Probably Not The Killer App You Hoped For But Still One Of The Best In The Industry
2007 was an amazing year for the games industry with an insane amount of top tier titles to pick from, the original Bioshock was amongst those. In fact Bioshock stood above the competition and even six years later remains one of the best games money can buy on the Xbox 360, PS3 or PC. I don’t need to explain what made it great, if you’re reading this review then I assume you have an interest in Bioshock and have already played it by now. If not, then would you kindly go and do so.
Bioshock Infinite is the third entry in the series although it isn’t your typical sequel, it’s actually not even a sequel at all as the game takes place before the events of Bioshock. Calling Bioshock Infinite a sequel is a bit of a dirty word as much has changed this time round, if Bioshock 2 left you wanting for something more unique and fresh then Bioshock Infinite should have you covered. I prefer to refer to it as a game within the Bioshock universe, it has it’s own identity and isn’t trying to compete with past games but rather add to them.
You play as Booker Dewitt in Columbia 1912, a disgraced former agent of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency who meets a young girl by the name of Elizabeth. The plot is one of those “does not make sense until the end” types so going too much into detail would only serve to ruin the surprise for our readers and I wouldn’t want that. What I can tell you is that Bioshock Infinite is interesting throughout, you’ll always be intrigued to find out what happens next and it’s likely the main reason you won’t want to stop playing until you see the whole thing through.
The first couple of hours in Bioshock Infinite are some of the best I’ve had this entire generation, it intentionally starts off slow allowing the player to take in all the amazing work the artists at Irrational Games have put into 1912 Columbia. It’s extremely rich in detail and never feels like any one section of it’s design has been overlooked, I spent ages simply exploring at my own pace checking out the signs, the architecture and general behaviour of the NPCs. Many games claim to have a “living, breathing world” but in Bioshock Infinite I actually felt it, easily the highlight of Bioshock Infinite as a whole.
It’s not all about sight seeing and exploring in Bioshock Infinite, the opening hours also serve as an exemplary example of how to handle pacing. It’s an extremely delicately put together opening with a perfect mix of action coupled with slower yet still interesting moments that keep you hooked until you reach the middle portion of the game. Once you reach what feels like the half way point, that’s when the game starts to become less appealing giving players a nasty sense of “yeah, this is totally the boring part”. Without giving too much away, lets just say that most forms of entertainment suffer when they put the “main narrative” on hold in order to tell a “side story”. The game starts to pick up towards the end although it never manages to reach the standards set by the first few hours, be on the lookout for a rather annoying and poorly designed “command deck” area. It’s the usual designer thought of “Okay so you made it this far, well okay screw you now, you’re not finishing this any time soon”.
Bioshock Infinite is a first person shooter but fans know that in reality it’s much more than just your usual generic first person shooter. That’s not to suggest that Bioshock Infinite isn’t familiar as a pistol, shotgun and RPG can be found throughout the game though it’s the Vigor abilities that help it stand out from the other shooters on the market. For reasons not all that well explained, Booker DeWitt is able to drink a bottle containing a certain substance that grants him various new power ups to help him deal with his enemies in a number of different ways rather than just go full on Rambo during every encounter.
Vigors are supposed to be an integral part of Bioshock Infinite and yet I couldn’t tell you that any of them came across as particularly inventive or cool. Despite having access to seven different types of Vigor attacks, I pretty much just used the Shock Jockey to stun my enemies in place whilst I fired away madly. You’re able to attack enemies with crows, turn them against each other and throw fireballs yet the game never encouraged me to make creative use of my abilities. Without a real purpose, these new abilities are just there as a different way to tackle to situation and therefore are not all that exciting whenever a new one is discovered. I played through the game on normal and generally got by just fine barely using anything beyond the Shock Jockey, it feels like the Vigor attacks are there because that’s what you’d expect from a Bioshock game.
The two new selling points for Bioshock Infinite are the sky-line rails and Elizabeth’s tear ability, both of which are perhaps the game’s biggest let downs. The former when seen in video form looks extremely impressive, it’s essentially a roller-coaster but unfortunately roller-coasters are best experienced when control is taken away from you. The basic concept works fine, look at up a railing and hit jump to have Booker perform a super leap to begin riding the rail. Problems arise when you’re not using the rails as a means of travel but rather as part of the combat, unlike the Vigors which are a little useless yet well integrated into the combat, the rail rising aspect of Bioshock Infinite does not fit into the combat quite as smoothly, if at all.
Cast your minds back to 2007 and some of you will remember a quality game by the name of Metroid Prime 3, it featured a similar “floating city” concept along with rails you could ride on. Bioshock Infinite fails where that game succeeded because it tries to do too much, you can jump betweens rails, shoot enemies, change direction, adjust speed or even do a leaping attack. It would all generally work fairly well but the sky-line rails in Bioshock Infinite are simply way too fast for anyone to be truly in control of the action. Even worse is that jumping off the rail onto solid ground isn’t easy, you have to find the “sweet spot” in order for the button prompt to even show up.
Looking around whilst riding the sky-line is handled by the right analog stick but jumping off the rail also requires the use of your right thumb to push the face button. It’s not very intuitive to furiously be switching between analog stick and button, as mentioned the sky-lines are generally pretty fast and the sweet spot to jump off at is pretty specific causing a major disconnect between the two in the heat of a battle when everyone is firing at you. The transition between ground and rail riding should be a lot more seamless than it actually is.
Bioshock Infinite is generally a mechanically sound game, there isn’t much to complain about when it comes to controls but the sky-line rails are sadly the exception. My advice to all future players is to simply leave the rail riding to travel purposes, yes it looks very cool in the trailers but in reality it’s a clumsy mess. Rail riding worked superbly in Metroid Prime 3 because it kept everything simple, it knew it’s limitations and played to them not to mention a Wii remote offers far more precision than an analog stick. Rail riding was always going to be an issue when you consider the nature of analog sticks and their acceleration speeds but I’d like to think that there’s a more elegant way of handling it than what Bioshock Infinite currently offers.
The second part of what I would assume is another potential selling point for the game is in regards to Elizabeth’s tearing ability. This concept has genius written all over it with the potential being essentially infinite (excuse the pun), sadly it’s a massive missed opportunity. The way tearing works is quiet simple, Elizabeth has the power to rip a hole through time and space that lets her bring objects into the current world, it could be used as portal to time jump to another era essentially.
Take a moment to think about how amazing this could all be…
Instead Bioshock Infinite plays it safe and never really does anything interesting with it, all Elizabeth does is bring in a small structure that can be used for cover, bring in weapon, turret or ammo supplies. It’s not not bad per say but I was hoping for something more exciting than this, how about Elizabeth creates a tear in which we visit dinosaurs for a minute, what about finishing off a boss by bringing in a moving train from the future? It feels like the developers had a perfect excuse to create all sorts of interesting moments that otherwise wouldn’t fit into the game but opted to only occasionally do something cool when the story demanded it.
Since it feels like I’m just hating on the game by now let’s focus on what could be considered a negative or a positive depending on what type of player you are. There’s no real way of putting this nicely so let’s just get on with it, Bioshock Infinite assumes you are an idiot who has never played a game a before. It’s a victim of some of the trends we’ve come to expect from “modern gaming” and whilst it means well, the changes Bioshock Infinite makes just end up hurting some of what made it special in the first place.
Going back to what I said, Bioshock Infinite thinks you’re an idiot and you don’t need to look any further than the way-point system. Pressing UP on the D-Pad will cause an arrow to appear on the ground telling you where to go, they even got rid of the map system so you won’t dare attempt try to explore these environments. It’s a big of a slap in the face to all the artists who worked hard to create worlds dripping with detail, Bioshock is the only series outside Metroid that I actually enjoyed exploring. There was always a random item or some loot to reward my curiosity but these days it’s all about pushing forward, god forbid a player actually get stuck for more than 45 seconds.
Elizabeth who acts as your partner through most of Bioshock Infinite feels like she and the whole tearing mechanic were designed to further aid the player. During combat Elizabeth is constantly opening up tears to provide you with ammo, health or salt for your Vigors. You don’t even have to go get any of that stuff, just press the button prompt and she throws them directly at your hand no matter where you are. Forget reloading after she hands you some ammo, by the time it’s in your hands, the weapon is automatically reloaded with no animation needed. She also opens small locks, brings you back whenever you die, in fact I think the only thing missing here is a “FOLLOW” icon on her head.
Further holding your hand throughout the course of the game is the ever popular regenerating health, well there’s two bars this time round. The yellow bar represents the regenerative health whilst the red is the classic non regenerative health so it’s the same system seen back in the original Halo. Ultimately they’re both the same as Elizabeth basically gives you health 70% of the time you need it, I didn’t even bother buying health ONCE from the vending machine as a result. The game has also lost it’s weapon wheel and instead we get the two weapon system, gee thanks a lot Irrational, not even the box art managed to survive this “modern gaming” butchering.
So they made the game more “casual”, the tearing isn’t as awesome as it could be and the sky-line rail riding is clunky. I bet you’re all thinking I hate the game but far from it, Bioshock Infinite has many great things going for it that manage to overshadow the bad aspects for the most part. For starters did I mention that this is a gorgeous game?
What was once a technical showcase in 2007 isn’t nearly as impressive in 2013 but it doesn’t matter as Bioshock Infinite’s visuals are still remarkable thanks to the fantastic art design. You’ll see countless other games that look “better” than Bioshock Infinite but few are likely to leave the impression this game does. Gone are the dark colours of Rapture which are now replaced with brightly lit environments that are not scared to abuse bloom lighting. The rest of the lighting is rather well done, particularly once the game ditches the bright colours in favour of something darker as it helps set the tone just nicely. The weird option of “unlocking the framerate” returns which disables the v-sync in order to provide a higher than usual framerate at the expense of horrible screen tearing, definitely keep that v-sync ON.
As mentioned earlier on the environments in Bioshock Infinite are just as great as they’ve ever been, nothing in the world ever feels bland or copy/pasted in order to make a deadline. Some horrible textures aside, Bioshock Infinite is the type of game you’ll want to explore even if the game is obsessed with making sure you never get lost. Elizabeth herself is a good example of how the game has gone for a more “cartoon” like approach with it’s visuals than the original Bioshock but it works. It’s not the best looking game on the market but the art style more than makes up for it.
The sound design in Bioshock Infinite is also worthy of praise, voice acting is great with Courtnee Draper who plays Elizabeth turning in a believable performance. Troy Baker is the one doing Booker Dewitt and also turns in a good performance but his role feels a little more like the developers were looking for something along the lines of a 1912 Nathan Drake. Music is normally kept to a minimum but when it does appear, it does a good job at joining the visuals in creating the mood and tone the developers are looking to set at any given time.
It seems rather fitting that the series that convinced to buy an Xbox 360 is going to be one of the games that closes out this generation. Bioshock was somewhat of a perfect game for it’s time, the market were ready for it and the hardware was capable of delivering the vision that Ken Levine had for the game. Bioshock Infinite has the daunting task of having to live up to the extremely high standards set by the original and for the most part it succeeds, one could say it’s every bit as good as Bioshock. If Bioshock Infinite does come up short it’s because we’re not in 2007 any more, it’s 2013 and we’ve seen some incredible things from this generation in the past six years which take away from some of the impact Bioshock Infinite could of potentially had.
Bioshock Infinite stumbles on some parts but nothing in the game is really “bad” per say, the quality level ranges from “this could of been better” to fantastic. It’s frustrating to see the game adopt some of the newer trends seen in gaming (there’s even a season pass in there) but in the grand scheme of things none of it hurts the game all that much. Forget about the score I gave the game, that’s just some stupid rating system that reviewers such as myself have to abide by. It’s silly to think six years worth of work from Ken Levine and his team at Irrational Games could be summed up with two digits. As a reviewer we sometimes focus too much on breaking down a game to it’s core carefully evaluating every aspect of it. All you readers really want is a simple yes or no answer, is it good or does it suck?
No is the answer you’re looking for, Bioshock Infinite does not suck, it’s good, in fact it’s very good and well worth your time. The kind folks at 2K games sent us a review copy of the game but I still went out and purchased my own copy on Amazon after I finished the game because I enjoyed it enough that I wanted it in my collection. Bioshock Infinite never quite reaches the genius of the original Bioshock, you won’t find anything here that’s nearly as compelling as Andrew Ryan or the iconic Big Daddy, a floating Columbia from 1912 can’t hold a candle to Rapture and the ending is a bit rubbish if like me you prefer a little more closure from your games.
There’s something many reviewers find hard to describe and it’s basically the “feeling” you get when you play something amazing, sometimes you just know you’re in for something special. Bioshock Infinite gave me that feeling during it’s opening hours, I was sat there with a grin on my face thinking “game of the year material”. The game is unable to maintain this level of quality throughout and the troubled development history of Bioshock Infinite suggests that the final product likely didn’t come out exactly as the team had originally envisioned, the awkward sky-lines being a perfect example of that . Never the less I enjoyed my time with Bioshock Infinite and you will too if your expectations are no higher than the city of Columbia is from the ground.
