izigame.me

My main takeaway with this episode is that it feels and plays like it's just meant to bridge the gap between the main campaign and Episode 2, and greatly suffers from it.
I loved the art design of Infinite's main campaign, it's just a sight to behold on modern platforms and this expansion episode is no different. Rapture looks great in this game! Granted it's just using a preestablished setting but the contrast of going from Rapture before its downfall to the sunken Fontaine factories adds so much if you've already played Bioshock 1 and 2. Sadly, like the original campaign, I feel like the art direction is the strongest part while the combat suffers greatly.
Episode 1 places an emphasis on ammo and EVE management that the original campaign did not, though it doesn't push it enough to feel fair or fun in conjunction with the other mechanics this expansion offers. With ammo limited for 80% of the campaign the game tries to encourage you to seek creative solutions to take out splicers, the problem is that the game doesn't present you with many options much of the time. Stealth isn't viable since melee kills are very unreliable, and EVE is way too restrictive to be the difference between winning and losing a firefight. Tears never give many unique options that aren’t just a skyhook or an overpowered companion.
Another problem holding the combat back is with the weapon wheel, and even though having every weapon should let you be dynamic in combat, the way the weapon wheel works makes that feel impossible. In Bioshock 1 on KB+M you could use the number keys for swapping weapons and function keys for plasmids, it worked great! Going from plasmids to weapons let you have more control over fights. Episode 1 doesn't do that and it suffers for it.
When combat starts it shows just how weak the variety of playstyles is in this expansion especially. You get Old Man Winter which I never really used for the whole Episode, since it's basically just another plasmid that can stun, and it uses so much of your EVE that you're better off just using Devil's Kiss and Possession most of the time, since those at least provide a utility or can actually kill an enemy. If EVE costs for specific plasmids like Old Man Winter and Shock Jockey were paired back a bit I think it would’ve improved the combat drastically.
Tears are just as underwhelming as the base game, and I'd even say that they are either unimportant to combat or completely trivialize it. Sky hooks and ammo/health tears don't change much with combat, but spawning in companions completely destroys any challenge with an encounter. It's most egregious with the final boss, the Big Daddy, since you can just spawn a Motorized Patriot that aggros the Big Daddy, and you can kill the final boss without ever taking damage.
I didn't expect this expansion to be that long but it really doesn't have a long enough runtime to do anything interesting with the setting. I wasn't expecting a 10 hour campaign but I finished the episode in under 3 hours, and 30 minutes of that were spent in the beginning segment with no combat. If it was longer, you could’ve had more time to let the player build up their arsenal, since money is so scarce that you might have just enough for two upgrades by the end of the episode.
I thought the story was more intriguing than the base game since it felt more self contained, though it's obviously connected to how the base game ends, which I think hampers the storytelling if a player plays it not fully understanding what happened with all the multiverse shenanigans.
The ending boss like I mentioned above is really lame, I think if they fully committed to resource scarcity and dialed back the power of tears this could've been a really tense boss fight, give Old Man Winter more unique effect, and address the weapon switching. It's a shame to me since there's a lot of potential in the idea of a Bioshock game that has a heavy emphasis on resource scarcity, and leaning more into the lite-immersive sim elements the original had could've let this episode really shine. Let the player throw things, make stealth viable, let the player lean around corners, give tears more of a utility role rather than combat. Like the original campaign, it suffers from being indecisive, and I hope Episode 2 commits to a design and sticks to it.