Bioshock Infinite

I wonder if they should have removed the ambiguity and made it explicit that the Vox are Marxist revolutions.

Mind you, that might not be enough.

Just bought and played the game last night.

It's pretty damn good.

Welp, beat the game.

Good god, that ending sucked.

As you say. It's one of my favorite endings in all of gaming.

It sticks the landing better than Bioshock 1 in my opinion.

It stuck the landing, sure, but it broke both of it's legs and raptured one of it's lungs in the process.

Either way, the rest of the game was great enough for me to at least somewhat forgive it.

Edited by Risdio51 on Mar 9th 2021 at 9:43:13 AM

I have mixed feelings over it. It and Bioshock 2's ending also set a precedent that if you're a player character, you're gonna die.

I have more contempt over its ammo distribution and mechanics.

I'm less kind to Bioshock: Infinite these days. I think the story just ends up being cheap and lazy. It cribs too much from the original game and it doesn't feel clever so much as an excuse at times. Columbia could have been interesting and a cool setting in it's own right and it's just Rapture with a new aesthetic. And the side characters and antagonists aren't particularly interesting or compelling.

I remember the audio logs in Bioshock 1 and getting a sense of the life in Rapture that lead to it's downfall and the horror of a woman going from talking about her boring office job to the New Years Eve attack.

I never felt that way about anything in Columbia.

A comical exchange on a Reddit thread I needed to share.

I bear Bioshock Infinite again. It’s easily the weakest game in the series and honestly feels more like a spiritual successor to the original than a sequel. Bioshock 2 is still my favorite of the trilogy and its sad to see how the game ignores Bioshock 2 (“There’s always a man, there’s always a lighthouse, there’s always a city” doesn’t apply to 2). The gameplay is fun but strips away many of the options the first game and especially 2 gave you, forces you to upgrade every weapon individually despite having a limited loadout, and the levels are linear until near the end. I also prefer Rapture to Columbia.

The ending was okay for me because Booker did some truly evil things.

But the Rapture DLC had an EVIL ending.

This is good timing. I was just in a topic on another site about games that aged poorly and BI being the first example listed. And boy did it age poorly. I remember it was praised for its anti-racism messages and for the fact that you fight slave-owners. This was quickly found to be surface level though and the "both sides" theme aged like milk. Along with Levine defending Gina Carano a few years ago the whole thing is awkward on retrospect. Burial at Sea didn't make it any better either.

Gameplay-wise the corridor action gameplay was also forgotten about much faster than the more atmospheric, exploration style gameplay of the 1st two games. I too think 2 was very underrated. The gameplay was a good improvement over 1 and there were so many options you could do to lay traps for splicers in the Little Sister defense segments. The one major flaw 2 had was the lucklustre story compared to 1 but I think Minerva's Den makes up for it a lot which unfortunately a lot of the detractors apparently haven't played.

I think it's less detractors have never considered it and more, well, it's ultimately DLC. There's only so much DLC can make up for in a game, even if it's in of itself good. Especially if said DLC is sub-10 hours on a 60+ hour base game (Not saying BS 2 is 60 hours, just hyperbole).

I think the only thing Infinite really has going for it is a fantastic visual feast of an underdeveloped setting and two amazing leads played by actors who can sell the material and a fun side-pair of characters also wonderfully acted and that's it.

It's a cake that looks really pretty and you can get some flavor out of, but you always can't help but think "Wouldn't this be better if we had x inbetween the layers? Or a jelly filling?". What if... What if... What if...?

For me, that jelly would be an ammo system that wasn't so overly generous and the option to say "no" when Elizabeth wanted to give you something.

If they'd cut the whole section with Lady Comstock, removed the Luteces bringing you stuff, kept Elizabeth's powers being detrimental toward her health, and removed the part about getting guns for Fitzroy that made little sense...

...well then you'd have to remove several parts of Infinite for me to look back on it fondly.

I finally got around to playing this game last year. I was a big fan of the two first ones, and I enjoyed Infinite too, though I'm not quite sure where I would rank it compared to the others.

On the plus side, the setting is still delightfully weird and the relationship with Elisabeth is well done (and I liked her character Elisabeth). Conversely, I miss the choices from the first games, and even the various minigames.

One point I'm not quite sure I like or not is the fact that you need to hunt down the recordings if you want to understand the full story - and even then, there a few points that are left to the player's imagination (like how reviving works).

The fights are not the most memorable part of the game, but then again it's not why I have played either Bioshock (though the self-imposed challenge of not upsetting Elisabeth too much was fun).

On the whole, I liked the game, and I certainly intend to the play the DLCs at some point.

Hardly what I call a challenge when the game gives you so much ammo to use, why would anyone use melee executions in the first place?

Actually I was trying to use the Possession Vigor as much as I could instead.

I finally played through Burial at Sea and it's extremely sloppy from a story perspective. There are many very obvious plot holes and it damages the lore for Bioshock 1. It's also hurt by being DLC, meaning assets and gameplay concepts from the base game were reused despite them being a massive retcon (it is especially ludicrous that the sky rails and drinkable plasmids were never so much as mentioned in 1 or 2). Gameplay was good in Part 1, but Part 2's stealth was a tedious downgrade from Booker. It was really saved by the character interactions and Elizabeth's arc, which were quite strong. It was the base game's best strength in terms of story after all. Overall the DLC was just ok and a definite step back from Minerva's Den. Infinite in general is a step back from 2, so I'm not surprised. I might go into detail about plot holes in the future.

Edited by TheLivingDrawing on Feb 3rd 2024 at 5:00:44 AM

I didn't mind the stealth focus on Part 2. Bigger pet peeve of mine for the game is the absolute abundance of ammo in Columbia, rendering the act of looting containers unsatisfactory (you could easily cap out on certain ammo types without even trying, with the Vox Repeater being the biggest offender). By comparison, the Burial at Sea chapters' ammo amounts were far more reasonable and gave me more dopamine when I got the ammo that was actually needed. I liked the combat of 1 the most, a shame it was so short.

While I enjoyed the storytelling aspects of Burial At Sea Part 1, I despised how they treated Elizabeth in Part 2. A female character who is presented as incredibly strong is reduced to stealth gameplay, depowers herself essentially out of guilt, and then gets beaten up by evil men as part of some kind of penance arc.

I don't mind the retcons to Rapture so much, but I also hate what they did to Fitzroy. Instead of acting of her own volition, she's made into a puppet of the Luteces to drive Elizabeth's character development.

Part 2 reads like a whimpering apology for daring to create such a cosmically powerful character, so she had to be torn down in the most horrific way possible.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 5th 2024 at 10:25:06 AM

Burial at Sea did the monumentous task of undermining both Bioshock 1 and Infinite’s main game.

Elizabeth being reduced to stealth gameplay since she spent most of her life locked in a tower and isn't as strong as Booker, an ex-soldier, at least makes sense. Her losing her powers is an ass pull. I like how they explained vigors as just being plasmids, with no mention of how ADAM is addictive in the base game.

They rendered the entire story pointless and everything Booker sacrificed for Elizabeth is undone.

Obviously, Elizabeth isn't a tanky character and I wouldn't expect her to mow down Big Daddies with the crank gun. But it is rather convenient how well that narrative justification lines up with the "girls do stealth and guys do brute force" stereotype, no?

There's nothing wrong with stealth gameplay in and of itself, and I did enjoy the DLC from a mechanical perspective... well, kind of. Getting murdered repeatedly because I messed up the stealth and there's fuck all you can do once cornered wasn't terribly fun. It's just weird how the guys never got the "see people through walls" or "turn invisible" plasmids.

All of those things pale in comparison to the fact that it was horrid to play from an emotional perspective. I didn't get off on seeing Elizabeth constantly get captured and beaten up. Maybe someone does, and if so, more power to them, but jeez... The DLC is fucking sadistic.

And yeah, it makes everything that she and Booker struggled to achieve in the base game meaningless.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 3rd 2024 at 12:33:01 PM