Bioshock Infinite Jest
Previously on Load Last Save, I reviewed Bioshock, a gaming classic that I don’t like. You can read the full review to find out why. A friend of mine who knows how much I disliked it told me to review Infinite, as a joke. I declined. I’ve played terrible games before, and reviewing Infinite just to rag on it sounds fun in theory, but I’d have to play the game, and that part doesn’t sound like fun at all.
I don’t know much about Bioshock Infinite other than it was disliked for not being like the other games, and being completely different than what was promised before launch. I asked him “what makes it so terrible? Did it turn into another generic first person shooter from the era with hallway levels and hitscan enemies? A call of duty lite?” and he said “something like that”. I kept giving him my predictions, and he said they were pretty spot-on.
Then I said “Sounds like I could review this thing without playing it”.
This first part will be my predictive review. Using only my limited wits and what little information I already have about the game, I’ll write a review of what I think it’s like. Just like anyone who gives their opinion on the Internet, I won’t do any research, any fact-checking or any real work. I’ll basically hallucinate an entire review. Then in the second part, I’ll give an actual review of the game after playing it, and I’ll compare both of my assessments to see if I’m a Raven Simone psychic or if I’m just a dumb fraud who shouldn’t be trusted.
The Ignorant Review
Bioshock Infinite (some release year. Probably 2011.) Is a first person shooter. You play as man, who goes to Rapture to kill people for some unknown reason. This time, Rapture is in the sky, and instead of being themed around 1950s Art Deco America, it’s 1800s colonial America. Here you’ll use a variety of weapons to take down guys with guns and save a girl named Elizabeth from something. Probably saving her from seeing all the porn made about her since the game’s release. That’s the only thing about this game that I know for sure, that the entire world is thirsty for Elizabeth.
Gameplay
This is a first person shooter from the early 2010s, so you know what that means: hallway levels, hitscan enemies, regenerating health and a two gun limit. Every level is just a glorified straight line that snakes around to give the illusion that something’s happening when it isn’t. Any time a fire fight breaks out you’re in a hallways that’s barely wide enough for you and two enemies to walk side-by-side in, with one or two bespoke pieces of cover to hide behind. This gives you little to no room to maneuver, which is okay, since the movement in this game sucks a fat one, I assume.
Your base movement speed is a brisk walk, the kind of non-hurried stride you use when window shopping at the mall. It lacks any urgency and it makes you feel woefully unprepared in a fight. You can sprint, which makes you faster for a bit at the cost of not letting you shoot. Sprinting isn’t useful in combat, it’s used mostly to move through the vast, empty wastelands called levels.
Moving around won’t do you any good since every enemy uses a hitscan weapon. A hitscan weapon is one where the bullets fired from it aren’t real projectiles. The game checks to see if the enemy has a direct line of sight to you, and if they do, they “fire” and hit you. There’s no way to dodge by moving, which makes sense in a way. You can’t outrun bullet. Contrast this with projectiles, which are a physical entity in the game that moves and you can dodge. Think of slow-moving energy balls or rockets. If you can’t dodge enemy fire, why bother moving?
Instead of avoiding damage, you’ll have to mitigate it, as is tradition in these kinds of games. You don’t have to come up with interesting enemies or put much thought into the level design when you have regenerating health. Any instance of damage that doesn’t outright kill the player is alright, and you don’t have to consider the effects of taking cumulative damage across an entire level. You don’t have to worry about placing health packs or balancing enemy encounters around a set number of hit points. Just give the player a little hole to hide in or a wall to sit behind while their health recovers and they’re good to go.
The hallway-like structure of the levels also ensures that the player can call a time out whenever and recover health. There aren’t any paths for enemies to flank you, so you can fight at your own pace. Enemies will never try to push into you or pressure you, since they have guns and would rather fight from afar.
Speaking of the enemies and guns, they’re all guys with guns. Human enemies with hitscan weapons that they shoot as soon as they see you. There might be one or two special enemies with a specific role, like a big tank guy that takes forever to kill, but 99% of the enemies will be some guy with either a pistol or a machine gun.
The big, tank enemies are the Big Daddies, or their equivalent. The Large Uncles. These giant, hulking monstrosities aren’t the passive but easily angered behemoths from the first game. These guys come out and they act like mini-bosses. Since the levels are one straight shot down the middle, you don’t have the luxury of luring them into kill boxes or into hacked turrets. You have to face them head on (apply directly to the forehead) and take them down.
The other special kind of enemy are the turrets. Much like real life cities, Sky-Rapture is packed with automated turrets around every corner. These will fire on you the instant you enter their field of vision, and they will keep you pinned down and annoyed. With the new, narrow levels, it’s very hard to go up to them and hack them, so your best bet is to disable them with the returning electric plasmid, or waste most of your ammo destroying them from afar.
The plasmids make a return, because it’s a Bioshock game, so of course they have to. They range from completely useless to overpowered. I suppose.
Along with plasmids, you have access to a variety of weapons. These include the standard pistol, an automatic weapon, a shotgun, an explosive launcher and a wacky weapon like a plasmid launcher or something. You’ll get to know two guns at a time, since carrying more than that is unrealistic and fun, and we can’t have that.
The guns aren’t very fun to fire, but they’re an improvement over the limp pea shooters in the first game. Enemies don’t really react to getting shot other than with a little plume of blood here and there, and there isn’t any real gore outside of the cutscenes or environmental story-telling corpses. You can’t blast an enemy’s head off with a shotgun, and blasting them with a grenade launcher just ragdolls their body around the arena instead of reducing them to a pile of gibs. Enemies don’t leave bloodstains on surfaces, either. This is an M-rated shooter, and it feels incredibly non-violent, as was the style at the time.
Throughout all this you’re joined by Elizabeth. She doesn’t do much in game other than press a button or pull a lever here and there and get captured. She will stop you after every fire fight and put you in an unskippable in-game cutscene where she gets uncomfortably close to the camera and talks to you about things that you may or may not care about.
Now that I brought them up, let’s stop all we’re doing and watch a little cutscene play out. Much like the first game, there will be multiple instances where you’re walking around looking at things play out in a detached way, like you’re constantly dissociating. Whether it’s behind a glass, on a far away place or on a literal stage, you’ll watch things happen without your involvement. Things sort of happen and you watch. You have a gun in your hand and you could stop it, but your character stands there gawking instead of exercising his second amendment rights.
The game’s story is an overwrought mess of cliches involving magic, time-travel and heavy-handed religious allegories and surface-level critiques of America. John Bioshock is sent to Sky-Rapture to save Elizabeth from the clutches of Sky Andrew Ryan who plans to use her special Goth Girl powers to take over Sky-Rapture and enact capitalism across the globe.
The big plot-twist this time around is that the guy you play as, John Bioshock, is a genetic copy of the guy from the first game, sent to Sky-Rapture to destroy it and prevent Sky Andrew Ryan from taking over the world. Elizabeth is a grown-up Little Sister who got magical powers from Adam instead of turning into a grey demon baby. She lived in secret until she was captured by Sky Andrew Ryan, and she sent out a psychic distress signal to John Bioshock because he has traces of Adam in his genetic code, and she mentally DM’d him his MK-Ultra activation phrase. It’s a dumb story that makes no sense.
The part near the end where John Bioshock turns into a Big Daddy and Elizabeth rides on his shoulder while he torches Sky-Rapture was kind of cool. The game kind of overdoes it by playing the entirety of the song Little Sister by Queens of the Stone Age, and Elizabeth sings along to it and John Bioshock goes “hey! This song is about you! You’re the little sister! And the shadow is Andrew Ryan, who casts the shadow of Capitalism!”. Then she replies with “The fact that this city is in the sky is an allusion to Manifest Destiny, which compares America to a shining city on a hill, which comes from Jesus’s Sermon of the Mount, but ironically this shining city isn’t so heavenly after all. It sits above the clouds in defiance of God. It floats lightly even when it’s metaphorically weighed down by the sins of our fathers. Did you know the founding fathers owned slaves?” It was out of place and weirdly anachronistic, and it spelled out the game’s themes in a way that was too obvious and preachy.
Less organized miscellaneous predictions.
I know there are ziplines or sky rails in the game. These will be used to go from point A to point B, they won’t have any real impact on the gameplay. Maybe there will be one or two arenas that have skyrails you can use. Maybe a gimmick turret section with the sky rails. They will be mostly absent or completely gone after the first two or three hours of gameplay.
The iconic pipe puzzles from Bioshock 1 will be gone. Sad, but true. The most iconic part of the game, and its enduring legacy, will be stripped from it. I will be glad they’re gone, because I hated them, but that’s a core part of the game’s identity gone. John Bioshock not being able to do pipe puzzles is like Ryu from Streets not being able to do a hadouken. Just plain tragic.
The already anemic RPG elements from the previous games will be completely gone. I wouldn’t even call the ones in the first Bioshock RPG elements, but they’ll be gone from this one. I could also see the other side of the coin where they go into them more, but it’s just allocating numbers into skills to make them stronger, like levelling up shotguns so you can do 0.5% more damage when you fire it. That sounds really dumb, and I hope it’s not in the game for the sake of my own sanity. Games from that era loved their unnecessary and ineffective skill ups.
Conclusion
I don’t think I’ll recommend Bioshock: Infinite once I play it. I’ve played enough of these early 2010’s shooters to know I won’t like it, as I stated previously. From what little I know of the game, it sounds like a streamlined, dumbed-down shooter version of Bioshock, which was an already streamlined and dumbed down shooter version of the Shock games. This is like a diet version of a diet cola. Double diet Systemshock.
This might seem like it’s in bad faith, and I don’t blame you if you think it is. Reviewing the sequel to a game I already disliked, just to rag on it, seems mean-spirited, but I will play it with an open mind. I never play games hoping to hate them. Having played more games than I should, I can predict how certain games will be, and preemptively decide if they’re going to appeal to me or not, but I always play them with the hope that it surprises me and I end up enjoying it. When I first played Wanted Dead, I was expecting a jank, clunky mess of a game. I got just that, but I also got a ton of fun out of it and ended up liking it. I played through it multiple times, even on the highest difficulty, and it was a game that honestly looked kind of bad.
I’m also doing this because I’ve had the entire Bioshock trilogy sitting in my Steam library collecting dust since 2015. I got them in a bundle for five dollars, and I haven’t touched Bioshock 2 or Infinite after playing the first one and getting disappointed. Imagine that. Eleven years in my backlog, untouched. I want to get them out of there. Probably not Bioshock 2. That one seems too similar to the first, so I know I’m going to hate it. I won’t even bother.
I will do my due dilligence and play through Bioshock Infinite. If I end up liking it or disliking it, know that I will write an overly long review of it detailing each and every reason why, as always.
Before I go play the game, I will cement my predictions in the most authoritative, official format known to man: The bingo card.
With this my thoughts are crystallized and put into an unchangeable bingo card, that is as binding as a legal contract. Now the true test will begin… can I get a bingo… or will I be ousted as an unforgivable fraud or worse… a FAKE GAMER.
Tune in next time on Load Last Save!