[b]Score:[/b] ★★★★☆
[b]Played on Steam Deck:[/b] Yes.
[b]Tags:[/b] FPS, Steampunk, Sci-Fi, Story Rich
[b]Review:[/b]
Having played the entire trilogy back-to-back over the past year, every entry holds up remarkably well. Yet [i]BioShock Infinite[/i] is easily the most fascinating and frustrating of the three. It is also the one I keep thinking about. If you are searching for a campaign you'll remember for its story far more than its shooting, this is the one.
Where [i]BioShock[/i] built Rapture, a decomposing underwater utopia and [i]BioShock 2[/i] refined nearly everything mechanically, [i]Infinite[/i] threw the blueprint out the window and flew to the skies. Columbia is a breathtaking paradise floating above the clouds, hiding its rot behind patriotism, religion, and spectacle. You walk through pristine carnival rides and grand parades, only to step into back rooms where the truth starts bleeding through.
Then there is Elizabeth, who carries this game on her back. Courtnee Draper's voice performance, dialogue, combined with expressive animation, creates a companion that feels genuinely alive. She never requires babysitting, never obstructs combat, and her Tears can completely reshape an encounter. More importantly, her relationship with Booker and her connection to Comstock give the story its emotional weight. Through Elizabeth, the series returns to its core questions about choice, determinism, consequence, and redemption. By the end, I cared far more about Elizabeth and Booker than whatever firefight was waiting around the corner. That emotional anchor alone carried [i]Infinite[/i] through its rougher edges.
Unfortunately, the shooting never matches the world around it. The Sky-Line adds kinetic aerial combat, weapons has a wide arsenal and they all feel responsive, and Vigors provide you room to improvise. But the two-weapon limit feels absurdly restrictive, Vigors lack the tactical depth of [i]BioShock 2's[/i] Plasmids, and the regenerating shield strips away crucial survival tension, lowering the game difficulty. The whole system feels streamlined for the early-2010s FPS crowd. Worse, the large arenas increasingly devolve into generic enemy waves instead of encounters built around the tools you're given. Rapture used tight corridors and compacted locations to make combat deliberate and dangerous; [i]Infinite[/i] gives you a bigger playground, then repeatedly tells you where to stand. More space, less freedom.
That goodwill gets tested further in [i]Burial at Sea[/i] DLC. Returning to Rapture is wonderfully atmospheric, but forcing [i]Infinite[/i] back into original lore makes the entire narrative feel tangled. Episode 1 leans heavily on fan service nostalgia, while Episode 2 slaps on a half-baked stealth skin with a new Peeping Tom Vigor and a non-lethal crossbow with limited ammo. Rapture was never built for stealth, turning potential tension into tedious fetch-quest padding. And to top it off, Elizabeth, a cosmic force in the main game has her powers conveniently stripped away through multiverse bookkeeping, reducing her arc to a contrived bridge to the first game. That isn't tragedy; it's continuity maintenance. The writing has brilliant moments, but the plot holes ruin it.
[i]BioShock 2[/i] remains the superior game, but [i]Infinite[/i] is the one I enjoyed the most. It is flawed, streamlined, and occasionally exasperating, but Elizabeth and Booker left a much deeper impression on me than I ever expected. And I keep coming back.
[b]Achievement Difficulty:[/b] ★★★½☆
[b]Completion Time:[/b] 36-40 hours
[b]Achievement Review:[/b]
1999 Mode is a major step up in difficulty, though enemy AI remains easy to exploit with their sloppy positioning. The largest time sink is the brutal Blue Ribbon Champ achievement in the [i]Clash in the Clouds[/i] DLC.
