Somewhere, in some parallel dimension, there's a BioShock Infinite that I likeable a lot Thomas More than the unity I played in this dimension. This workweek, as I played the second, concluding episode of Infinite's Burial at Subocean expansion, I felt alike I got glimpse of that mettlesome.

Spoilers travel along for BioShock, BioShock Infinite and Burying at Sea Episode 1.

Burial at Sea has long promised to lease us finally step into the shoes of Elizabeth, the young charwoman who in BioShock Infinite alternated as sidekick, demoiselle in hurt, sad woman in ask of comfort, super-powered plot device, and eventually, annunciate of the apocalypse. Burial's second instalment picks up Sir Thomas More or less straight off aft the events at the end of the (generally disappointing) first episode, with Elizabeth finally completing the circle by going to the eldest BioShock's underwater urban center of Transport and hunting down and putting to death the final examination Booking agent/Comstock.

Of course, picking up "immediately after" the first chapter doesn't in truth mean much in the multiverse of BioShock Infinite. In a count of minutes, everything that seemed to (assort of) make feel at the end of episode one has been turned on its spike, and it's away to the metaphysical races again.

In short order, Elizabeth has been forced to make a deal with the treacherous revolutionary Map collection—who, as we who played the first BioShock know, is really the baddie Frank Fontaine in disguise. Elizabeth is wracked with guilty conscience concluded the fate of Sallying forth, the little-girl-turned-little-sis she used American Samoa bait for Comstock in the first episode. Atlas has her, and wish only release her and spare Elizabeth if she helps get their submerged wing of Rapture backward up to the main urban center so that Atlas can launch the revolution that sets the stage for the first BioShock.

If this all sounds beautiful twisty and backward-referency, that's because IT is. Episode 2 is for the fans; specifically, the fans of the archetypical BioShock. The story is both BioShock Limitless epilogue and BioShock prologue, and while it manages the last mentioned feat more ably than the former, it achieves both tasks with a surprising measure of success. (Though we shall non, apparently, speak of BioShock 2, an underrated back that, at least in the timeline of BioShock Endless, manifestly never really happened.)

Here's the first, well-nig unexpected thing about Burial at Sea Sequence 2: It's a stealth game. Not an action game with half-baked stealth elements, like the freshman episode; this is a full-on, crouching in a corner, concealed-risen-on-enemies-from-behind, using-a-crossbow-to-bump-unfashionable-guards stealth game.

See, for reasons passing explanation, Elizabeth has been nerfed of her human race-smashing natural object powers, as well American Samoa her ability to see into the future. In her words, she's "just a normal girl, with a normal pinky." This has the welcome effect of grounding a chronicle that had previously spun entirely out of control. We're none longer dealing with the absolute planes of the multiverse, we're just talking about a somebody in a place, trying to accomplish a matter. How nice.

Elizabeth can't takings very much punishment in a honest-up fight, and the levels are parsimonious with money, weapons and ammo. Smart players will flummox to the shadows, crawling knightly most of the splicers who patrol Transport without daring to aim them on.

The stealth works, at least, it works far better than it mightiness have. That's for the most part due to a new plasmid power Elizabeth gets that is, more or less, "Stealth magic." It allows her to get invisible for a time and likewise highlights enemies through walls. All together, players are given the situational awareness necessary to make sneaking merriment; you toilet watch an alerted foeman cautiously draw his or her mode toward the room where you're hiding, then quickly creep off behind a table as they enter the room. Then, as they break down to investigate a twilit corner, creep up butt them and… bang!

Elizabeth's enemies are awfully dimwitted, and it often feels evident that the new stealing stuff has been grafted onto a secret plan that wasn't ab initio designed to support them. Bad guys are usually supernaturally good at sharp-eared Elizabeth from crosswise massive rooms, particularly when she steps on off-and-on glass or into water, and the inconsistency of it all leaves the stealth feeling both insubstantial and unpredictable. But while hardcore stealing gamers may not be satisfied by the complexity of the simulation, information technology remains important just how soundly a focus on sneaking changes the tenor of the game for the better.

Interment at Sea has a constant tension that is far more engaging than either its firstly episode Beaver State, certainly, BioShock Infinite as a uninjured. I spent most of my time creeping through the various rooms and antichambers of Rapture, always alert, ever listening, my eyes peeled for new threats. The game forces players to retard and earnings attention, and arsenic a event is a much richer, more tuned experience than either of its predecessors.

In fact, the more I played, the more I found myself flummoxed A to why the whole of BioShock Infinite couldn't have been more like this. IT really does feel like an alternate-realism edition of the back, one that slipped finished one of Infinite's many rifts. Instant to moment, it's a better, more interesting, more enjoyable game in almost every respect.

Sneaking through these gorgeous environments while avoiding terrifying enemies fits then recovered with the grandeur and horror of the BioShock series, and allows the cautious player so much more room to research and drink in the sights. The many gripes I had more or less the core bet on's combat are rendered largely moot thanks to Interment's stealth, as are many of my complaints about the over-the-top, distracting furiousness and Gore. Burial at Sea is still a non-white, tearing game, but the wildness feels much more give up and specific, and as a result the game is soaked in a stage of tension that Infinite itself rarely achieved. For formerly, a BioShock pun International Relations and Security Network't shouting at me. What a blessed relief.

It helps, too, that Burial at Sea is a sprawling, roomy game that greatly rewards exploration. It took me upwards of six hours to gambol through the intact episode, and I on a regular basis found myself lost and unsure of where, precisely, I was supposed to go next. (In a good right smart.) Various large areas seemed whole irrelevant to Elizabeth's bay, but curious players will follow wellspring-rewarded for wandering. Few hidden rooms contain upgrades that make Elizabeth's new stealth powers often more reusable, letting her continue invisible and see through with walls indefinitely as long as she remains still. It was after obtaining those upgrades that Elizabeth I fully switched from quarry to predator, and I found myself having Thomas More diverting plainly playing a BioShock stake than I have in a very long time.

It has been interesting watching so many big-budget series experiment with letting players assume the part of their less empowered supporting characters. Burial at Sea, Assassin's Creed IV: Freedom Cry, The Last of Us: Unexhausted Behind and the second season of The Walking Dead have all shifted center from their traditionally empowered male protagonists to comparatively disempowered sidekick characters. (Even Adewale from Exemption Cry qualifies, presumption that he's low suspicion and attack at entirely times due to his complexion.) Every prison term a game has cooked this, we've gotten a to a greater extent interesting story, a to a greater extent interesting protagonist, and a more interesting spunky. There is a lesson here: Good games don't need to have powerful protagonists, and in fact, many games benefit from putt the player in the role of the disempowered.

Other aspects of Interment at Sea's story succeed and give out more or little every bit. I've long since stopped caring enough to render to decipher the many lighthouses and many tale doors of the Uncounted universe. The series' heady pseud-scientific explorations continue hither, every bit Elizabeth spends her downtime debating the nature of things over the radio with a potentially imaginary version of Booker. (Information technology's likely, though never quite confirmed, that she's really just talk to herself.) Their frequent forays into the metaphysical rarely do much to illuminate the convoluted events at the end of BioShock Unnumerable, and Burial at Sea's story only really gains momentum when it circles posterior to the events initially of the first BioShock.

The irony, then, is that this strongest chapter in the Infinite saga is at its best when IT focuses on the plot of the first gear game in the series. BioShock sure was a great game, wasn't it?

Over the course of Burial at Sea we pick up a great cope about the working family relationship between Transport's Dr. Suchong and Columbia's Jeremiah Fink, a kinship commencement hinted at in the original Infinite. That Columbia relied so hard on Rapture's knowledge base breakthroughs is fitting, I suppose, precondition how subordinate Countless feels here to the first BioShock, just it does make it that much harder to feel all that invested in whatever transpired in the city above the clouds. Was this whole thing, the story of Elizabeth and Booker and Comstock and the rest, just a closed-closed circuit morality spiel that existed to set slay a revolution in Rapture? Seems like it was.

Actor Courtnee Draper does a fine job reprising her role as Elizabeth, turning in a gutsier performance than she did in the original game. Interment at Sea plays up Elizabeth's smarts, with her regularly rattling off vital stats astir high-tech machinery, displaying an encyclopedic knowledge of biology and metaphysics, and generally out-braining everyone in the elbow room. "Retributive a entirely lot of volume-erudition and a handful of lockpicks," she says of herself, in a standard flake of self-effacement that admittedly rings false, given the incredible feats she pulls off over the course of the gamy.

This Elizabeth is a astonishingly grounded and relatable character, considering how many versions of her we've met in the past. She's overrun by guilt feelings and self-doubt, yet dictated to see her missionary station through, haunted and desperate to undo a small fraction of the suffering she's caused.

"We'd all be better off, U.S.A DeWitts, if we could leave advantageously enough alone," she muses at unitary point. As IT turns out, it's far more interesting to watch a character come to price with her powerlessness than it is to watch her rip apart and rewrite the entirety of space and time.

BioShock fans will see hatful of otherwise familiar faces (and hear plenty of conversant voices) from the serial publication, each character waltzing along and off stage with an allow come of pomp and context. Most of information technology works, though a blatant attempt to undo one of BioShock Infinite's more careless and problematic plot developments falls right its face and never gets back finished.

(Here comes a small spoiler) Capital of South Carolina radical Daisy Fitzroy, we now learn, did not simply snap and take a child surety in Infinite. No more, she was convinced to do it by the Lutece Gemini the Twins because it would force Elizabeth I to kill her, thereby making Elizabeth into the woman she would need to be in order for the rest period of the events of Infinite to play out. Seldom have I seen a more brazen attempt to sweep a widely criticized narrative screw-up under the rug, and with each of Fitzroy's stilted monologues about her situatio amid the gears of doom, I groaned a bit louder. (So ends the spoiler.)

Furthermore, a late-game rack chronological sequence is gratuitous and nasty, as it gleefully forces us to witness a terrifically mortifying, first off-person depiction of anguish. As with closing hebdomad's Metal Pitch Hard V: Ground Zeroes, I found myself interrogative: Haven't video games minded us sufficiency of the torturous suffering of women? Must yet another actress earn her voiceover stripes by permanent at a microphone and screeching in agony? The intact successiveness feels configured solely to electrical shock and enervate, with little actual reason to be other than someone decided, "Hey, this would be water-cooled."

The Saame could be same of most of the mettlesome's inalterable twenty minutes, really. As the report careens toward its dark conclusion, much of what came before goes outgoing the window and we are railroaded to a grim finale that, fittingly, finds itself furthest more solicitous with the start of BioShock than with the end of BioShock Non-finite.

For all its narrative failings, Burial at Sea succeeds in a number of places that BioShock Infinite fell short. It successfully bridges the gap between Rapture and Columbia, giving both cities a tender, if muddled, farewell. As standalone surprises go, Burial doesn't match the heights achieved aside BioShock 2's fantastic add together-on Minerva's Lair, but IT comes closer than I was expecting.

It seems unlikely that this testament constitute the last we'll see of the BioShock population, merely given the current state of Irrational Games, it power be a while in front we get a other entry in the series. Considering how thoroughly these games have get on twisted up in their own metaphysical mumbo jumbo, an intermission is probably for the best. Let BioShock breathe and make relaxed, let it rediscover its center.

It's hard non to wish that I could live in a parallel world where the entirety of BioShock Infinite had been as stimulating and tense as this new epilog; a world where the smarter spunky was the status quo, not the eventual exception. I put on't live in that world, but hey, at to the lowest degree there's Burial mixed-up. I'll deal it.