Vagrant Rant M o v i e s . G a m e s . M u s i c . "L i f e".

I picked up this much-hyped game a few days ago amidst a flurry of other titles. Suffice to say the other games fared a little better.

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Platform: PS3, Xbox 360, PC
Developer: Irrational Games
Rating: MA15+
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At least the case looks good.

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Well this sucks.

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I have waited for Bioshock Infinite to arrive on store shelves for a very long time. It was announced years ago and as the third in an incredibly revered series of games, I wasn’t alone in expecting big things. But now that I’ve played it, I barely think it’s worth wasting words on. In fact, you can skip the review if you want; just please don’t buy this game.

THE SET-UP

Bioshock Infinite is set in 1912, which is its first problem. Because none of the developers were alive in 1912, they were very likely to get things wrong. For example, you play most of the game in a floating city called Columbia. Now I’m no historian, but I’m pretty sure that we still haven’t invented the technology to make entire cities float in 2013, let alone 101 years ago. This is a real problem because an unrealistic setting makes it hard for players to believe what they’re playing. Anyway, you play as a guy named Booker, which I think is one of the stupidest names in gaming history, and you have to save some girl named Elizabeth who is called the “lamb” by many people in the game for some reason. She has superpowers, which is cool, except nearly everyone else in Columbia also has superpowers called vigors, which makes her less cool.

WHAT YOU DO

The game is a first person shooter, which is good because it means that you can shoot guns and Bioshock Inifnite‘s guns feel surprisingly powerful for supposedly old technology. I suppose this is unrealistic and it does make things feel a bit too easy sometimes but it does make some bits more fun. You don’t just shoot guns in the game though. You also use those things called vigors that I just mentioned. These are like superpowers that come in bottles that you can drink to change what power you are currently using. It’s definitely cool to use some of these powers but some of them just aren’t as powerful or accurate as just using guns, while others seem like ripoffs of the powers from the first Bioshock, which I never played, but that doens’t change how obvious this is. For example, in this game you can shoot crows from your hand, which isn’t all that different from shooting bees in the first game.

I’m not going to lie, I couldn’t even be bothered to capture screens from this game.

Speaking of the first Bioshock, that game was known for being really atmospheric and scary, but Infinite isn’t either of those things. The bulk of the game’s opening consists of literally walking through a carnival, with blue skies above. Even when you go indoors, building interiors look normal and mundane. Compared to the first game, which was apparently claustrophobic and oppressive in atmosphere, a stroll in the park doesn’t quite cut it. When you can’t even count on a Bioshock game to be scary, what can you count on?

WHAT YOU SEE

I played the game on PS3, which is supposed to be a powerful console with good graphics. But playing Bioshock Infinite didn’t exactly wow me with good graphics, which is a problem in this day and age. Whenever I thought I had to read something to make sense of the nonsensical story (and forcing people to read while playing games isn’t the best idea in the first place), the text was so blurry and not high definition that the game even provided subtitles on the screen. Subtitles. For text. That should tell you something. Also, I’ve seen how the game looks on PC, and it looks really good, so I don’t understand how a PS3, which is supposed to be a powerful console with good graphics, can’t also make the game look good.

This is probably from the PC version of the game.

This isn’t even as big of a problem as the game’s story, which is not only confusing and looks like it’s going nowhere (I’ve only played an hour of the game and I can tell you that’s already too much jibberish for me to take), but the game has no cutscenes whatsoever. None at all. You spend literally the entire game in the first person viewpoint of Booker. I don’t know how game developers expect to tell a good story without even using one cutscene. It makes even less sense than the story itself.

WHAT YOU HEAR

The music in Bioshock Infinite is horrible. The tunes the developers decided to put into the game are all really crackly and hard to make out. In the modern era, having songs which you can barely hear, let alone enjoy, is a big mistake in my opinion. Throughout all the game time that I’ve played through, I did not hear one bass drop, which took me by surprise as I thought modern games had realised by now that people want to hear dubstep while they’re playing games. Also, the really cool song from the recent trailer? Not even in the game. The score is okay I guess, but when you can’t even put the song from your game’s trailer into the game itself, you’ve taken a pretty big misstep.

I would have to stay standing like this to hear this guy.

The characters in Bioshock Infinite talk a lot, which is annoying enough in itself, but when there are no cutscenes to tell the story it means you have to listen closely to people in order to even have a chance of understanding what’s going on. If you hear characters talking when you’re near them and then decide to turn and walk even a little bit, just so you don’t die of boredom from standing in one place doing nothing, the voices become muffled and distant. That’s right, the game punishes you for trying to actually do stuff while you’re playing it.

WILL YOU GO BACK?

If you enjoy playing baby games for babies, maybe Bioshock Infinite will keep you interested long enough to keep playing through it. But I can tell you for sure that I’ve only played an hour of the game and that’s all I’ll ever need. I know Bioshock Infinite is a really disappointing game that could have been so much better, but it just does too many confusing things that seem to make no sense. I’m done with this game and I’m going back to Call of Duty.
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THE VERDICT

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Good: You can shoot things with cool guns
Bad: Complete lack of cutscenes, unoriginal powers, too much talking, unrealistic setting, story makes no sense, not scary, no good music, too easy
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D I S G U S T I N G