Playing A Game BioShock Infinite PC

Talk about rose-colored glasses; even moreso than my recent attempt to replay Red Dead Redemption, embarking upon Booker's journey through BioShock Infinite a second time is humbling.

The first half of the game isn't any good. It's practically bad.

Infinite's gameplay mechanics hardly need to be called out, but I'll call them out anyway:

  • Randomized equipment upgrades are almost never useful;
  • All of the vigors are criminally useless;
  • Paying to upgrade vigors is futile, since you'll need to spend money on weapon upgrades if you actually want to kill anything;
  • Redundant weapons, like the Machine Gun versus the Repeater, feel like a cruel joke;
  • Replacing the hacking minigames with a lockpick item is borderline insulting;
  • You can only carry two weapons!?;
  • You can't save manually!;
  • There's no in-game map,
  • And the bulk of its sidequests require you to backtrack through entire levels.

Basically, in every way that might lead to deep, intricate, thoughtful gameplay, BioShock Infinite fails to deliver. In this, the year of our Comstock 2017, Dishonored and Wolfenstein: The New Order seem like sensible, unpretentious bitch-slaps to Infinite.

The star of BioShock Infinite is, and was always going to be, its story. And all the necessary conveyances are there from the start: audio recordings, ambient chatter, menacing voice-overs, evocative environments, banter between Booker and Elizabeth. But even here, the first half of the game somehow manages to trip over itself, by focusing on the predictably-shallow racist and classist story of Comstock versus Daisy Fitzroy. This is a plot that's interesting for 30 minutes; not for six hours.

So it's a damn good thing that the game's narrative starts to turn around, and focus on Elizabeth's sci-fi powers, around the halfway point. Because up to then, it's almost completely forgettable.

Progress: Finished the business in Comstock House.

Rating: Meh