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BioShock Infinite Review 2013
There's a bit near the very start of BioShock Infinite where a travelling barbershop quartet rock up to a sunny promenade and serenade a young couple with a few verses from God Only Knows, torturing pleasant, extended harmonies out of every word before floating away on their own personal sky-barge to some other part of this giant, opulent city in the clouds. You can stand there and watch the scene for a few minutes in stunned disbelief: God Only Knows wasn't released until 1966.
But that's probably the point. The 1912 setting of BioShock Infinite is shot through with deliberate anachronisms, some subtle like a Beach Boys cameo, and some that will make no qualms about time-slapping your dumb jaw to the floor. There's a dreamy weirdness that permeates the city of Columbia that isn't explained in the few hours of playtime we had with BioShock Infinite. It riffs on chance, choice, fate, determinism and quantum physics. Coin tosses give improbable results, raffle tickets are called before they're drawn with Derren Brown levels of impunity. Something's very slightly wrong with how reality works in this universe, but nobody seems to notice.
It makes sense, however, that protagonist Booker Dewitt is happy to ignore this crease in reality and just carry on with things: his objective is uncomplicated and singular: he is to infiltrate Columbia, retrieve Elizabeth and hand her over to some debtors who shout at him in his flashbacks.
He'll do this by recreating BioShock's introduction in reverse: Infinite begins with Booker at sea, removing a gun and his instructions from a metal lunchbox before entering a storm-battered lighthouse. Here he collects his ticket to Columbia, activating a rocket-powered launch-pod that propels him above the cloud layer and reveals for the first time the scale and majesty of the impossible city. Columbia is a chunk of turn-of-the-century America, a statue-infested, puritanical town around which airships buzz, clouds creep and flags flutter. It's ruled by the unhinged, hyper-religious and self-appointed prophet Comstock, who promises salvation to Columbia's citizens by shouting at them through loudspeakers every day.
It makes sense, however, that protagonist Booker Dewitt is happy to ignore this crease in reality and just carry on with things: his objective is uncomplicated and singular: he is to infiltrate Columbia, retrieve Elizabeth and hand her over to some debtors who shout at him in his flashbacks.
He'll do this by recreating BioShock's introduction in reverse: Infinite begins with Booker at sea, removing a gun and his instructions from a metal lunchbox before entering a storm-battered lighthouse. Here he collects his ticket to Columbia, activating a rocket-powered launch-pod that propels him above the cloud layer and reveals for the first time the scale and majesty of the impossible city. Columbia is a chunk of turn-of-the-century America, a statue-infested, puritanical town around which airships buzz, clouds creep and flags flutter. It's ruled by the unhinged, hyper-religious and self-appointed prophet Comstock, who promises salvation to Columbia's citizens by shouting at them through loudspeakers every day.
It seems to work, Columbia has as much of a dark cultist mindset as Rapture ever had, and you're seen as just as much a disruptive and unwelcome agent, a unruly first-person cat bouncing around next to a meticulously constructed house of cards. It's Comstock who, having somehow been tipped off as to your identity, orders your immediate death without trial. Meanwhile a rebel group, the Vox Populi, forms the opposing slice of bread in the political sandwich Booker is desperately trying to avoid putting in his mouth during his mission to liberate Elizabeth.
Though caught in the middle of this conflict, Columbia is a resolutely civilised place to explore. More so than in BioShock, more so than in games likes Deus Ex and Dishonored, levels are filled with regular people going about their business, having conversations within earshot, being animated and human as best they can. Columbia isn't abandoned or ruined, it's thriving and you enter it during its heyday, where markets and fairs fill the boardwalks, promenades and gardens with well-attired and excited gentlemen and ladies.
It's a colourful, vibrant and interactive place: you can take part in games at the carnival, which are beautifully disguised tutorials for the game's shooting and magic-casting abilities. You can peer into what you'd expect to be a coin-operated peep show, but turn out to be mini-documentaries showing the foundation of the city. You can wander and absorb as much as the fiction as you care to, like a narrative ghost wandering a storybook graveyard. And you can listen to The Beach Boys. BioShock Infinite is proper virtual escapism, like the kind you hear about in the first line of news reports, when they try to snappily explain what videogames are.
I didn't like the shooting in BioShock, there was a pane of cognitive mind-glass somewhere between my mouse hand and the game's lazily clunking controls that made me feel removed from an otherwise welcoming world. It probably had something to do with mouse acceleration, it nearly always does, but BioShock Infinite doesn't suffer from this sluggishness. It's fast and snappy, your weapons crack loudly and headshots are fatal, movement is swift and sharp, enemy AI is clever enough to force you to move through combat arenas. Those rollercoaster rails that wind and arc between platforms are remarkably easy to use and, thankfully, it's either impossible or suitably difficult to murder yourself while grinding along them. Similarly, Irrational have recognised precisely how irritating it would be if falling into the clouds resulted in anything other resetting you at the position where you fell off. So don't worry about that either.
Your Vigor powers are partly carried over from the previous BioShock. You can summon flocks of crows to pester enemies, which is a lot like that time you summoned swarms of bees to pester enemies. The new Bucking Bronco Vigor jolts enemies skywards, another launches firebombs from your fist, while a more tactical minded Vigor can possess mechanical turrets, temporarily turning them friendly. Certain Vigors can also be placed as traps that activate as enemies walk over them, increasing your options and allowing you to play defensively when the odds are stacked against you.
Elizabeth follows you around too. On your instruction, she's able to open up 'tears' in space and 'pull through' objects from parallel dimensions. In practical terms that means she can make useful things appear at certain pre-defined positions in the game: she could conjure up a turret placement, or an ammo cache, or a sky-hook that you could latch on to in order to access a higher platform. She can only open up one of these tears at a time however, so choosing which ones to utilise can transform the course of a firefight.
Shawn Elliott told us about how these encounters play out later in the game, as the arenas become multi-tiered battlefields pocked with strategic strong points and populated by warring factions. Though it's Elizabeth who's opening and closing these tears, she's never unavailable in a gameplay sense: that is to say, if you give the order for a trans-dimensional turret to be pulled through a tear, it will happen instantly, no matter her position on the map, as if you'd just done it yourself. Your ally in Infinite is entirely helpful, not even an occasional liability. She even throws you ammo and health when you need it most.
You can now also find apparel to wear in a limited number of slots, with each item of clothing offering a new ability. There's a hat that makes you more accurate when shooting from skylines. There are some trousers that let you, erm, hurt people more. The early items were tame enough, but rare. I expect increasingly powerful trousers will be found later in the game.
This sine wave of violent, explosive peaks and peaceful, exploratory troughs are mutually complementary. After rescuing Elizabeth from her tower, you're hounded by the terrifying, mechanical songbird, a twenty-foot tall clockwork avian horror bound in leather skin and powered by arcane motors set behind glowing, staring eyes. It shrieks and trashes as it tries and fails to keep Elizabeth inside the tower: a pitiful monster, a dumb, misunderstood metal giant doing what it must to protect something it cares about. In its tick-tock brain, you're the bad guy. You're the worst guy.
The songbird is Infinite's Big Daddy, minus humanity, plus canary. In a frantic huff it destroys Elizabeth's tower (a monolithic, hollowed-out angel that dominates Columbia's skyline) as you escape, sending you both plunging into the water below. You wash up on an artificial beach, still aboard the floating city (which you only now realise boasts its own miniature seafront, a sandy shore whose fake ocean tumbles over a precipice and falls away into the vast blue sky beneath).
The pace of the game slows here. Elizabeth is missing, but not for long. Infinite bucks the "oh no I lost the person I'm looking for when I fell into the ocean" trope, and she can be found dancing on the nearby pier with fellow beach revellers. Her first experience of music outside of her prison perfectly frames both her childish naivety and Booker's grimly sober-faced approach to his task. That is to say, Booker don't dance. He does, if you want, explore the beach and poke around some bins while the heat's died down. Elizabeth excitedly scoots about, fascinated by the world around her and pelting the oddly stoic Booker with questions.
The locations you then travel to in pursuit of a means to escape Columbia are hugely varied: the city has room enough for sun-bleached gardens, churches with vast interiors, dark museums and foreboding catacombs. Some of the set-pieces feel recycled however: there's a sense of deja vu as you wander through a historical battle re-enactment while a disembodied voice monologues over loudspeaker. And whether deliberate or not, that Booker's backstory is a mystery to the player leads you to question his motives at certain points, creating a sort of cognitive dissonance between your actions as a player and his dialogue as a character. Again, like with the time-weirdness, and knowing how Irrational works, that's probably partially the point.
Also, while I'm thinking about it, looting cash registers and bins and listening to audio diaries isn't fun, it's weird and creepy and antiquated. Nobody has ever kept an audio diary at any point in history, they are the least believable part of your magical flying, crow-obsessed city.
Everything else is fantastic. Without wanting to slip into meaningless hyperbole, BioShock Infinite could easily be the best game Irrational's ever created: an intelligent collaboration of weird Jules Verne futurism, steampunk science-fiction, time-travelling soundtracks, magic hands and clockwork birds. It's a truly fascinating and original setting around which Irrational has built a vastly improved set of shooter mechanics and an ideal vehicle for a clever and intriguing story.
BioShock is out March 26.
Tomb Raider 2013 Review
Tomb Raider is a game about a woman who keeps standing on rotten planks of wood and falling down. It is a game about a woman who is always sliding on her bum, muddily, confidently towards her next adventure. It is a game about a woman who keeps going into rooms that are not properly affixed to the Earth, and then there is an explosion or a rumble or something, and then the room becomes unmoored and begins to lurch sideways and off the edge of a cliff or a waterfall. It is a very good game, full of exciting things to do with falling, and I like it.
In Tomb Raider you find yourself shipwrecked on a mysterious island full of mysterious tombs and mysterious cultists who’ll chase you around ancient ruins, shooting the faces off giant statues and defiling the sacred resting places of dozens of long-dead royals by chucking sticks of dynamite about. If that bit in Aladdin where the guy working on the sphinx accidentally chisels its nose off made you feel a bit sick, Tomb Raider will send you into a lurching fit of prehistorical sadness, such is the destruction wrought upon your delicate and unique surroundings. Imagine a bomb going off during a taping of Antiques Roadshow and Fiona Bruce gets blasted clear over a marquee and skewered on a branch. That is the reality of Lara Croft’s destructive archaeological efforts. That is Tomb Raider as she is played.
As well as being about wrecking tombs, Tomb Raider is also one of those games that sometimes plays itself while you sit back and watch. During certain sequences it’s not clear whether holding down the ‘go’ key is actually achieving anything, and depending on how intently the game is masturbating you can sometimes let go of the controls entirely and watch Lara automatically backflip over some lava. More often however, all of your button presses are simply interpreted as ‘go forwards’, requiring that you at least be sitting at your desk and paying attention to progress. But that’s okay.
That’s okay because during these moments Tomb Raider is a rollercoaster, a thrilling series of surprising twists and loops and tunnels and screams. Lara escapes toppling towers, scuttles through collapsing caves and across buckling bridges. Walls explode around you, Lara is thrown about as rooms twist and floors crumble away with perfect cinematic timing. The loss of control is countered by your fleeting few panicked reactions, the wheeling camera angles and rousing orchestral tharrumph-a-dumph. It looks and sounds more spectacular than it ever could have done had Crystal Dynamics allowed you, with your poor directorial abilities and penchant for running into walls, complete control over your character during these bits. So that’s okay.
It’s also okay because these cine-chunks are so carefully and sparsely set around the rest of the game, which is a game about shooting bad men, interspersed with the raiding of tombs, which arrive in the form of short, neat physics puzzles. Tomb Raider’s island is optionally open-world, a collection of wide, interconnected hub levels through which you can backtrack and fast-travel in order to collect more XP and salvage — the game’s currency for skills and weapon upgrades — or to find previously inaccessible tombs after having discovered the tools required to reach them.
The game is Zelda-like in its drip-feed of new world-traversing abilities: rope arrows allow you to create your own ziplines, a special climbing axe lets you climb up any walls that have the climbable wall texture on them. By the end of the game you’re basically a tomb raiding Batman, having collected all of these useful toys that Lara will probably accidentally drop down a hole at the beginning of her next game.
You can push forwards and ignore the option to double back and find more tombs. You can also ignore all of the Bear Grylls hunting and survival stuff that the game’s early tutorial and pre-release marketing seems to focus on, as animals are little more than roving, four-legged crates of XP and salvage, and you come across plenty of that stuff simply by carving a direct path through enemies.
Shooting men in their heads feels great too, which is worth pointing out at you do it a whole bunch. Lara’s armoury is whittled all the way down to a snappy handgun, clackety assault rifle, blammo shotgun and stealthy bow, the use of each changing the tempo of gunfights in such a way as to stir up variety as ammo expires and weapons become used out of dire necessity. They all pop satisfyingly, though, and each of the four weapons will get a decent airing around such clever enemies as: man with impenetrable riot shield, man who cannot be hurt by arrows and man who runs right up to you with a machete. The bow is used for stealth kills, allowing you to headshot bad men with arrows in such an order that nobody sees you do it. In that sense it's a bit like a puzzle. Some of the later skills you unlock allow you to trigger some brutal melee kills too.
It’s worth piling all of your skill points into melee kills, if only because it so messily highlights the wonderful character development of Lara Croft, a woman perpetually bullied by nature and haunted by gravity. She goes from vulnerable, desperate and shivering to a strutting hailstorm of vengeance-fuelled bullet rage, while never losing her defining ability to look at an urn and tell you which Chinese dynasty it’s come from. Looking at the insides of tombs and having Lara say something clever-sounding is a startling mind-snap back to the very first time you played the original Tomb Raider, that sense of visual wonder and awe in your surroundings makes a subtle but very perceptible return. I only wish there were more of it. I'd like Tomb Raider to be one long, interactive, Brian Coxesque anthropological narrative, interrupted only by ledges breaking underfoot and big slides down waterfalls. The sense of constant amazement at the scenery might be partly down to how rarely the game seems to reuse its own art assets: each long-lost burial site and overgrown, statue-studded crevasse looks and feels unique and, with few exceptions, graphically stunning.
It took me about 14 hours to finish Tomb Raider with something around a 60% completion rating, though I might've spent a load of time on the menu screen while I was in the shower or making sounds at the cat who lives outside my window. So let's say 12 hours on an average playthrough, with a few more on top if you decide to go back and find old tombs you missed, which you should. I haven't played the multiplayer because that ain't my bag, yo. It runs well enough on my mid-range PC, as long as you turn off fancy hair, but I did have some odd graphical glitching caused by post-processing being switched on, meaning I had to endure a fairly flat looking version of the game for the most part. Driver updates and patching should hopefully fix this right up.
Tomb Raider is the best videogame about shooting things and falling over I've played in quite some time, better than at least two of the Uncharted games and better than at least a dozen other Tomb Raider games. It's refreshingly well-written too, deftly rubbishing the expanding polygonal tits and arse of old Lara Croft to make way for a new character entirely, one who can innately side-step the bullshit two-dimensional machismo that plagues the form to become, by contrast of her own violently framed vulnerabilities, one of the strongest characters in games. Genuinely.
Lara Croft should be celebrated, Tomb Raider should be played and Crystal Dynamics should be rewarded.
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