploring the world, which might be out in the open or tucked away in a safe and a cleverly constructed lock-picking mini-game.

Should you be discovered, or facing unlikely odds, you do have certain more proactive options. The Crossbow has the most utility for stealthiness, with tranquiliser darts and noise makers making early appearances, but there are also a couple of more exotic options alongside your faithful pistol and shotgun.

In all cases, resorting to gunfire is very much a last resort and not just because of limited resources, but also because just a few hits will take you down. However, at no point did I really feel like I was all that threatened, on normal difficulty, and only a handful of encounters provided any real challenge. The AI was really not all that smart anyway, and I could easily evade, go invisible, tranquilise or literally stand around a corner and wait for them to come and investigate the growing pile of corpses.

Instead, the main focus of the DLC is the tightly woven story. At around 4 hours long, it’s a more satisfying length than Episode 1 was, and has much more leeway to provide peaks and troughs between stealth or action and moments of storytelling.

From the moment that Elizabeth wakes up at Atlas’ feet, she is thrust into a series of events that feature more of the cast of characters from the first BioShock, and another part of that world which can be just as vivid and vibrant as ever. It gradually peels back the mysteries, with several stand out moments along the way, and it all comes together quite excellently to bind Rapture and Columbia ever closer together.

You can probably start to put the puzzle pieces together in your head, and the final few plot points are maybe a little laboured, but I still found it to be an enjoyable and fitting arc with which to conclude the series under Irrational.

It’s actually a sad realisation that, as the one year anniversary of BioShock Infinite’s release passes us by with this release, it effectively signals the end of the series, with Levine moving on to other projects and Irrational shutting down. This is Irrational’s swan song, a culmination of the fiction they have created over the last decade that, even as it feels so quintessentially BioShock, still manages to bring something new and interesting to the series.