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I was writing this up this morning under a THC haze and got a little too tired to finish it and I may just wait until after a third before I really want to nail these down into a more compressed thought stream, but...man, if nothing else this is a fun game to write about. I haven't felt like writing how I feel about a game in a long, long time.
(Please note that I write for/to people who have already had the experience, and while this won't be spoiler-ridden I don't try to be coy about anything, either. Being that this is a story-heavy experience, this text should be avoided if you're looking for general thoughts.)
Disclaimers on disclaimers on disclaimers: This is the only Bioshock I've played to completion. I now own the entire series, thanks to Bioshock 2 having been offered for free to Playstation Plus members and the original Bioshock coming along with this new one, but I hadn't played much more than an hour of either. A good deal of trepidation was owed to my general distaste for the First-Person Shooter genre...hard as it might be to believe, either Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare or Killzone 2 was my last FPS experience. Hell, I hadn't even seen the much-hyped E3 trailers until sometime this month - that's how tuned out of the gaming conversation I was before I came across Giantbomb. Essentially, a lot of the cultural connotations folks bring to this game don't exist for me.
Bioshock Infinite was sold to me mostly on its own merits. I loved the look of the art, I loved the ambition of the in-game culture and after seeing the ambition of those trailers (more on those later) I was certain at the very least I would be more in awe of Ken Levine's new world than anything I'd experienced since probably Grand Theft Auto IV. And for a large part of the game, that was certainly all I needed to marathon through the game in a pair of sessions that totaled between 10 and 16 hours if I had to guess. From a purely artistic perspective, the world of Columbia is a fascinating place. If you watch the Quick Look on the site they'll reveal what's likely the game's most transfixing environment/oil painting - the Fraternal Order of the Raven's tribute to John Wilkes Booth's assassination of Abraham Lincoln, complete with Devil Abe Lincoln - but my first playthrough was consistently filled with sensory curiosity.
From a gameplay perspective, my signature moment came at the climax of the first Songbird interactive cutscene, when you leap out of the airship onto a sky-line as the Princess' Tower crumbles and that intense, drum-filled soundtrack kicks in. For a moment, you may as well be Tom Cruise suspended from wires in front a green screen, there's that same sort of sensory rush that just doesn't get old. The sky-lines in general provide an intriguing element to combat, particularly a pair of fights before boarding Lady Comstock's airship that consist of several tiers and tears. Zooming up and down four or five stories of floating architecture while Elizabeth is warping in turrets, salts and weapons is just ludicrous enough that I'd become grateful Irrational Games had created a world in which all of this seemed fair game.
How they do that is apparently quite a Bioshock thing, so I'm not sure how it'd go over for people who've already rode the ride. But those first 12 or whatever hours I was totally down for loot-addiction; give me any excuse Ken Levine could find for me to stumble upon some more weird art, a new Voxophone (major props to the sound guys on these, by the way), Infusion or gear, I was in. I think that if you were to just play through this game as a cinematic experience interrupted by the occasional combat sequence, this game could possibly take half the time it does. Even with so much scrounging, I'd missed about 20 voxophones and never known telescopes were part of the same trophy as the kinetoscopes. If you're a looter, this game's got the looting.
I'm not sure I was ever quite able to reconcile my lack of training in the FPS genre as its evolved through this generation, sadly. During my second playthrough it would become less of a problem, but the first time around I played so much of the game constantly worried that Vigors were a scarce commodity that I never realized the benefits of traps, or Vigor combos, or even just switching Vigors in and out of the rotation on the fly. As the game became more and more difficult this became very frustrating for someone like me who's used to playing games exactly that inventively in series like inFamous and the Arkham games; I would just see the gun and think the gun.
As the game rounded into it's final third and became essentially all about warfare, I constantly found myself being snuck up on, and the game's lone pair of boss battles are possibly two of the worst tropes in all of boss-dom which were done no favors by my relative futility. The first is against a ghostly foe that flies around the arena (there is a moment in this game where most of the combat begins to take place in what feel like Create-A-Rooms for modern shooters; how you respond to that might say a lot about what you're looking for in video games) summoning minions that are merely distractions as you try to focus fire on an over-buffed nuisance. In and of itself this one fight isn't so bad, it's more the fact it's one of those introductory battles where you realize the next hour of gameplay is going to be dedicated to taking this thing down. The second is a defense mission disguised as an epic showdown, an idea resting on the oft-proven wrong idea that there's any excitement or fun to be gleaned from a defenseless object with a health bar being berated by tunnel-vision A.I.
I'm not going to talk much about the story because that's it's own discussion separate from the game, but I will say that it's possible to spend all of the first playthrough confused about what's going on. The Voxophones tell considerable chunks of the story, and while you could go back to relisten or read helpful transcripts, the game's momentum (even with all the riff raff dumpster diving I got up to) doesn't really foster that mentality. Likewise, the menu offers helpful information about how much you've upgraded your weaponry, what Gear you've collected (this is also, as some friends never came to learn, where you equip them) and some other things but due to the game's constantly intriguing happenings out in the game world I may have pressed the select button less than six times during my time with the game.
How a lot of this game floats through your head turns out to quite possibly be very intentional, though. In a sense the way Bioshock Infinite wraps up allows for a lot of little quibbles to be written off - I'd liken it to MF DOOM's supervillain gimmick, in which it's hard to criticize a man who actively considers himself an antagonist. I don't get any sense that Ken Levine sees himself that way but he's certainly created a game that can and will treat its player that way. There is something very interesting to me about an artist that wraps up their creation with an admission that it was just some silly fun in the end. It's definitely "in" right now to make a game that feels like a commentary on its own lineage, but this is about as bonkers a way to do it.
It's the second time around, when Bioshock Infinite becomes nothing but a game forever more, when the dream falls apart in some unfortunate ways. As it turns out, it's not as easy to get excited about rifling through trashcans for bananas, caramel boxes for machine gun ammo and barrels for cash the second time around. The process isn't exactly avoidable, either: without a New Game Plus option, the cost of weapon and vigor upgrades remains frustratingly restrictive. By tying these upgrades to such a scarce resource that's also used to restock ammo, salts and health in a pinch is just a little too sloppy for a game that initially feels so fully realized. Unless I'm just terrible at shooting games, it's disappointing that this game's difficulty ladder seems unfairly daunting for someone who'd rather play this game at the pace that the mainline story implies.
The illusion of Columbia also becomes much less impressive the second time you buckle in. There's a very carnivalesque quality to the process, a feeling first person games have always been good for in my experience but it's amplified here by just how enjoyable the first few hours are. Without any threat of combat, you're free to roam around as a stranger and soak in how intensely creative the Irrational Games people are. But when you realize that whole sequence is essentially an animatronic tour of a city that essentially doesn't exist, it becomes more like an excuse for some early cash/XP-hoarding and podcast listening, by voxophone or otherwise. It's still a great triumph, but considering a lot of the game becomes warzones and forts by the middle point that whole "original" Columbia experience feels like a bit of a novelty.
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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." © Jay Bilas
"I don't read pages of rap lyrics, I listen to rap music." © Bombastic
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