Bioshock Infinite review

Bioshock Infinite opens with a single instruction: “Bring us the girl and wipe away the debt.” That’s all the encouragement protagonist Booker DeWitt needs to board a rocket bound for Columbia, a floating city ruled by self-proclaimed prophet Zachary Comstock.

As Booker’s quest begins, players get to experience Columbia at its peak – the city feels alive as buildings float through the sky and its citizens go about their daily lives. Whereas Bioshock’s Rapture was a decaying shadow of its former self, Infinite paints a much more vivid picture of what Columbia’s creators were trying to achieve.

Comstock’s influence can be seen everywhere throughout Columbia

Your target is Elizabeth – a girl with the ability to prise open ‘tears’ in space and time – who is imprisoned in a tower overlooking the city. As soon as you free Elizabeth, the city begins to succumb to a nightmarish class war between the ruling classes and the workers – who have been treated like slaves in order to keep Columbia running smoothly. Infinite deals with some dark themes, including religious indoctrination and racial segregation, but all are handled with the greatest of care and are crucial to the story; it’s a testament to the game’s creators that it manages to pull this off without coming across as clichéd or deliberately controversial.

Understanding Elizabeth is the key to following Infinite’s labyrinthine plot. Once liberated, she accompanies you through the majority of the game, but hides plenty of secrets – most notably, why she was imprisoned and why a giant mechanical bird has been tasked with keeping her locked up in Columbia’s walls. Her naïve innocence is refreshing, a perfect counterpoint to Booker’s grizzled war veteran. By helping you scavenge for health, weapons and money when exploring, and picking locks to let you access hidden areas, she certainly comes in handy, but it’s during combat that she proves her worth.

Vigors mix up combat, and are crucial on the harder difficulty levels

By opening tears to provide cover and extra weapons, or activate sentry guns and environmental obstacles to help you fight your enemies, Elizabeth adds a new dynamic element to Bioshock’s familiar guns-and-superpowers gameplay. She never gets in your way and doesn’t need to be healed, so you never feel like you’re babysitting an unruly AI.

Of course, you’re well equipped to deal with Columbia’s many dangers yourself. Infinite has a much larger arsenal than previous games, designed to let you take full advantage of the large, multi-tiered levels. If you prefer to stay out of sight and pick off your targets one by one, the carbine and sniper rifles will be your pin-point accurate best friends. Fans of explosives will love the RPG and grenade-spewing Volley Gun, while the hand cannon and shotgun are on hand for getting up close and personal. Each weapon can be upgraded using scavenged currency, adding extra damage, bigger magazines or faster reload times to make you even more deadly.

The mechanised Patriots are a force to be reckoned with, although they don’t have the same impact as Bioshock’s Big Daddies

Vigors, which are Bioshock’s Plasmids by any other name, mix things up further. As well as setting traps for unsuspecting enemies, you can also send them flying with a burst of energy, pull them towards you for a quick melee strike, or send a murder of crows to distract them while you find a better line of sight. Despite sounding varied, though, many of the vigors have largely similar effects.

Infinite is much more combat-focused than the original Bioshock – you spend much of the game fighting either Columbia’s police force or the Vox Populi revolutionaries, but occasionally Columbia’s mechanised Patriot soldiers and towering Handymen make an appearance. Neither have the same impact as your first run-in with a Big Daddy, but they suit the setting and prove quite the challenge in a fire fight. You’ll need to take advantage of Skylines, interconnecting rails that join buildings together, to get the advantage – it can feel like a roller coaster at first, but you’ll soon be using them to switch between platforms, get to higher ground and retreat when low on health.

Elizabeth’s abilities are central to the plot, but also come in handy during gameplay

Columbia itself is beautifully realised, with gorgeous lighting effects and a signature art style that has to be seen in motion to be truly appreciated. We could run it on maximum details on a modest gaming PC – the ‘god ray; sun shaft effects look fantastic when surveying the city’s expansive vistas, and are well worth turning on.

As well as seeing it first hand, much of Columbia’s backstory is told through the ‘Voxophone’ recordings hidden throughout each level. Although you don’t need them to complete the game, they flesh out a huge amount of the story so we would recommend grabbing as many as you can on your first play through, rather than saving them for a second. Expect something like ten hours of gameplay if you’re in a hurry, but more if you take the time to explore each area and find all the hidden items.

Skylines let you travel between platforms, but also provide an advantage in combat

When you do reach Infinite’s conclusion, you’re in for a treat – if the “Would you Kindly” moment that unravels towards the final third of the original Bioshock had you surprised, be prepared to lift your jaw off the floor when Columbia’s puzzle pieces all come together. It’s one of the finest bits of storytelling we’ve ever experienced in a game, and one that will see you jump straight back in for a second playthrough.

Despite our praises for the plot, the game isn’t perfect. Although Plasmids made sense in the context of Andrew Ryan’s Rapture, the presence of Vigors in Columbia never felt truly explained. The signature Skyline rails are somewhat underused too; looking back at Infinite’s original E3 gameplay trailer, they appear to have been scaled down significantly and only come into play in a few key battles. There’s also a point about two-thirds in, where you have to open three story-related tears before proceeding, which felt like unnecessary padding, but we’re prepared to overlook it purely because it meant spending that little bit more time exploring Columbia’s streets.

The beautifully realised city, incredibly emotive characters and simply stunning plot don’t just make Bioshock Infinite a worthy sequel – it excels the original and takes the genre onto a whole new level. It’s a masterpiece of storytelling, which everyone should experience.