Late to the Party – Bioshock Infinite

After way too much time, I finally got around to play Bioshock Infinite by Irrational Games. Sorry, but I was about 8 years late to the party. Today, I’m hence talking about Bioshock Infinite and about how I liked the game after having played through it in about 15 hours. This doesn’t include the DLCs… since I don’t own the DLCs, I can’t play those, obviously… and I also can’t get the achievements for those but I got most for Infinite and 31/80 total (36%), which is honestly quite nice. This is not a review btw. Hence, there will be spoilers. I won’t spoil the end of the game or anything like that but I’ll get into some stuff… so a mild spoiler warning.

So, I basically started up Bioshock Infinite and loved it from the getgo: Instead of fighting mad scientists, their experiments and drug addicts, you fight police officers, soldiers, religious fanatics, white supremacists, anarchists, and robots. Bioshock Infinite really stepped it up and went into a whole new direction, I believe, which is nice. Instead of damp and dark areas, you have a lot of lights and colour open spaces that connect to other places, filled with secrets and life. You play as Booker Devitt who has to find a girl and bring her to his employee to get rid of his debt. The girl in question, Elizabeth, is trapped inside of a tower to protect her. She is the Lamb, Father Comstock is the Prophet, and you’re the False Shepherd, or so the people say. Hence, people are hunting after you. You can help the Vox Populi who are against the oppression by Comstock and his religious cult. There are other characters as well that help you or that don’t… and again, there seem to be choices.

Bioshock always had choices in there to a degree… In the case of Bioshock Infinite, you can choose between heads or tail, the bird and the cage, killing or sparing. It gives you the idea that you have a choice but more often not it’s such a minor change if any change at all, resulting in you not really having many endings or anything like that. You play the game and the game ends eventually. Apparently, I’ll have to play Burial at Sea Episode 1 and 2 to make sense of the story… but I don’t have the funds right now to buy those… Oh wait, never mind, someone just gifted me both of those DLC. How kind of them. What the fuck? Anyways, I’ll have to talk about the DLC eventually as well once I get to play them… and I’ll talk about Bioshock Infinite’s story now, essentially. I mean, the story was nice with a bunch of twists and it made sense for the majority of the time… but eventually, they just added pseudo-science to the mix and held it up against your face until you drowned in it. If you ever stop questioning the end of the game’s main storyline, you’ll notice that… it doesn’t make much sense. It contradicts itself in a way. It pretends to be scientific. It pretends to not have to explain shit to you after a certain point and if you pretend that much it looks pretentious eventually. I mean, it’s just the end, the game itself was fun. I played on the Hard difficulty but never felt like I’m stuck anywhere… apart from two occasions at the end. The endgame is kind of rough as you run out of ammunition quickly and as you seemingly deal no damage against the many armoured foes and as you have no choice but to suck it and see if you can somehow find a magical guide that allows you to deal with that boss or this encounter and… then you’re done with the game essentially.

Combat has been improved a lot. The game doesn’t feature a weapon selection like in Bioshock 1 and 2 where you have all weapons available to you at all times. Instead, you can carry two different weapons and just switch out what you have on the fly. Meanwhile, all the plasmids are now called vigors and only two of them can be equipped at a time as well but you can easily switch out between vigors by holding Q… which is something that I had to google because the game told me way too late that it’s possible at all, which was quite annoying. So, you basically can still use weapons and vigors (or plasmids or whatever) at the same time, like in Bioshock 2 but you only have 2 weapons at a time available to you unless you play the DLC. Bioshock Infinite features a plethora of weapons from pistols, snipers and shotguns, to hand cannons, machine guns, RPGs and salvos. There are a lot of different weapons on the side of the soldiers and on the side of the Vox Populi. You will end up helping the Vox Populi, the anarchist group I mentioned earlier, but they’ll fight you as well eventually, and so, you can use any and all weapons when you find them laying around to your advantage, which is fun. The gunplay was alright. The new plasmids were amazing. Uhm, the whole world was actually a lot of fun to explore, especially with the new vertical movement added through the skylines that you can access and from which you can execute enemies with a skydive. ALSO, the game now adds weapon and plasmid upgrades that you have to buy using Silver Eagles. The old upgrade and stat system is no more. There are no passives anymore but you can now equip gear with different effects.

Honestly, I feel like the game is a lot of fun and that the game is quite beautiful and that the game does have a great story. The ending is just a bit disappointing. I hope the DLC fixes that. On top of it all, Elizabeth is a great NPC and while we do escort her, she actually helps us out a lot by picking locks, giving us ammunition, salts (for vigors), health and coins. There is also this new shield mechanic in the game and it overall feels very much updated, even if the game is now eight years old.

I’m looking forward to playing the DLC eventually to round up the story… until then….

Cheers!

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!