Be Excellent To Each Other

So, are we at that stage where we can have a moan about this then?

Hear we go.

The world is lovely but the textures are a bit washed out when you’re close up.

Liz is nice but the rest of the characters suffer from the same problem as Bioshock: you either never see them or their actions (or barely see them) and, as such, the characterisation is poorly handled.

Now you might disagree with this as the ancillary characters and the main protagonist are fleshed out using the medium of the world itself (Comstock), the recordings (just about everyone else) or the occasional voice over a tannoy. I don’t like it though. I don’t mind the recordings per se - I just can’t understand why the people have made those recordings in the first place and shoved them in a corner of a basement. What’s wrong with bumping into the people you’re about to kill? There was no reason that we couldn’t see Slate, say, and it was a bit jarring when I did meet him cause I didn’t really have any feelings about whether to shoot his face off. In fact, I can’t remember why he was laid out on the floor when I did catch up with him? Anyway, here’s where, say, CoD’s stories do actually help build investment in the characters as there’s usually a bit where the baddie meets you and you have an event with them even if they do eventually just run off. You can hear their words clearly, there might be some rapport, you see the face, you recognise the type of person they are from their actions and how they emote. Bioshock could do with more of this.

The vigo(u)rs were actually a bit boring, right? The effect of three of them are the same: water knocks over baddies and stuns them, crows stun them on the spot, the lightning does exactly the same and buckaroo floats them where they’re, y’know, stunned. The most interesting one was possession. The one I barely used was the shield one; and thinking about it, the problem wasn’t that it wasn’t useful, it was that it was a bit bland. I like how you can catch bullets but then you return them as a, well, a ball of light? Boring. The fireball power? Well, we’ve seen that a million times before.

Plus, the combat never once allowed the proper use of the vigors as traps where you lay them on the floor and wait for someone to step into them. There were a few arena battles and only one event (in the theatre) that actually allowed you time to lay some traps up as you waited for the next wave of baddies. But even then you didn’t know where they were coming from. At least in Bioshock, you knew when you had to lay traps in anticipation of a fight. Here, not at all. Plus, you’re always moving forward through the world so you never get familiar with the areas. You revisit none of them. Plus, whilst I’m thinking about it in this large rambling text, when you do arrive at some of the arena battles the baddies are already there! So you can’t lay traps at all since as soon as you get near it’ll all kick off and you’ll just be duking it out.

Thank god for the vigor combo’s or I’d have only stuck with possession and buckaroo throughout.

Plus the enemy AI is weak. Most just charge you, some just shoot at distance, the big baddies just blast and walk towards you ever blasting. There’s little variety to keep it interesting.

And why do we have vigors? And why is Columbia riddled with ammo machines? It’s the one thing that bothered me about the consistency of vision.

And (I’m getting bored typing this out now) why are the arena’s, in the main, so bland. You fight it out in large open arena’s with little elevation or variety. There’s a couple of indoor fights that are just large rectangles with stairs either side. The best arenas are those that have the rails through them which make for some interesting battles as you jump to and from the rails to get elevation or baddies that insist on chipping away at you from a distance. MOAR please. But sadly they were too infrequent for my liking. And the enemy AI made for some uninspired battles anyway...

The very last fight on the battleship was tedious. Oh so very tedious. Song bird was too underused since if you didn’t smash the zeppelins then you got just hammered by bullets. I tried using song bird to clear areas of the decks but there was never enough time. The sniper perch right at the top was useless.

Etc etc etc.

I’m just moaning about the fighting now, right? Yeah, it’s not the best. Still, it’s not the worse either but after you’ve played Dishonoured...

... that reminds me. Dishonoured shows you how to search for meaningless tat in a more interesting way. Remind me why I’m searching bins again?

...where was I, after you’ve played Dishonoured you see how it’s possible to tell a fantastic yarn without having to resort to tired gameplay to fill out the moments when you aren’t telling your story.

Shit, one last thing, the tossing the coin shit was annoying. Sometimes it interrupted dialogue between the two characters! And not just one or two occasions either, enough that I noticed and felt the need to type these words. Why was it in there again? Yeah, throwing ammo over was ok though. She’s got very burly arms.

I’ve bored myself so I’ll just abruptly stop ty

So, it turns out the arse tube protection mission was the last actual fighting thing going on.

Ending was... interesting. A bit unconventional for games round these parts. "Aha, you were also the bad guy and now you're dead" wasn't really expecting that. More over, I wasn't expecting that to be the end.

In the interests of fairness I should say that it does get better for the second half, and the final third of the game is, in the main, pretty good - but by christ you have to wade through a lot of shit to get to it.

The story does play out well, and the setpieces toward the end are truly dramatic, although the return to Rapture is underwhelming and underused IMO, but just 'being there' again is fantastic. As I posted earlier, I 100% 'spoiled' the game by reading the Wiki plot article for the game upfront, and I honestly think it makes the game a lot BETTER if you know where it's going and why it's going there - in fact without that drive to see the story play out I doubt I'd have even finished it.

I absolutely can't forgive the save system (or lack of it), there were a couple of bits I thought 'Oh I'd rather like to do that again and try something different', but I couldn't, there were a couple of bits where I knew I'd kind of fluked my way through rather than performed well, that I wanted to try again, but I couldn't.

There was one bit where I triggered a significant event at the same time that my daughter started crying upstairs, by the time I got back downstairs it'd all played out and autosaved again, so I missed the whole fucking thing. Thanks, Ken. (IIRC it wouldn't let me pause 'cause it was already in 'autoplay' mode.)

For more detailed criticisms Ian's post here mostly nails it - viewtopic.php?p=758807#p758807

However, combat wise, the lame combo I found that was basically a 'win game' button with vigors/gear was the charge and set things on fire move. I can't remember the exact set up but it was the Charge Vigor, with a Hat piece of gear that had a 70% chance to set enemies on fire, another piece of gear that had a chance to spread the flames to other enemies, and the other pieces of gear complimented this approach (more speed, or extra stuns, and charge uses less salts, or something).

Anyway, once I'd latched onto this setup the game became borderline ridiculous, especially with all the extra salts and shields and health I had, to the extent that I could simply fucking ram into enemies (and large groups of them at that) almost with impunity. Yeah a couple of things are immune to charge but I had a maxed out shotgun that made short work of even the toughest foes.

The combat in the game was basically a bit crap from start to finish, never satisfying, frequently annoying, and then totally trivial once I'd sorted out the build outlined above - it reminded me a bit of WoW where players would latch onto a massively overpowered character build and Blizzard would have to balance the game to get rid of it, except here of course no such thing has or will happen.

I also had multiple problems with dialogue overlapping, as Ian mentioned, to the extent that characters would be talking over each other or background dialogue would take precedence over important story details, even subtitles didn't help 'cause the subs would frequently pick the 'wrong' thing to show subs for.

The guns were all mostly crap and because you can't afford to upgrade everything once you've pimped out a couple of guns you're effectively knobbling yourself if you use anything else.

TBH I've kind of forgotten a lot of the details of stuff I didn't like about this game 'cause I finished it a couple of months ago and have felt absolutely no desire whatsoever to return to it in any way, shape or form. I bought the Season Pass so I suppose I'm duty bound to at least give the DLC a try when it comes around, but unlike with Dishonored where as soon as I finished the campaign I bought the Knife of Dunwall DLC and dived straight into it - it'll be a genuine effort to install and play the Bioshock Infinite DLC. (Unless it's a lot better than the main game was.)

Final bitch? Booker and Elizabeth aren't very good characters, Elizabeth for all the fuss that was made about her is frequently little more than a clichéd useless damsel in distress who happens to be very good at finding guns and ammunition up her skirt and also flipping coins at you RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF REALLY IMPORTANT OTHER STUFF THAT'S HAPPENING. Booker I never connected with at all, he'd have worked better as a silent protagonist like Corvo in Dishonored, except then he wouldn't have been able to do the various pieces of dreary exposition he was lumbered with throughout the game.

I'd peg it at maybe 6/10, and it'd be a lot less than that but for the final third of the game which I did enjoy. Massively worse than Dishonored which is a straight 9/10 (that only drops down from a 10/10 because it goes off the boil a little bit towards the end).