izigame.me

The setting is the real star of the show, I could barely pay attention to the story even though dialogue is much better written than in the base game. Many games set in underwater cities, colonies or bases do very little with the setting and are made by devs not knowledgeable about the physics of air and water pressure, or other considerations of marine engineering. You can find many unhappy comments about this, by me, under the Steam pages of games like: Under the Waves, Surviving the Abyss, and Aquatico.
In Bioshock 1 the oceanic setting, ripe with potential...was merely a backdrop. In Bioshock 2 we got a brief corny looking ocean floor walk and a bathyscaphe ride. SOMA went much further, but the one and only stand-alone habitat you can enter (the sphere outside of Omicron) is smoke & mirrors. The interior is a separate map which loads when you cycle the lockout chamber.
No such smoke & mirrors in this DLC. When you're inside the buildings, there's still ocean outside. The whole map is seemingly rendered at all times. There are micro dome habitats with moon pools you may freely surface into them through, no load time, like Subnautica. The ocean floor ecosystem is much more lovingly crafted than in Bioshock 2, the scenery of the transparent tube corridors, spherical pods, buildings, etc. and the ocean is just stunning, makes me wish I lived underwater for real.
The architecture is mostly acceptable, assuming Triton is a positive or ambient pressure structure, not 1atm. It's confusingly presented; lots of spheres and cylinders, convex dome windows, all pressure resistant shapes, but then rectilinear buildings in some places with big, flat windows. I'm content it's not 1atm as it's under a lake, not in the deep sea, and log entries mention decompression sickness. All is well in that case. I noticed the tube corridors are restrained, not supported, correctly accounting for their buoyancy. The only thing I don't see is ballast weight. Minor quibble!
Overall the concept is stunningly well realized, a noteworthy achievement in Unreal Engine 4. Why set a game undersea if you don't do as much as you can, gameplay-wise, with that concept? Well finally, someone did. Kudos to the devs. I'm not yet through it and may update my review, but at the moment all it's missing is a player piloted submersible section. As a marine engineering nerd it's difficult to express how delighted this DLC has so far made me.