Masterpiece will sky hook any gamer

Bioshock Infinite stays true to powers and panache, but moves from the brooding, dead-ridden waters of Rapture into the vibrant, floating city of Columbia.

On its surface, it is a simple tale of downtrodden, former Pinkerton hoodlum Booker Dewitt ascending to the 1920-era, sky utopia of Columbia to answer the cryptic calling “bring the girl and erase the debt.” Columbia, with all its fashionable fanfare, steam-punk ingenuity, and peaceful people, easily beats out Bespin’s Cloud City as best floating city ever created (sorry, George Lucas).

Tragically, you soon realize that behind Columbia’s seemingly perfect façade lies a dystopia built on the backbone of religious fanaticism and racial superiority. Once Elizabeth (the girl) is rescued, your path leads you towards joining the resistance movement, trying to overthrow the evil roots of Father Zachary Hale Comstock, a.k.a. The Prophet, and balancing the injustice committed through Comstock’s puritan sky-ark against the scourged people of Columbia.

But Infinite doesn’t stop there. As a proud member of a series famous for its twists, the game lets you think you know where it’s heading, but through the character development of Elizabeth, the relationship she and Dewitt forge together, and the dissemination of alternate realities – a nifty little trick of Elizabeth’s – an ending unfolds that left me shaking with disbelief.

As unique as the plot is, the basic mechanics thankfully haven’t changed much since the first Bioshock rocked the gaming world back in 2007. You have powers – then called plasmids; now called vigors – and various weapons and explosives at your disposal. You work your way through levels battling baddies with the odd boss fight keeping you going. Simple, effective, and a perfect stage to add a few genre-defining additions.

Let’s get the most obvious flaw out of the way. Unlike the crisper lines and tighter shading of the PC version, Infinite on console is slightly fuzzier. The wearied graphics yields character designs and action sequences that may seem like little growth has taken place since the last Bioshock game. But grow it has, in so many more ways. Though somewhat visually disappointing, Infinite is still esthetically enthralling in every way, a masterpiece of design and execution. Where Infinite goes from good to brilliant is the level of strategy added by the sky hook, and later by Elizabeth. The sky hook is a rotating hook that you acquire as your first weapon. Its melee-finishing attacks are wonderfully brutal but its real genius is in allowing you to take to the sky during combat. Instead of simply fighting zealots, guards and machines from the ground, you have the option of leaping to hooks or riding along a sky rail. From there you can choose to rain down from the air to incapacitate your enemies, access new caches of weapons, or relax up there for a while and get your sniper on.

And the most powerful of all new additions is the character of Elizabeth. Elizabeth goes well beyond simply personifying your conscience. She is wonderfully supportive in a fight, finding salts, health and ammo for you while you purge the evil of Columbia. Her ability to open rifts into alternate realities means that she can provide new strategies in combat, and supernatural, fatalistic windows in the plot. Yet her greatest addition is to add heart as well as twist after twist to the journey.

The role of choice may not nearly seem as prevalent as previous Bioshock games. Yet in some ways, the theme of choice has never been stronger. The game subtly weaves a story of fatalism through the perceived choice of the narrative. Until you play it to its triumphant conclusion, you aren’t even aware of the choices that you – not as a gamer, but as a human being – have been making all along. Not until it’s too late.

The greatest choice you can make is to play this game.