FROM BIOSHOCK CAME THE REBIRTH OF THE FIRST-PERSON SHOOTER, AS DEVELOPERS BEGAN TO TAKE GREATER PRIDE IN INTERACTIVE STORYTELLING. NOW, IRRATIONAL IS BACK TO CHANGE EVERYTHING ONCE AGAIN...
Announced in late 2010, it’s been a long wait for BioShock Infinite, but finally the fruits of Irrational Games’ labours are about to be released for sampling, and Play sat down to experience a morsel. It’s been a long hard road, but where we’re going, we don’t need roads. BioShock Infinite starts off familiar enough. Though it’s not quite as explosive as the first few moments of the original, there are parallels. Your character finds himself being escorted by two unnamed comrades in fetching yellow parkas, in the middle of a raging sea. You’re handed a box, and immediately your character grunts ‘What’s this?’ Your character’s name is on the front. You’re not some unnamed unfortunate anymore like you were in the original; your character is his own man. A man by the name of Booker DeWitt.
A former agent, it’s clear from the contents of the box that he’s on some kind of mission. A pistol, a picture of a missing woman, and a host of other scraps indicate that Booker’s about to have a hard time of things. A giant lighthouse looms into view. Now we’re in familiar territory, a familiar nod to the BioShock faithful. The pair leave Booker by the lighthouse and row off into the briny abyss, leaving him on his own. The first thing he does upon entering the building is gaze at his reflection in
a bowl of water. Not only does he have a name, but his own face too. It’s highly doubtful he’ll be coerced into lodging a golf club into someone’s cranium at this stage.
He explores the lighthouse some more, rings some bells which herald a chorus of terrifying apocalyptic lights and horns in response, before being beckoned into a chair. After a tentative few moments, the chair straps him in and things start to go haywire. DeWitt starts losing it completely, the fear taking him over as he struggles and yelps. He loses his pistol (don’t worry he’ll find another later on), and he sees rocket engines starting up below him. A few minutes later, he’s somewhere very very new, with stunning skylines and airships (again, it’s all incredibly reminiscent of seeing Rapture through the Bathysphere for the first time), introducing him and us to an entirely new world.
It’d be hard to top the opener of the original BioShock. After all, it was a graphical revelation at the time, an introduction dripping (see what we did there?) with atmosphere and the promise of a completely new type of experience.
Infinite doesn’t evoke the same ‘Oh my god’ factor, but it at least ensures you’re not about to miss Rapture. Columbia, the cloud city that’ll be your new playground for an undisclosed number of hours, is a far cry from the broken down, libertarian utopia gone wrong of BioShock. For one thing, it’s still thriving, and there are no splicers out to carve you up. Not initially anyway. It’s all incredibly pleasant, a population living a serene, communal existence among the clouds. However, no one buys
BioShock games for the chat, and it’s not long before things are going belly up. It all starts when Booker takes part in a carnival show, presided over by a chap with a similar look and charisma to Daniel Day Lewis’ Bill the Butcher character from Gangs Of New York.
Booker’s tasked with throwing a ball at a couple of slaves, instantly dispelling the idyllic atmosphere of the town. You can choose whether to target the slaves, or chuck one in the face of Daniel Day Lewis’ doppelganger. Choice will once again play a huge part in BioShock, although how big a part it
plays remains to be seen. Once you finally get to let rip with the combat, it’s immediately apparent that it’s a whole heap better than the original. For all the good it did, BioShock’s combat felt like an afterthought, lacking impact and feeling altogether quite woolly.
Infinite’s weapons are more entertaining to use, and it’s a lot more fun mowing down allcomers with a meaty shotgun than the outlandish, slightly rubbish weapons of the first game. It’s immediately apparent too, just how much more violent Infinite is. The first two BioShock games had some devastating weaponry, but you never felt they did sufficient enough damage to the splicers. Yes they’d die, but they’d just flop around after being administered the coup de grace. Infinite ups the ante with popping heads and dismemberment. Though gore doesn’t make a game (and there’s an option to turn it off, in case any sensitive souls are watching), it’s nice to see for once that the damage meted out in a BioShock game has an appropriate aesthetic response. An early kill with the skyhook
– Booker’s melee weapon and means of transport – sees him brutally lopping the head off some poor sod likely just doing his job.
It’s a new thing for BioShock, and one that’ll have people fond of copious head detonations (these things are important to some) salivating but one thing that isn’t new is the use of ‘vigors’ which we all knew as plasmids in BioShock. It wouldn’t be an Irrational game without some entertaining unnatural way of turning the tide, and Infinite delivers. They work the same way as plasmids, triggered by the left bumper, exploding, killing and manipulating in a litany of entertaining ways. You pick up a fire one pretty early, along with a hacking one, so there’s no more tedious art deco pipemania in order to get a machine to do your bidding. In a later segment, you could even fire crows at people, which is wildly entertaining for some reason, and makes you feel like a Metal Gear
Solid boss.
It’s only in a later section that’s set a few hours later, where we see just how much more dynamic the game is than its predecessors. By this time you’ve met up with Elizabeth, the woman you were tasked with saving in the first place, and she’s right by you all the way. Yes we hear you groaning ‘Oh no,
not a bloody escort mission’, but wait! Elizabeth is from the same school of companionship as Farah (for all the foetuses out there she was in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, before Ubisoft seemingly forgot about that franchise), and isn’t an annoyance at all. In fact she’s pretty bloody essential to your
survival.
She can’t be killed, so you don’t have to worry about her like you did with the little sisters, and you’d be absolutely buggered without her, quite frankly. Elizabeth’s talents lie in creating rips in space/time, enabling her to phase in and out of reality so to speak, meaning she won’t get lost, and can follow DeWitt closely even when he’s speeding along on a sky-line. More importantly though, when you’re low on ammo (and this’ll happen, especially when you’re going up against a handyman, the Infinite
variation of the Big Daddy) she’ll phase out for a bit and return with supplies and replenishments.
What a nice lady. It’s during this later segment when we see just how much better Irrational are at combat than it was. In earlier BioShock games, there was always lingering dread about the next fracas, and not in a survival horror ‘Argh what’s around the next corner’ way. Each time you heard a Big Daddy stomping along, or a gaggle of splicers talking bollocks a palpable sense of ennui washed over you, as you realised you were about to spend the next few minutes in a fight trying to get to grips with some shonky-feeling weaponry. Not so in Infinite. You’re immediately more agile and handy with a weapon, especially in conjunction with Elizabeth. The big winner for you though is the use of the skyhook in conjunction with the sky-lines, and it adds a new level of excitement and depth to an already improved experience.
If things get hairy on one level, or Booker finds himself ambushed by a turret-spewing airship, he can leap off the edge (there’s no penalty for leaping off the edge and falling, as you’re immediately phased back into the action) connect with a skyline, and zoom off to another platform for a better chance at managing the situation. It’s a fun way to get the drop on your unsuspecting quarry, and it helps the game feel as frantic and exciting as the best shooters in the genre. In fact, the traversal feels
more like something from Crysis 2 than the original BioShock. That’s not to say that Crysis 2 is one of the best shooters around but the fact that a BioShock game can compare to a top tier firstperson
shooter in the first place surely speaks volumes.
You’ll need the extra mobility, as the Handymen are a lot more agile than the lunkheaded Big Daddies of yore. They’re incredibly fast, and can use the skylines too, meaning you’re constantly on your toes while you’re throwing everything in your arsenal at them, as you pray Elizabeth’ll make do on her promise to bring more ammunition.
The one handyman encountered was tough, but fair. With the Big Daddies there really wasn’t a lot of tension fighting them, owing to the fact that even after death and resurrection in the Vita Chamber, their health was still depleted from your last encounter, meaning you could constantly bash a Big Daddy with a spanner and die repeatedly, safe in the knowledge that the great metal brute would fall by your hand, no matter how utterly ineffective that hand was.
The Handymen are infinitely more fun to fight, and after your death, it seemed like they got some of their health back too, so there’s a lot more incentive to stay alive this time around. Once the moustachioed beast was felled (and it can be revealed that Play was the first publication in the UK to take out one of the bastards, so this issue should be framed or something), the playthrough was over, giving us but a cursory glimpse of the ultra-violent delights to be found in Infinite.
It’s been a long time coming, but BioShock Infinite is definitely shaping up very well indeed. It was
fraught with rumours of a troubled development cycle, as tales of Ken Levine’s perfectionism were revealed through interviews with ex-employees and others, but as per the old axiom, ‘If you’re not going to do something right, it’s not worth doing at all.’ Irrational have taken steps to avoid the flaws of its earlier games, providing a slick, fun experience. It’s a much better game than its predecessors, and also a step forward for the developers.
Columbia is a much more vibrant, alive place than Rapture, and it’s encouraging that in these days of rampant homogenisation and everyman shooters set in muddy brown warzones, we still have developers like Irrational Games willing to craft interesting new worlds and settings. Columbia is unlike the majority of we’ve seen in a game before, though it does bring to mind Arkane Studios’ seminal Dishonored, another first person narrative adventure with a vibrant, unique art style, though they’re completely different experiences.
Most encouragingly, there’s no arbitrary, tacked-on multiplayer to dilute the game. God knows how many games have been ruined by a feature doubtless pushed forward by some clueless moneyman, greedily eyeing the Call of Duty dollar, and there were rumours Infinite would have a few features like this, but thankfully (whether it’s through intention or not being able to implement these features properly no one knows) it’s single player only. Spec Ops: The Line was the most recent victim, the
seminal, forward-thinking shooter lumbered with multiplayer components that successfully negated the narrative intentions of the single-player.
BioShock Infinite is a game to be experienced as a single-player game, perhaps with a glass of wine and a roaring fire if you’re feeling particularly sophisticated. At no point would having a disgruntled, over-privileged teenager hurling homophobic epithets over the internet add to the experience. It’s a sprawling, stimulating game, full of character and allegory, that’ll doubtless find itself party to some
pretty rapturous (hohoho) praise upon its release in March
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