A great game but definitely not perfect.
Below is a transcript of a video review I did for Bioshock Infinite which can be found here - TickleGames
Hello everyone and welcome to the first DoubleTime review and today the honour has been given to Irrationals recent magnum opus, Bioshock infinite. I never really cared for the original Bioshock, it bored me on so many levels and apparently that was all that some people needed to want to hang me from a tree as a tribute to the gods and I ignored the sequel that apparently we don't talk about for some reason, that reason being that it was a pile of tits and not even the good kind that we all enjoy. So infinite comes around and I think why the fuck not let's give it a bash, I wasn't looking for something to change my mind about the series in general but maybe this could still be a great game and I could have some fun and not have wasted my money...You are booker Dewitt and have been tasked with going to the floating city of Columbia to assumedly steal some girl named Elizabeth in order to wipe away your debts.
So let's get this part out of the way, the game is fantastic. The environments are stunning to look at, genuinely stunning and even if it did give my ageing graphics card a bit of a shunt that doesn't mean you need a titanic supercomputer to run this.
Comlumbia as a city is quite well constructed in my opinion, there's plenty of characters populating most of the environments but this only really shines in the large market style hubs where there's plenty of independent NPCS doing their own thing and having conversations about the weather and the inferior race because yes this game has a lot of racism in it but oddly enough it's nothing that makes you go "oh fucking hell that's bad".
If walking isn't your thing then he skylines have you covered, they're a lot of fun to ride around on and add a new level to combat and the excessive exploration that you'll be doing pretty much from the get go. The sound design and voice acting are insanely good and I don't feel like I've been able to say that about a game like this for a long time and the sound track is a great compliment to the 1912 atmosphere. There's even some nods to modern songs and in one case it's sung by a bloody barbershop quartet on a floating barge the smug stripy fucks.
You'll spend the majority of the game moving from area to area relieving the population of their possessions and eating every hotdog and half empty tin of beans you find, making you some kind of pirate/Snorlax combo and if that's not your bag of fun then there's always hour after hour of gun play to occupy your brain whilst you fight off hoards of random faceless guys, mechanized George Washington's and old guys trapped in mechanized body suits with their giant glowing hearts on display.
I want to talk about the characters quickly because this is an example of a game with some really bloody good ones, 3 to be exact. Elizabeth is one of the best characters I've ever seen in a video game and not just because she's easy on the eyes. She actively or rather conveniently finds you ammo health salts and money whilst you plod along tearing corpses apart for more of the same. Originally this game was pitched to me as Bioshock the escort quest and whilst there's a huge glaring nugget of truth in that it's not as bad as you'd expect considering she can't die and requires absolutely no looking after whatsoever which is great because if you did have to keep her alive you'd snap the disk in two very quickly which is somewhat redundant in this digital age we live in but I digress. I found myself liking Booker even if his standard reaction was to listen to everything around him then respond with a slightly amused huh, and finally the Luteces, the dapper teleporting duo.
Now now I'm not one to overlook things I consider to be issues no matter how big or small and this game is no exception, I don't like any game that gets so many perfect scores, perfection shouldn't be dished out so readily, it should be something you strive to achieve and more often than not fail at. The combat is bland and unintuitive, the powers or Vigors you have access to aren't particularly interesting and the guns are boring, rifle pistol explodey shooter thing all in slightly varied forms just don't make the combat fun and even after upgrading them all they still felt incredibly weak. There's nowhere near enough use of the skyline mechanic and the random bits of gear you pick up are often useless, the first ones I picked up were the ones I used for the entire game because they seemed like the obvious choice. I also don't think the game was varied enough, you move from area to area either stealing everything or killing everything, it's like Skyrim all over again with less horrific flying bastards although there is one of those. I'd have liked to see some more secondary objectives, as far as I'm aware there were only 3 of the cipher codes to find and they weren't really a challenge in any way shape or form so you just end up going from objective to objective looting the world in-between.
It's certainly not a bad game in any way and I'd definitely play it again but to call it perfect is complete lunacy. It's not perfect, it's closer than a lot of games recently but that doesn't mean it's there yet.
