![]() Bad guys are usually preternaturally good at hearing Elizabeth from across massive rooms, particularly when she steps on broken glass or into water, and the inconsistency of it all leaves the stealth feeling both insubstantial and unpredictable. bam!Įlizabeth's enemies are awfully dimwitted, and it often feels evident that the new stealth stuff has been grafted onto a game that wasn't initially designed to support them. Then, as they go to investigate a dark corner, creep up behind them and. All at once, players are given the situational awareness necessary to make sneaking fun you can watch an alerted enemy cautiously make his or her way toward the room where you're hiding, then quickly creep off behind a table as they enter the room. That's largely due to a new plasmid ability Elizabeth gets that is, more or less, "Stealth magic." It allows her to become invisible for a time and also highlights enemies through walls. The stealth works, at least, it works far better than it might have. Smart players will stick to the shadows, creeping past most of the splicers who patrol Rapture without daring to take them on. How nice.Įlizabeth can't take very much punishment in a straight-up fight, and the levels are parsimonious with money, weapons and ammo. We're no longer dealing with the infinite planes of the multiverse, we're just talking about a person in a place, trying to accomplish a thing. In her words, she's "just a normal girl, with a normal pinky." This has the welcome effect of grounding a story that had previously spun entirely out of control. See, for reasons passing explanation, Elizabeth has been nerfed of her world-smashing cosmic powers, as well as her ability to see into the future. Not an action game with half-baked stealth elements, like the first episode this is a full-on, crouching in a corner, sneaking-up-on-enemies-from-behind, using-a-crossbow-to-knock-out-guards stealth game. Here's the first, most unexpected thing about Burial at Sea Episode 2: It's a stealth game. (Though we shall not, apparently, speak of BioShock 2, an underrated game that, at least in the timeline of BioShock Infinite, apparently never really happened.) The story is both BioShock Infinite epilogue and BioShock prologue, and while it manages the latter feat more ably than the former, it achieves both tasks with a surprising measure of success. Episode 2 is for the fans specifically, the fans of the first BioShock. If this all sounds pretty twisty and back-referency, that's because it is. Atlas has her, and will only release her and spare Elizabeth if she helps get their submerged wing of Rapture back up to the main city so that Atlas can launch the revolution that sets the stage for the first BioShock. Elizabeth is wracked with guilt over the fate of Sally, the little-girl-turned-little-sister she used as bait for Comstock in the first episode. In short order, Elizabeth has been forced to make a deal with the treacherous revolutionary Atlas-who, as we who played the first BioShock know, is really the villain Frank Fontaine in disguise. ![]() In a matter of minutes, everything that seemed to (sort of) make sense at the end of episode one has been turned on its ear, and it's off to the metaphysical races once more. Of course, picking up "immediately after" the first chapter doesn't really mean much in the multiverse of BioShock Infinite. Burial's second episode picks up more or less immediately after the events at the end of the ( generally disappointing) first episode, with Elizabeth finally completing the circle by going to the first BioShock's underwater city of Rapture and hunting down and killing the final Booker/Comstock. Spoilers follow for BioShock, BioShock Infinite and Burial at Sea Episode 1.īurial at Sea has long promised to let us finally step into the shoes of Elizabeth, the young woman who in BioShock Infinite alternated as sidekick, damsel in distress, sad woman in need of comfort, super-powered plot device, and eventually, harbinger of the apocalypse. This week, as I played the second, final episode of Infinite's Burial at Sea expansion, I felt like I got glimpse of that game. ![]() Somewhere, in some parallel dimension, there's a BioShock Infinite that I liked a lot more than the one I played in this dimension. ![]()
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