Bioshock Infinite Reviewwwwwww

Alrighty! Finally remembered my damn password for this account, so I can finally add some more content to this blog. If y'all don't wanna be douches, you should help me revive this thing. If not, I'm just going to use it to ramble to myself for all eternity.

Because we all enjoy games the first piece that Ima add to this is a game review, and after this one I'm going to go back to some of the other game's I've purchased in the last year play through them, review em, and say if they're worth purchasing period. (Now that most of them are fairly cheap, if I DON'T recommend a game to be bought, it'll be pretty obvious that it fucking blows.)

Onto the review. As a fan of philosophy, history, and the bioshock series in general, I knew even before the start, that I would enjoy playing  this game. But going into this game as just another sequel, or just another political statement from Kevin Levine is not giving enough credit to the writers of Infinite. Before going into any specifics, I'll list just a general overview of SOME of the topics this game examines, and tries (mostly successfully) to weave into a solid and fantastic story. History  (specifically how we white wash and in some ways worship leaders of the past) american exceptionalism, philosophy (specifically religion, guilt, entitlement)  politics, interesting level design (and exploring the levels), theories on perspective, quantum mechanics, racial inequality, entitlement,  gratuitous violence, roller coasters,  ex-puh-loceans, annnnd flying through the sky.

The basic bioshock game play is still here. Your first weapon is the "wrench" (granted it's a magnet spinning, arm fan blade...thing) and you get plasmids which are called tonics. You can upgrade your health, and your adam (called salts) the three big additions to combat are the amount of weapon types (quite a few more than the first or second) you get a "shield" that can break and recharge, and of course there's Elizabeth who will help you in a variety of ways.

The amount of times this game had been pushed back was enough to  piss me off quite frequently (ask Rob) and the developers seemed to set the intro of the game as a way to tell fans that everything would be okay. It opens with your character Booker DeWitt in a rocking boat on a  stormy sea (of emotion) with two other shady characters who just don't care that you're there. Then through the fog you see that lovely light arc of a lighthouse in the distance, and nostalgia floods over you. Zoom forward about 5 minutes (or if you're me, about 45 minutes of exploring every square inch of a fairly small lighthouse) and you get into a bathysphere (it's a rocket but...yeah) and you get to Columbia! A beautiful floating America. As a console gamer I rarely care about graphics and in all honesty I think they are entirely secondary to the ya know...actual game play... But I cannot stress enough how pretty this city looks. Oh, it IS a city by the way. It's not Rapture, there are children running around and lots of white peeps talking about how much they hate the irish.

Anyways in order for this "review" to not be about 45 pages long, I'm going to try and fast forward through the rest of this bitch fairly quickly. Okay, at heart this game is an escort game. You go to the tower, rescue the princess, and then try to escape Columbia. And on that note I'm going to point out one of the few things that I honestly consider a negative about this whollleeee experience. Roughly...45% through the game it starts to get bogged down with Mario syndrome. You go to one area, find out Elizabeth (the princess) isn't there, and then you have to back track a bit, and she's not there either, then there's a water level and you have to wrestle with flying squids.. Honestly if there where flying squids I think this wouldn't have been quite as big of a problem. Within 2 hours you've seen virtually all of the enemies there are in the game, and while you eventually get more ways to kill these enemies, it can still feel deliberately murky for no other reason than to force the player to not beat the game sooner. And the odd thing is the fact that at no point was it necessary for me to NEED to slow down. The world is so big and so fun to walk around in that more often than not I wanted to just run around and explore people's shops. See what would happen if I tried to steal from a cash register, or took some kid's ice cream, or possessed a random citizen. Overall that is a small issue, but..still. Stop that shit developers.
However, this is BY FAR the best escort game I've ever played. Liz can throw you ammunition, health, salts, and eventually open rips in reality to pull through random items that can either help you kill peeps, or simply hinder your opponents. As far as your opponents go by the way, Infinite has more combat than 1 or 2. You wont have a small encounter with a lone splicer, helllll no. You eventually end up going against two different sects of people that want to riddle you with their patriotism. Getting back to Liz though, I'll be honest and say that at first I hated how often she would  "find" money. I'd be busy sitting in a stall listening to people talk about the whether and she would suddenly and cheerfully inform me that she found some money. Which would require me to walk back out to her, press x, wait for the animation to finish, then go continue my spelunking. Later on in the game, you lose her. And you will miss her something awful. The fact that you can occasionally feel immortal and have pockets with more bullets than china has people, is entirely thanks to this NPC. When she's gone you devolve to what you actually are, a lone person in the middle of a civil war on a floating city that slowly gets immolated in the middle of a hurricane (yes, it looks amazing.)
She is also fantastically well written, having spent her entire life in a tower and having no contact with any living creature other than a flying big daddy. She will interact with random shit in the world in a similar way that I did. "oh, that looks neat, let me go look at it for an hour" and she'll comment whenever she finds something you could use. The only thing mildly annoying by her commenting on this shit, is occasionally she'll get your attention to come back from whatever you where doing to eat a hotdog with her. Overall, it's refreshing to see a game do escorts well, even more so to have a female character that doesn't entirely NEED the tough intense male to save her. (I played this game, and am writing this review with my girlfriend hovering over my shoulder so...I had to put that in here but it was nice!)

In terms of backstory, there's a civil war about to break up between rabid republicans and nasty liberals that need to get a job instead of bitching about having to work for 13 hours straight for 20 cents a day. At first it is easy to pick sides in this conflict, until bullets start flying and it becomes obvious that both sides are in it for themselves. Around the time you meet the leader of Vox Populi (or occupy wallstreet) the game introduces the ability to travel to parrallel universes. What would happen if a weapon maker wasn't killed by the Founders (Tea Party) in an attempt to keep his guns from being given to the Vox? Unfortunately this is a feature that isn't really explored as well as it maybe should have been. You never get to CHOOSE to hop worlds, it's all done through the main story. This is also one of my other problems with the game, there are virtually no choices you can make that changes the story. There aren't any little sisters to save, or giant plasmid stuffed geniuses floating in a tank to scramble, the "choices" are neat, but generally superficial and simply aesthetic.
Case in point: somewhat soon after you team up with Elizabeth you come across an obvious ambush, and you can choose to either pull your gun and kill everyone, or demand your tram tickets. On my first play through I chose to pull my gun thinking ya know..I'd rather not die. However after liberating the enemies with my freedom rounds, Elizabeth ran away screaming I was a murderer. After 5 minutes of explaining yourself to her, she agrees to continue along with you.
After beating the game I decided to go back to the same level and demand my tickets. To my horror, for not deciding to pull my gun, I got stabbed in the hand, took a pretty big health loss, and STILL had to kill everyone. But clearly Elizabeth would understand that I had to defend myself (and her) right? No. No she did not. The dialogue was almost exactly the same, the only difference? The only "reward"? A blue sash around the bloody wound that to the developers credit, at least stays on your hand throughout the entire game. I would say that this is another area where the developers completely dropped the ball, when I first heard about the civil war backplot, I thought you would be able to choose which side would win. Would you choose to allow this white washed version of American exceptionalism continue even after seeing the squalor that black, irish, and jewish people had to live in? Or would you take a chance and allow the Vox Populi, however brutal, to burn away that lie and try to put something better in place? This to me was the single biggest let down of the game...there is really no morality system to it, which to the general player I'm sure no one particularly misses it, to me it felt like the game wasn't quite... Bioshock.

I feel like I'm doing more rambling than reviewing so I'm going to start bringing this to a close. Being a Bioshock game, the story is center stage and more specifically the big "twist ending" that is a hall mark is expected the entire time. And in some ways I think that is an example of why I think a player that has no experience with one or two will enjoy Infinite more than someone like me. The twist is still pretty alright, but it is no "would you kindly" moment. The characters are interesting, but there is no Andrew Ryan or Fontaine. The combat is fun, but there are only one or two new powers. Of all the "new" mechanics, the only one that doesn't feel bland is the aerial combat that I'll get more into if any of you want me to. The game's ending is more of a thud than a bang, and leaves you with more questions than answers. However there are three planned DLCs, and there isn't any multiplayer to suck them up, so there is hope that we'll be able to revisit Columbia, and hopefully make some lasting choices.

Overall I gotta give this game a 4 out of 5. While Infinite will arguably be one of my favorite games on this generation, I have to be a bit harsh in the grading because I KNOW the developer can do better. That being said, this is a game that every gamer that enjoys story NEEDS to own, and even if you're not all that big on story, buy the fucking thing to convince developers it's worth making games that are different from the CoD clones.

I know this thing is pretty jumbled, but the point was to try and revive this blog more than actually writing a review. I hope y'all enjoyed it, and if you have any questions please ask.

Post review addition: After playing through some of the later levels hunting for the last audio diary I need to have allll of them,  what I also realized is that some of the more interesting things this game has to offer only show up in the last 1-3 hours of game play, and are only there for maybe 30 minutes all together. Case in point would be the boys of silence (the weird looking dudes with the odd helmet) without spoiling too much.... They're very interesting enemies that did not have anywhere near enough screen time as they should have. Looking back at some of the early demos of the game, it's also pretty apparent that a lot of Elizabeth's abilities where taken out of the finished game at some point. I sincerely hope that both of these things are added in the coming DLC, and if they are...it might boost Infinite to my favorite in the series.