I was blown away when I first got my hands on Bioshock Infinite back in 2013. The game instantly became one of my all-time favorites and has remained in my top 10 ever since. I remember playing it again immediately after finishing it the first time, my mind had been shattered due to the challenging story that I tried to wrap my head around.
As time passed back in 2013 the hype slowly began to fade and I felt I was the only one championing the game. I thought it was a clear winner for “game of the year”, yet I was wrong. A bad game won, The Last of Us won everybody over and I was left with my Bioshock Infinite. Maybe my dislike of the Last of Us was due to me simply loving Bioshock too much and not being willing to accept anything else at the time. That might be true, but I still Hate The Last of Us so here we are.
I have recently been playing the game again and I thought it would be fun to write a bit about it and see if I still think it’s good enough to be among my favorites or if it has dropped off my favorites list. It was fun to see if I still liked this game or not.
I am the kind of guy who replays all my favorite games a lot. I have recently been playing Mass Effect legendary edition and I like it exactly as much as I did the first time, maybe even more.
How to start a game
Let’s start with the beginning, a shocking idea, I know. I still believe that Bioshock Infinite has one of the best starts to a game ever. You are dropped off by two random people who just argue all the way (we get to know them later) You only know that you have to bring a girl to someone you don’t know in order to clear a gambling debt.
You are then dropped off at a lighthouse, it’s raining and stormy, and as you enter you see a little note on the door saying “don’t disappoint us”. As you enter the lighthouse and make your way to the top you hear the classic American music that is prevalent in all the other Bioshock games. As you reach the top the owner of the lighthouse is sitting tied up with a bag over his head and bullet through his brain.
What I enjoy most about the journey ascending the lighthouse is that it is all in the environment, you are not told anything, yet you can piece together what happened. When you enter everything seems normal, but as you go up the stairs of the lighthouse, you see signs of a fight, you see plates on the floor shattered, you see that someone has made a mess before you find the owner dead with a hole in his head.
It might sound weird, but the beginning of the game with the lighthouse is my favorite part of the entire game, despite the lack of combat or NPC interaction. It sets the tone perfectly and sets you up for the adventure to come. As you would know on repeat playthroughs the lighthouse also serves as a major thematic part. As Elisabeth says later on:
“There is always a lighthouse, there’s always a man, there’s always a city.”
The lighthouse is an important part of the overall story. There is also something poetic about a lighthouse, isolated from everything else, yet provides light and guidance, a shiny beacon for others in the darkness.
So, that was the first 5 minutes of the game, now don’t worry, I am not going to do a chronological breakdown.
The Environment
If there is one thing the Bioshock franchise has in spades it would be atmosphere and tone. Now, the atmosphere in media is a combination of many things, it is all about how the different aspects play off each other and make for a greater whole. If one of the elements is off then the tone suffers. An example could be if the music was hardcore rock the overall atmosphere of the game would suffer since the music wouldn’t be compatible with the rest of the athletes.
Sometimes, however, you can create a juxtaposition like in the anime Kaiba where the cartoonish art style enhances the dark story by creating an eerie contrast.
While I still think the first Bioshock has a better overall atmosphere, Bioshock Infinite has a lot of things going for it. One of the things I liked, playing the game again was that the more you progress in the story the darker and more distorted it becomes. Both in terms of themes, but also in how the environment changes. As you explore different timelines things become more violent. This aspect of the story was something I did not appreciate or noticed the first time I played the game. It all culminates when Elisabeth kills Daisy Fitzroy, from that point everything spirals out of control.
To me, I prefer the beginning of the game before you help the vox. I love how you are thrust into the city. There is this strange feeling when you get baptized, it is like the city is “too clean” people talk as if something under the surface is not what it’s supposed to be. It is not explicitly more of a feeling and sure enough, everyone is religious, racist zealots who blindly follow an imposter of a prophet.
Where the first two Bioshock games used a more darkish blue color palette to represent the underwater city of Rapture, Infinite uses a more goldish color to represent the city in the sky. Exploring the city with the old American aesthetics of the 1920sh is something I really enjoy, I love the look and feel.
You can enter a store where someone is getting their shoe shined/polished, from a radio you hear the music of the time from a radio. These aspects make me feel like I have entered the past in a way. I enjoy just strolling around the city taking in everything.
The voxophones are basically recordings lying around everywhere, they also make for a great atmosphere. They tell a story on their own and they give great insight into one of the characters. My favorite being one from Rosalind Lutece.
“When I was a girl, I dreamt of standing in a room looking at a girl who was and was not myself, who stood looking at another girl, who also was and was not myself. My mother took this for a nightmare. I saw it as the beginning of a career in physics.”
The recordings also become more and more desperate and dark as you go through the game.
In this playthrough, I did stress a little since I tried to find all of them so I could get the achievement.
The guitar scene is beautiful and underrated, it comes kind of out of nowhere, it adds a simple little time to rest to take the game in.
Elizabeth
Yes, Elizabeth gets her own section.
Elizabeth is kind of amazing and to this day I still don’t feel she gets the respect she deserves. The game poses like an escort mission, you have to get Elisabeth from point A to point B however, there is no real chance of her getting caught or killed in combat since all the enemies only attack you. This works since the game is a shooter and not a stealth game. The combat is fast and furious and in the middle of it, Elizabeth will throw ammo, Salts, and healing to you, taking an active supporting role instead of just being something to transport.
She can also use lockpicking to unlock safes or locked doors for more loot. She can open tears to aid you in combat. She serves as an important ally and feels like a partner to Booker and never a burden. She also finds money for you, when you are not in combat.
She also goes through a whole arc doing the game. An arc from a prisoner in her tower to a strong independent character. She also undergoes a visual transformation. She changes her clothes, cuts her hair and her face become harder and more somber. This indicates Kavin Levin (the director of the game) knows what he is doing.
Elizabeth is also kind of important to the story as she is the center of everything. I also like her design and voice actor, call me biased if you like.
The story
It is no secret that Infinite’s story is a bit complex and hard to grasp at times. Or at least it is difficult when you first play the game, at least it was for me. The game is a multiverse story meaning there exists an infinite number of universes all slightly different from each other. The game foreshadows this, first in the title which is not intuitive but nevertheless is foreshadowing. The second time is when you start the game and you are met by this quote.
“The mind of the subject will desperately struggle to create memories where none exist…”
Basically, it means that Booker is going to fill in the blanks himself when he enters a new universe. Every time he gets a nosebleed it means he is in the wrong universe.
The first time I played the game I was blown away by the story. I started a replay the second I finished it because I wanted to get a grasp of the story. The story is not as exciting now that I know what the story is and how it works. It is fun to notice the different hints and foreshadowing and it is also a well-told story so it still feels good to experience again.
One of the biggest appeals of the story is the Lutece twins. These two are hands down one of the best characters to come out in the last 10 years. At first, they just appear whenever and wherever they please. They joke around and have a lot of funny interactions.
On replays when you know who they are and what they are about they suddenly become a lot more fascinating. I still remember being mind blown When I realized they were the ones on the boat in the beginning.
They seem omnipresent in the game going where they want, jumping with Booker and Elizabeth as they enter different worlds. They can also not be killed, you can shoot and shoot at them and nothing happens unlike any other character in the game.
Gameplay
The most important thing in a game is the gameplay, a lot of people play games for the story which is something I always found a little strange and pointless. I might expand on this point in a later post. For now, let’s talk about the gameplay.
It’s just fun. There you have it, next section.
But for real, the gunplay is super fun. The game limits you by only allowing you to carry two guns at a time, which is a bit of a bummer since I like most of the guns, but I prefer the sniper, shotgun, and hand cannon. If you wanted to, you could go through the game by only using your favorite guns. The combat is fast-paced and satisfying, enemies vary. Enemies such as Firemen, crow guys, patriots, and handymen are all part of the rogues’ gallery. By the way, I hate handymen, love their design, hate fighting them.
Vigors are fun to use as well, it’s just fun going around using superpowers to kill enemies. I do miss the frost one from the first game, but that vigor makes a comeback in the DLC.
Vigor trap can also be a way to make the game more dynamic. You can use them in different combinations for maximum effect. Different play styles suit different vigors, this time around I tried using some that I usually would not be using.
skylines are fun and dynamic addition to the game. They make for transport in the city of Colombia, but can also be used for combat and strategic purposes. They are creative and are not misplaced their inclusion makes sense in a game where you explore a city in the sky.
DLC
The game has some excellent DLC especially the two that take place in Rapture, where you really can see Rapture in its prime and not in the falling state of the first game. However, the story is a bit too convoluted and confusing. They try WAY too hard to connect the Infinite with the first game and simply does not work.
The other DLC is for combat, it is an arena-like game mode. It is fun to some extent, the gameplay is funny so I spend an hour or two playing it. There are different challenges making for variety in strategy.
Criticism
It is time to talk a little about common criticism I have and hear from other people.
One bad thing that persists is that the game is kind of too easy. Normal difficulty is simply too easy, I only died once in this playthrough. In all my other playthroughs I rarely if ever die.
The game has been criticized for being for being too linear with a big city to explore only in theory, the concept of exploring is an illusion. Well, it is true the game is not an open-world sandbox. I personally don’t find open-world games that engaging, the idea of exploring the same cave with only a slight difference in variation is too tedious.
The truth is I feel that most open-world games are just empty space, with the exploring aspect taking a backseat to simple traveling. Infinite is limited in how much it allows you to explore, but I find the way the game is designed to be perfect. The exploring comes in walking into stores and listening to different conversations throughout the city. The city is also beautiful to look at, and sometimes exploring doesn’t have to be about clearing dungeons and finding hidden levels.
The game also touches on the concept of racism and a criticism I have heard is that it needed to explore that concept some more in order to give it justice to this important and heavy topic. I personally like how it is a thing in the background.
At one point Elisabeth askes innocently why blacks and whites have to use different toilets and Booker says they just have to. Before this, if you pay attention you can actually enter a bathroom and find different things, this is nothing really special.
However, at one point you walk under where the crowd is and you enter a toilet only for blacks and you find them dirty and nasty, with a colored man cleaning. This moment hits WAY harder than if someone was to blatantly say racism is bad. I will say the whole “throw the ball at the Irish and the black” is kind of not so suddenly and probably could have been done better.
I also think it’s kind of funny the way Booker eats from trash cans when there are plenty of stores with food throughout the city, it is not technically something I find annoying or a flaw, it is just a bit funny to me.
Conclusion
Is Bioshock Infinite still among my favorite games? Well, no, At least not in my top ten. It is not because I was disappointed this time around, the reason it got booted out of the top ten is that something else simply took its place. I have simply been playing too many good games since 2013 when I first played it. I have also been pondering over which game is best Bioshock or Bioshock infinite, I am still wondering and I might make a comparison later.
The game is still solid, the gameplay is fun and I adore the characters, but when you know the story and where it is going it feels less special playing it again. I would say the same about the overall impact of the game. The replay values have expired a bit for now.
Overall, Is Bioshock Infinite still good?
Yeah, it is