Story:(There are going to be major spoilers in this review if you have not played Bioshock infinite or burial at sea I would recommend not reading this) Their is a lot to cover when it comes to story on this DLC so lets dive right in shall we? so basically the story starts out with Elizabeth asking Booker about a girl named sally she is looking for, this is basically the main plot there is a lot more to go into in the ending which i will mention later in my review.
Presentation: Unlike Bioshock Infinite's main overworld Columbia we are placed back in rapture like the first two Bioshock's, however this is before all the splicers and just the start of the little sisters and whats to come later, I'll be honest I never played the original Bioshock all the way through so while I think Rapture is pretty cool I honestly wish this was Columbia but I guess it was necessary since this DLC is tying the story's together, Rapture is still awesome and it was pretty cool to see its past and know what happened to it. the soundtrack is pretty good nothing too special but still pretty good, the presentation as a whole is just kind of alright for me.
Gameplay: It's your standard Bioshock gameplay, you got your guns, your vigors, and it's basically played out like any other bioshock game before, it, look I'll admit that bioshock infinite doesn't have a whole lot of depth to it's gameplay, and I can understand that infinite really isn't about that, and Burial At Sea adds more attentions to this problem, the guns in this one our very limited, you got a pistol, a shotgun,and a machine gun their really isn't much of anything else, while this is definitely a shortcoming I do have to admit that they actually let you keep all these weapons instead of just two of them like in infinite, but again this is a bit shallow and not much variety with weapons. If you thought the weapons didn't have much variety, the vigor's will give you even more of a shock, I believe their our only four vigor's you can use two which you start out with and our from infinite, and two new ones which you would think would be exciting but our not because their absolute garbage and not even close to worth using! The gameplay is pretty much the same as infinite but stripped down to its bare bones, making the gameplay very tawdry,and not very special at that.
(Spoiler Alert) So Booker and Elizabeth's big plan to get sally out of an air vent system would be to shut all of the vents except for one and turn the heat up to flush her out of their it brings her to the vent and Booker trys to pull Sally out of the vent to find out to his dismay that she is a little sister, the big daddy intervenes and after you defeat it you find out what this is all about. If you remember at the end of Bioshock Infinite's last cutscence every Elizabeth disappeared except for one of them well it turns out that their was still one comstock left meaning that their was also one Elizabeth left. So basically in this universe Comstock tried to take Anna from Booker but this time Anna payed the price of it, because instead of losing her pinky to the portal she lost her head(pretty brutal huh) after seeing this Comstock was feeling guilty so to get rid of his guilt he went back into a reality where Anna never existed and try's to even erase his life as Booker Dewitt,. After this is revealed the big daddy that you thought you destroyed gets up and kills Comstock. This is basically the end of the episode, the storys not bad but I didn't feel like this was completely necessary to go into, and I think most of it suffers from having to be split into two episodes, since some more of it's plot is shared in episode two, I think it would have been just better if they combined both the episodes and left it at that. The story's not anything too special but as we transition into episode two it gets better.
Overall Burial At Sea Episode one isn't bad DLC it just isn't Infinite, their just isn't enough time to really get a chance to get to know it that well and I think that's its biggest problem, I would still say that this is worth getting though even though it is a bit on the expensive side.