Finally got around to playing this after months of having it on the back burner and man oh man it sure was......a DLC. I feel like any way I look at this this is an immense downgrade compared to RE7's DLC, not only did RE7 have 2 DLC stories that had their own new gameplay but also had their own unique moments that could stand amongst the highest points of the base game (Chris vs mucus man Lucas and Crazy Joe Baker beating up Swamp Jack with a untested technological power gauntlet). In contrast RE8's DLC is much meeker in comparison; it only came with one DLC story and a few new characters to play as in the mercenary mode which if you like that stuff is cool for you, I do but to a certain point so really my 10 dollars was riding on whether or not Shadow of Rose would've been good enough to stand on it's own besides the base game like the past RE DLC stories.

Well...... it kinda does but I'm still kinda lukewarm on it.
First of all I wanna get this out of the way, the third person mode is honestly not that bad. For a game that was designed from the ground up to work in first person the third person mode's biggest hurdle was to not feel horribly janky and tacked on and I think they did the best way they could. It still feel janky at times and with the new perspective it makes some enemies hitboxes even harder then before (looking at you robot factory enemies >:( ) but besides those moment the third person mode did what I thought was impossible; made me forget I was playing a first person RE game, which is something I can't really say for a lot of third person modes, fan made mod or otherwise. Now as for the Shadows of Rose story itself......it's fine. Rose is a good enough protagonist and the new mechanics are decent for what this DLC wants to do, really I feel like the DLC's biggest problem is how much reused content it uses from the base game. Not only does it reuse almost the whole map of Castle Dimitrescu but it also does the Doll House segment almost beat for beat the same way; it is still the highlight of the DLC for me and the later half of the segment really started showing off some new creative ideas I wish the DLC had more of. The whole DLC reeks of cheapness which I know for a fact it's not since it's very clear the devs put a lot of work into it; but I feel like a lot of it went towards making the third person mode as clean as they could make it while everything else took secondary priority.
Doesn't really hold a candle to RE7's DLC stories and in the history of RE DLC stories it's also just kinda there, but as a short little epilogue Ethan Winter's story and the possible beginning to Rose's story it could've been worse.

Years ago I remember this game always being referred to as one of the goats of all time. But nowadays people have started saying "actually nuh uh this game is bad." So I didn't know what to expect.

I just played for the first time and it was easily my favourite Bioshock game. I never cared for the gameplay of the first two games, but I was actually having fun for the nearly-seven hours that I played this game. I enjoyed my time and couldn't stop playing. The gunplay felt a lot better, I basically used the sniper the whole time and just no-scoped people. I liked that they lowered the total amount of plasmids, but they all basically do the same thing as each other. So just like the first game, I ended up using electro the whole time and didn't feel like changing.

The story was much more compelling, I was invested. The characters were both interesting with great voice acting too. Queen Elizabeth the Third was a really good sidekick character and I enjoyed her presence (A lot better than Bioshock 2 where you just talk to Sinclair on the radio the whole game. I did not care about that guy at all). The whole ending sequence was totally rad. Rapture was an amazing setting, it's hard to top that but Columbia is also pretty awesome. The game is a nice length too.

Overall, this just felt like the first really good Bioshock game to me.