Maaaaaaan I remember loving this game and thinking it was a great entry in the Bioshock franchise...But this thing does NOT hold up on replay without the hype.
Gameplay.
The gameplay was so brain dead, aim at target and unload the clip until they're dead, I had to crank difficulty to hard to get a slightest hint of challenge, mostly because the enemies become bullet sponges.
Vigors are basically glorified grenades or something to make enemies stay still while you aim and unload your seemingly infinite ammo on the mobs, at no points do vigors become a weapon like Plasmids were in the first games, they're just there to make shooty shooty bang bang easier.
The sky rails suck. They bring absolutely nothing.
And the "Big Daddy" enemies in this game are just awful, Motorized patriots are just slow moving bullet sponges while the 3 "Handyman" you ever get to fight just immediately close any gap you try to put between them and you. while also no selling each of your shots.
I missed laying tripwires, electrifying water, and the overall persistence test that was facing a Big Daddy with little ammo.
I will say that the guns feel good tho.
Story
"Neo Nazis and BLM, both sides are equally as bad, because when the oppressed fight they become a bunch of violent irrational animals " -> Ken Levine, probably.
The city of Columbia is beautiful and a perfect design of how I imagine MAGA idiots think America should look like, but the story just does lip service to that setting and instead goes all in into a multiverse plot that completely makes no sense. Multiverse stuff happens because of course it does, characters jump in and out of timelines for no reason and these Lutece guys just jump in, say cryptic shit and bail.
Like I get it Elizabeth is a temporal anomaly that creates infinite possibilities, yet all those possibilities end by altering exactly one timeline...But shouldn't that simply create even more timelines?
This is the dumbest most confusing story I've played AND I UNDERSTAND THE PLOT OF KINGDOM HEARTS FOR FUCK'S SAKE. 7 years ago I thought I understood, but I just nodded along. This time I actually engaged with what the narrative gave me and all I got was a jumbled mess.
With that awful AWFUL messaging aside, I really enjoyed Booker and Elizabeth as characters again, they have this great "reluctant allies that grow into actual friends" plot that I am a sucker for. Elizabeth was my absolute favorite character
Until Booker literally flips a switch that turns her cosmic awareness on and she decides she's now a godlike figure that is above all, starts spouting cryptic shit, guilt trips booker through a series of mindfucks and then has the nerve to ask him "Is this what you want?" fully knowing what's going to happen and that she set the stage for it to happen....Oh god why....she was so cool and likeable.
I gave this game a 9/10 when it came out...Now I feel it's a 6.5/10 at best.
Now onto the actual new stuff I played
Burial at sea addresses pretty much every single complaint I had with the gameplay it introduces stealthy elements, limited ammo, laying traps and hiding is an actual viable strategy...It felt great!
But my god...The plot...JFC.
So Cosmic Awareness Asshole Elizabeth decides that no Comstock ever gets to live so despite the fact that she KNOWS this Comstock's entire life and BY HER OWN ADMISSION, knows this specific Comstock would be a decent guy if left alone....She decides to be blinded by revenge and go to the Bioshock 1 reality, just to kill the guy, even if it means BURNING A LITTLE GIRL ALIVE.
The character assassination of Elizabeth at this point is hilarious. I don't know if the fact that we live in a post "The Last Of Us Part II" world where I know how a game can correctly portray a character slowly go deeper and deeper doing the most awful irrational shit for the sake of revenge. But this game's did not land at all. Elizabeth simply goes to lengths that feel too twisted for her just because she hates Comstock, but none of it feels earned, hell looking at Commstock try his damndest to save the Little Sister actually made me hate Elizabeth for backstabbing him for things he doesn't even remember.
Then we get on part 2....and ooooooh boy now it's time to punish Elizabeth for being a dick! Let's depower her, make her go crazy, have a man slowly torture her, use her and then violently kill her. While she learns...nothing really? Turns out subjecting herself to all that was the right thing to do to atone for being an asshole and save the one girl she tried to cook alive, but she cares for her now after all those great moment they spent together....like
It all just felt so mean spirited towards their first major female character...It's infuriating.
Then, they try to save face from their both sides shit by making it so the black leader of the Vox Populi didn't actually want to kill a child for no reason...no no, she was following orders from a couple of time travelling white dudes that promised her this would make things better for her people because they're like from the future, she was a self sacrificing hero you see!
And now let's talk about the lore. I LOVED the idea of Suchong and Fink collaborating via interdimensional communication to get their respectives cities all the crazy Sci-Fi shit they got. it was clever and the audio logs where really cool...even if it did create some issues (Plasmids where injectables, but then they turned them into soft drinks...But by Bioshock 1 all the drinkable ones stop existing and only needles remain)
But then they go way too far with it. I lost it at fucking Andrew Ryan talking about parallel worlds which is exactly the moment I checked out. There is no reason for this characters to be talking about this shit. It just diminishes them and their original goals and world.
And then they decide that everything Elizabeth, their first female character suffers in this game is to set up the stage for Jack to actually do the job she was trying to do this whole time...fucking WOW.
Not only does this complicates and devalues Bioshock 1's plot a lot, by making it so that Atlas received help from a dimension hopping time travelling lady to get all the info on how to do the "Would you kindly stuff" it also manages to be sexist AF.
Thank you for reading my rant.
I don't want ANYONE involved with this shit to touch BS4.
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