Well they certainly took their sweet time working on this. Bioshock Infinite had become a poster child for why season passes being available on day 1 are a bad idea – aside from a mostly arena combat chunk earlier in the year, things were very quiet on some actual story DLC. Announced a few months ago, Burial At Sea is a two part story, which is set in … Rapture!
We’re taken back to a time where Rapture is at its height. Booker DeWitt is still an alcoholic private investigator in this universe, and he’s visited by Elizabeth who hires him to find a girl who is ‘missing’. That’s as much story as the trailer reveals, and as much as I’m going to cover here. Elizabeth is a brilliant character again, remixed into a film noir femme fatale, and I appreciated having her wandering around Rapture with me.
Irrational Games have done a good job of bringing Rapture back to life, and they’ve done so with mostly new graphical assets. However, your time in the thriving Rapture is limited and the game soon takes you to a deserted part of the city which looks nearly as run down as in the first game. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but having splicers running amok before the fall wouldn’t have made sense at all. Graphics are excellent throughout anyway, frame rate generally stays around 30fps but can drop in close combat.
There’s been much said about the cost of the DLC given that it’s 1/4 of the original price of the full Infinite game, but honestly now that I’ve completed it (which a little over 4 hours on hard hunting around for secrets), it doesn’t seem unreasonable. My advice is don’t plough directly through the story on normal difficulty, take time to savour what’s on offer.
After the ending, I’m very much looking forward to part 2.
