Bioshock Infinite

This could get in trouble wish some of my friends, but let's take some time to talk about Bioshock Infinite.

If you're a gamer, you've undoubtedly at least HEARD of this game. It's one of the year's most highly rated and highly talked about games. And for good reason, there's a lot to talk about here. There really aren't a whole ton of games out there that command as much attention as the "-shock" series has built. The series as a whole has built a large and loving following over the years.

The game opens up extremely strong, the first hour or so is basically an introduction into world of Columbia. This introduction is incredible. The world was breathtaking and so full of life. You're flooded with all of the interesting characteristics of this magical floating 1912 city. You enjoy time during a festival where everyone seems to be enjoying themselves, but things just don't seem right for you. There are quite a few odd things happening around you and way too much to be considered coincidence. I felt like the first couple hours with bioshock really set the game up to be incredible.

                Unfortunately for me, that feeling didn't last. After learning about the world, it's beauties as well as it's horrors, the shit hit's the fan. This is, of course, expected from a first person shooter. I remember where you get your first taste of the graphic violence of the game. Now, as a gamer, I'm no stranger to graphic e-violence. The scene early on where you deal with the racism of the society, and end up dealing with the situation through extreme violence is a powerful moment. The horrible violence in stark contrast to the sheer beauty of the world hits pretty hard. That first moment of the unspeakable violence here is a shock, and I think did exactly what violence in a game should do, it shocked you. You go from saying "This place is beautiful, but it's got some pretty dark and messed up under tones" into a "hoooooly shit" moment. While I feel this part was impactful and effective, the problem is that the entire rest of the game hangs on this high level of extreme violence, it loses its impact and the effect and remains the standard for the rest of the game. Essentially turning the violence away from our initial, shocking, interaction with violence into a desensitized, excessive, and childish game of spraying as much blood everywhere as you can. I think this is where violence usually fails in video games, it's extremely powerful when proving a point, giving character depth, building the story, and a thousand other uses, but when it's just constantly over the top as it is from this moment on, it loses all of its power and becomes childish.

The characters in the game are completely the opposite. They aren't obvious, in your face, and shoving the world down your throat at all. In fact, the Lutece siblings are the polar opposite of this. They speak in what seems like riddles, and continue to make you question what is really going on. From a story/character perspective, I feel like the Luteces are definitely the high point in the game for me. They were interesting, made me ask questions, really kept me moving forward through the game, and did so with a whimsical nature that only intrigued me further. The same can be said for Songbird. His first show on screen I said "oh, that's a boss for sure." But the game develops the character, exposes you to his internal struggle, his motivations, and you begin to pit the creature. In the end he even turns to your side for the final battle, only to die off in one of the better death scenes I can remember from a game. The people who designed, animated, and told the story for these characters should be applauded, as I feel these characters are responsible for the greatest achievements this game made.

Of course, we have to talk about Elizabeth. I have to admit, she really bothered me in this game. The buildup to her rescue felt good, and finally getting her on your team felt good as well. But that's where she kind of lost it for me. The game presented itself as an escort mission of sorts, to get her out. But it turned away from that pretty quickly. While I think Elizabeth was masterfully animated, written for, and performed, her interactions with the gameplay itself became really obnoxious early on. First and foremost, she's basically non-existent to the enemies in the game. She can't take any damage, and they don't even see her despite the fact that she's standing right in front of them. She runs around the battlefield picking up items and money for you, yet it's as if you're the only who can see her. It completely breaks my immersion into the game. Here's this precious girl, who I've done so much to protect, and even though everyone is out to kill me for it, nobody ever thinks to just grab her away. While the world not interacting with her is frustrating, what's worse is that she doesn't seem to have her eyes open the whole game. She'll eventually make some comments about how she doesn't like the killing, but only after you've used your skyhook to rip the faces off hundreds of enemies, none of which seemed to cause even a flinch from her. While I appreciate her desires to help in combat, I don't appreciate how generally useless she is. The rifts had a ton of potential, but they only used then for the occasional skyhook, gun, or Health packs. Not to mention it's completely uncool to have her offering a health pack or salt, then the second I'm out of combat that health pack mysteriously disappeared.

OK, on to the important stuff. Everything up to this point, I'm willing to tolerate from a video game. The story and the characters while at times annoying, oblivious, quirky, or just nonsensical, are all parts of the game and the messed up world that I'm tolerant of. After all the whole game seems to be about trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Where this game really made me feel let down is where we got into the mechanics and gameplay going on here.

Let's start with the skyhook. If you kept up even slightly with the hype and the buildup of this game, you knew about the skyhook. A fancy hook strapped to your arm that lets you ride on rails and fly around the world like an agile monkey in a forest. Except that it doesn't. The skyhook was grossly underutilized in the game. There were times where you got to jump up and grapple overhangs, or slide around for a few staged fights, but for the vast majority of the game I found myself using it as nothing more than a meat grinder. While I'm all for items having multiple uses, I wanted a lot more skyhook. I wanted to spend more time zipping around Columbia and dealing justice from the heavens. The times where you did get to use it felt so intense and powerful that I found myself wanting a lot more. Of course, much like violence, this could have easily turned into a situation where the whole game was just riding on skyhooks, which would have made the whole experience become dull, but I felt like I hardly EVER got to use the damn thing. And when I did, it was often to a fixed point to try and find some stowed away clothing crate somewhere; versus having more combat-based skyhook adventures.

Speaking of clothing, I was pretty bummed out here as well. The first hat I obtained in the game got me really excited. I liked the idea of getting some character customization out of the game. Giving me a system where I can change things up for different battles and circumstances. Unfortunately, with clothing being so rare coupled with randomly generated effects, I ended up finding an outfit and never changing it throughout the whole game. I feel like this system had a lot of potential, but when an equipping system ends up being used only 2 or 3 times early in the game, it makes the whole system seem really minor and destroys any attempt for growth from it. Sometimes I wonder if a small and simple crafting system could have been helpful. In turn, allowing me to really push my character into the direction that works with my playstyle.

On a random side note of Bioshock systems, what the hell is going on with the food here? Some give health, some gives salts, some take health for salts, etc. Yet nearly all of it is basically pointless. If you see an apple, you're going to eat it, along with everything else in the vicinity. The penalties were negligible at best, and the system feels like it's something they started to plan out, and just never bothered to finish. Given that your character has two primary resources, having restoration choices that force you to prioritize one over the other could develop into a system with some value, but that never happened here. This honestly feels forgotten about by the dev team. Not to mention that the presence of food feels somewhat pointless thanks to the presence of the shield which auto regenerates. Scrounging for health and focusing on survival wasn't even really a concern for me.

OK, back on track here. Let's look at the shield in Bioshock. The "halo-shield" has become quite the staple in FPS games in recent times. It self-regenerates when "out of combat" for a few seconds, and gives the player something of a "protective bubble" in the game. This isn't, exactly, a bad thing on its own, we've seen loads of games with this system do well, but where it gets a bit wonky is how this forces the game designers to change the game to accommodate for it. Thanks to the presence of the shield, the developers are forced to make their enemies capable of very high damage to break through it, or they need to try and set you up with ambush situations to surprise you and break through the shield. Not to mention that the breaking of the shield is way too graphically intrusive. Your whole screen goes yellow and you can't see anything for a couple of seconds. The presence of the self-regenerating shield forces the level designers into basically having stupid AI and play cheap tricks. They are forced to overwhelm the player to allow for the shield to be brought down, you're ambushed from all sides and without some system telling me where I'm being hit from I have no idea where it's coming from half the time. In the situation of enemies doing massive damage, it simply makes them feel cheap and unfair. While this isn't always a bad thing in games, the amount of damage taken should mean something. If you get hit by something that does lethal damage, you should have been able to avoid it through skill. I shouldn't walk into a room and get jumped on for my whole shield plus half of my health. This whole system essentially made it so getting hit doesn't matter half the time, and when it does it matters so much that it's grossly unfair. I remember the first automaton cannon I fought (before I had the shield) being really exciting. I had to plan out a way to deal with him with him without getting creamed, I tried changing up my positioning, attacking in bursts, paying attention to audio cues to try and catch him while reloading. It was a great experience, it felt dangerous yet manageable. After having the shield, they turned into a game of "pop out, do some damage, chill until my shield regenerates. Repeat"

This ties in to the enemy design which felt pretty lacking in bioshock infinite. Many of the enemies in the game just felt really stupid or grossly overpowered. In a world that's so intriguing and interesting, having essentially two enemy types was really disappointing. You're either being swarmed by a lot of small guys who do little more than charge at you while shooting, or your stuck with a heavy hitter who wrecks you if you get too close. The enemy behavior essentially turned me into a one-trick pony while playing through. Once you found something that worked you were never really forced outside of that comfort zone to experiment with other vigor/gun combinations. I can think of 2 maybe 3 situations in the whole game that asked more of me than to simply unload as much ammo as possible. Maybe drop a vigor here or there. These situations were the closest thing that bioshock had to boss fights and were welcome additions to the repetition of the gameplay and enemies encountered through most of the game. I really wish there had been more bosses or enemy variability.

Which leads me to the weapon system. Guns, lots of guns. I have to say, and this could fully be my fault and my fault alone, but I felt extremely limited by the ability to only equip two guns at a time. Often times I found myself completely skipping weapons because I didn't want to risk losing a weapon that I'd found to be my go-to. While this provides me with some level of choice in my weapon loadout, it also prevents me from trying out new things and really experimenting with my armory. There are guns in bioshock that I've only fired once or twice just to see how they behave. There were situations where I picked up a new gun from a safe, assumed it was very powerful due to finding it in a safe behind a lock, only to be hugely disappointed the second I got to test it in combat due to how weak it was. I feel like the vast gun variability would have worked out much better if ammo had been the limiting factor in my weapon usage instead of my ability to only hold two guns. Running out of ammo in my favorite forcing me to search for alternate ways to complete the task at hand is a great way to push people to experiment with weapons. But, due to the placement of vending machines, I never ran out of ammo. This part feels like a wasted opportunity to me, there are so many guns in bioshock, and I really wanted to play around with more of them I just never had a reason to. The  upgrades did so little for me, making them feel almost useless. While any gamer knows that stat improvements like "increased damage" are the right choice, they are seldom the most fun or interesting choices. Guns, although, or only half of the equation here, this is bioshock, so we've got to talk about vigors.

I loved the vigors in concept. In stark contrast to the weapons, vigors also had some interesting upgrades. Not all of them, but there were a few good ones in there here and there. While the whole super powers and mana bar thing is nothing new in games, bioshock didn't really force me to play with them as much as I'd have liked. It's very similar to the gun concept I talked about above. There's no real need or reason to deviate from the formula that you've grown comfortable with. You'd get a new one here and there, but they felt really formulaic as you'd acquire them, and you'd essentially be confronted with some challenge in the next few minutes that is ideally suited to your newly acquired power. After said challenge, you switch back to your comfort vigor and simply keep on keepin' on. This could have been mitigated by using per-vigor charges, essentially the same way that guns use ammo above. I feel like the presence of all of these weapons and all of these vigors begs for me to play around with different combinations, it wants me to try new things and be continually exploring my arsenal and powers in tandem with my exploration of Columbia and the story, but the game never actually asked me to do so. The trapping system was an interesting touch, but without enemies that do more than just charge straight at me, trapping didn't feel like it was ever really worth the effort. Had the game had some level of a stealth component to it, I think the trapping could have been a major boon for the vigors, but as it sits I never felt the need to play with or really use traps or vigors during the game. Which is a real shame.

 When all is said and done, I feel like bioshock is a huge game of missed opportunities. After playing through a few times I feel like the game made no real attempts to push me out of my comfort zone. The death system was far too forgiving, allowing me to zerg many situations, the weapons and vigors never pushed me into the area of ability experimentation. The shield allowed me to play recklessly and aggressively, while the enemies were predictable and formulaic. I really wanted to love this game, it's beautiful and the world had infinite potential (pun intended). Luckily, the masterfully crafted characters and story do a lot to keep the game going.