As a work-study college student who isn’t allowed to live on campus because I am a super x8 senior, I am exceedingly poor, and often have to subsist on a light meal plan of freshly emerged voles, and the tears of my eternally empty wallet. This makes keeping up with the latest games somewhat difficult, because every time I think about buying a new game my brain immediately goes into a hysterical giggle fit until I pass out and wake up in statistics class.
But I have to do it for you lot because if I don’t talk about a game that came out two minutes ago I might as well be discussing the pros and cons of diverse banking management in Swahili to you.
That is why my last review was for a game that had come out in the Dark Ages of two months ago. However during a chance encounter in the fabled land of the grocery store, I spotted a lone copy of “Bioshock: Infinite” in the filth-smeared Redbox.
Comically poor as I am, my girlfriend took pity on me and threw four pennies in my direction, the remains of her whoring her art skills out to creepers online. Alas, Redbox charges by the night, and I could only afford one, and it was already late by the time I snuck back into the crawl space owned by the old woman whom I leach power and shelter off of, so I could only no-life it for a few hours.
All of that was just a setup to tell you that I only got a few hours into the game before switching it off and judging the Hell out of it based on just a sliver of its total run time. Or maybe I was only two minutes from the end of the game, who knows?
Most FPS single-player campaigns these days only last the length of a burrito-fart, so six hours of playing sounds like I was one doorway away from the end of the game anyway. Oh, and unlike other reviews that I have done, this one will have minor spoilers. This is a pretty-revelation-heavy narrative, because you can’t have a game without at least forty convoluted twists these days. I’ll try to be a good boy though.
Because this is such a “What a twist!” story I’m going to give you the bare bones setup. You are a former soldier turned private investigator named Booker Dewitt, whose massive debts have been paid off by a mysterious benefactor in exchange for Dewitt’s rescuing a young woman from the floating city of Columbia, located in the skies off the coast of Maine. That is about as general I can get without being that jerk who spoils the end of The Sixth Sense. Seriously, there should be a legal loophole that allows the murder of those kinds of people.
Anyway, I hated the character of Booker from the get go, because in a shockingly original twist, the protagonist of an FPS is a 30-something white guy with brown hair. But that just put me off him initially; it wasn’t until later on in the game I realized that he is the lowest form of scum on the planet. While this character did grow up in a more intolerant time period (1914 to be exact), I found his past-and-current racism very off-putting. And while he is shown to regret his actions at Wounded Knee, the “man with a regretted past” angle rings kind of hollow when certain in-game actions can trigger racist actions and dialogue.
And even if I were to overlook that, (and this is the mild spoiler part) Booker SOLD HIS DAUGHTER to pay off his gambling debts. As such, any empathy I might have had for the guy is buried under the vast amount of horror I feel. It is almost to the point that I want the crazy-steampunk-sky racists to kill Booker, because I was rooting for them half the time.
Fun ranting time over, now on to the back-end things! The game plays very tight, and veterans of the series shouldn’t have any problem getting comfortable. And they were kind enough to let the player customize the control scheme the way she or he wants it, which made me happy, as the default scheme was just a little off for me. Visually, the game was toe-smashingly gorgeous, walking a fine line between highly stylized cartoon, and gritty realism.
The music is haunting at times, aweing at others, and very atmospheric when you’re not slaughtering hordes of innocent police officers with your train chainsaw glove. I wish I had more space to comment on this, but we are getting to the end of this little tirade, My Loyal Minions.
Again I find myself praising an FPS for its technical achievements, while taking a dump over the story mode. If I had the faults of mortal men, I might be accused of having a bias, so we can all thank Captain Picard that I am above such petty flaws, right?
If you are a fan on the “Bioshock” franchise, give it a buy. Everyone else, give it a weekend rental. You may play as an unsympathetic bastard, but there is a certain charm in shooting steam-robot George Washington in the face with a murder of undead crows, right before you start hopping through time and space like a rejected “Sliders” episode.
Oh yeah, there is time-travel, multi-verse shenanigans in this game. Oooops, more spoilers!
