Bioshock Infinte: Reviewed

by J.D. Cook

Well I finally caved in and played Bioshock Infinite. You see I was put off by all the rave reviews the game was getting. The reason for this can better be explained in an article I wrote a while back called Honest Reviews? An Exposé! Anyway I waited a bit and let the hype die down. Thanks to Red Box I was able to rent the game and beat it without purchasing it, although now that I have played through it I would gladly give my money to Irrational Games for producing such an excellent sequel to Bioshock. Yes I will erase the suspense right now the game is as fantastic as everyone says it is. I don’t even like first person shooters much and I was in love with this game. That said it does have one or two minor issues but first the good stuff!

Spoilers Here Down

The game-play worked like a dream! It really felt just like the original Bioshock as I rolled through the world except everything was streamlined and tweaked up. Vigors take the place of Plasmids as the psychokinetic weapon in the game but they handle virtually the same. Each Vigor was fun to play with and came in usefully during the game at some point. My personal favorite one was Death by Crows only because of how ridiculous it was. The Skyline adds another dimension to combat which keeps all of the battles entertaining. I made it through the battles fairly simply even if a few were challenging.

The setting of Columbia, the floating city, is every bit as striking as Rapture from Bioshock. In fact it may be more striking in some ways because of the huge vistas that are opened up in the sky. Even with the brighter setting the game still did manage to unsettle me a bit with the spooky John Wilkes Booth building. Essentially this is where a cult dedicated to worshiping Booth lives and it was at this point in the game that I decided the citizens of Columbia were truly evil and needed to be defeated! This game really did an excellent job of re-creating the look of 1912 and convincingly mixing it with a sort of Steam Punk futuristic look. It’s wonderful to play through! Oh and the music is awesome! I especially love the Lutece theme, Will the Circle Be Unbroken and the random snippets of music from other times!

My first minor complaint is that while the enemies can be challenging at times they don’t really intimidate or pose as much of a challenge as Big Daddies. The Handymen certainly can kick ass but they looked a bit silly with their giant bodies and big heads. Secondly there were no real bosses in the game. The Handymen were as close as it really got and while I didn’t mind the lack of bosses there was something awesome about coming up against the various insane denizens of Rapture who had managed to control their own turf somehow. Obviously this is a different game with a different story so you couldn’t do the same things but I wouldn’t have minded a fight against the massive Songbird before the ending of the game. Did someone say ending?!

As you may have heard the ending was a huge point of excitement for people. When you find out that Elizabeth is in fact Booker’s daughter Anna it’s mind-blowing and when you then find out that Comstock is Booker from another dimension and time it’s…well sort of confusing. Now don’t get me wrong it’s excellent and it makes perfect sense in the game but there are a few minor holes I wish the game had filled in after or before revealing that information. Booker becomes Comstock in a timeline where he accepted religion after the Battle of Wounded Knee but how did he convince the Lutece twins (in fact the same person from different dimensions) to help him after that? What made him into such a cultist nut job? In essence how the hell did Booker go from a sane fairly cynical man to a zealot of the highest order?! It can’t just be that the baptism suddenly changed everything about the character can it?! Secondly what the hell is Songbird? I want me some explanation on that one! Is he just a creation of the Lutece’s? You know what? These aren’t even complaints they are just me being a fan of the series and wanting to know more! This game is in many ways a video game version of Looper or Inception with some trans-dimensional travel thrown in and I enjoyed it so much I don’t want the story to end! I hope Irrational Games continues the story of Columbia in the future and would love to read comics, or watch movies about the subject! Great Game! Go play it and give in to the hype!

9 out of 10 Bigbluebullfrog Leaps!!!

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