SPOILERS INSIDE A good game with outstanding graphics and combat, let down by confusing story telling
There's a lot of love out there for BioShock: Infinite. The original Bioshock was, and still is, one of my favourite games of all time and I've been looking forward to Infinite for as long as I can remember. Having completed it today, after about 12 hours, I feel like the game deserves some sort of review as there's simply so many things which I want to say.
For the first hour of the game, I was completely hooked. I enjoyed the opening of the game, climbing the lighthouse, the mystery and intrigue surrounding Bookers past and the first glimpse of Columbia. Upon entering the city and viewing the skyline, I was absolutely enthralled. The graphics are simply breathtaking – I was running the game in high detail with an i3 processor and a Nvidia 460 Graphics card – and I could only imagine what the city would look like on the Ultra settings which I was too afraid to even try.
Combat, right from the start, is fantastic and this – mostly – carries on all the way through. Dying doesn't (really) cause any problems, which does make the game feel a bit easy, but the hook and skyline combat works really well. I have to admit, jumping down from a skyline and executing someone with my hook wasn't as satisfying as I imagined it to be. I found myself avoiding the hook in combat as much as I would of liked as I found it a bit weak. I did however love the hand cannon. The feel of it, and the damage it dealt was about right for me – however, I did not feel this way about any of the other guns. I experimented at the beginning with all of the different types, and didn't really find a gun that suited me. So I stuck to the hand cannon and the carbine, leveled these both up, but by then of course enemies were too strong to use any other guns so I was a bit stuck. Aside from a few battles which I felt were a bit trivial and frustrating, I did however definitely enjoy the combat. Fighting the Handymen was a real challenge and it bought a sense of satisfaction when they were downed. It was a shame there wasn't any real reward for killing them. Elizabeth in combat was also fantastic, never getting in the way and always helping out by throwing items and health. However, she was absolutely useless when trying the stealth approach. There I'd be, crouching on the floor, trying to sneak past some guards and she'd run right into the middle of them, alerting the entire vicinity and we'd have a gun fight on our hands. A little irritating.
Vigors were fun. Murder of crows is perhaps the most fun power I've used in the Bioshock series and each power was fun to experiment with. In particular, setting traps for enemies was really rewarding and the satisfaction you get when a number of enemies walk into the 3 different traps you've placed, being set on fire, electrocuted and torn apart by angry ravens was the highlight of the game for me.
We now move on to the part of the review that I really want to discuss – the story. And of course, there are spoilers so stop reading if you haven't finished the game. Wherever you go on the internet, you read about people saying how 'fantastic' Bioshock: Infinite's story is and how memorable it is. In some ways I agree with these people… but in other ways, I consider that the story might be memorable for the wrong reasons.
About halfway through the game, Elizabeth and I ventured into the Hall Of Heroes. Up until this point, I had been moving along nicely with the game. Travel to Columbia, Find Elizabeth, Escape. It all seemed pretty simple. We were looking for a vigor to start up a generator, standard stuff, and the place where it was at was in the Hall Of Heroes - Easy. That's when things started getting a bit out of hand and the story started to get away from me. Who the hell was Slate. Why was he attacking me? When I was given the choice to save his life or kill him, I felt as though I had absolutely no connection to the man, so what did I care? The problem was that Booker obviously knew him. Elizabeth obviously knew that Booker knew him. I picked up a couple of recordings of him, but was still pretty much clueless as to who he was. And this was a theme that unfortunately ran through the next 6 hours of gameplay. I had no idea why I was helping the rebels, I had no idea why Elizabeth and I were jumping through random tears into random dimensions – why would jumping through a tear that showed no weapons mean that the weapons were where we wanted them to be? What a ridiculous assumption. The only character in the entire game I cared about was Elizabeth, all of the other characters the game tried to introduce, Fink, Daisy, all seemed confusing and unmemorable, and they are not characters who I understand, or have any real desire to understand.
Put simply, the story was just too confusing for me. And it wasn't the infinite possibilities part that really got to me, it was everything that happened leading up to it. I feel as though Bioshock didn't do a good enough job in explaining what happened at any part of the game. The best part of the game for me was crossing the bridge into the snow, thinking you are going to rescue Elizabeth, only to find out she is old and has already been tortured. This to me, was the most memorable moment in the game, and it worked BECAUSE IT MADE SENSE. It didn't need confusing and irrelevant characters and pointless missions having you pretend like you were in some way involved in the war. It was a great moment with the character you were emotionally invested in and it was fantastic.
There were also moments in the story that broke my immersion from the game. We travelled to the graveyard of Elizabeths mother, but because we weren't at the 'correct' point in the game, she didn't even react when we walked up to her mothers coffin for the first time. Similiary, there were moments with convicts trapped in prison screaming for help, and neither one of our characters even paid them a sidewards glance. Some of the recordings were so important as well, Daisy revealing that she was set up for the murder of Comstocks Wife for example, and they were never even discussed between Booker and Elizabeth. I would of like to have seen more interaction between the two at some points in the game.
The ending of the game was good. Of course it was confusing, and I've seen that its already generated loads of talking about how it is possible. Why would drowning Booker in one reality change anything? How did Comstock know that a Booker from another reality would try and destroy Columbia? I also want more information as to how being baptized led to Bookers insane transformation into the racist, egotistical prophet. I'm left with too many questions, and any explanations of the ending are purely speculation. I don't think this game can be labeled a classic just because it makes you think. It has too many loose strings, and did have all the way through. Personally, I think the developers were over ambitious with the story and it didn't quite work. Although the world and the combat do somewhat make up for it.
Overall I enjoyed the game, and the story will play on my mind for the next few weeks. However, I think it could have been better. The beginning and end of the game were perfect, but the story telling in themiddle of the game could definitely of used some polish.