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Saturday 12 July, 2014
Well, I've had my great story fix for the week. I loved all the twists and turns near the end. Although I'm not exactly sure the significance of winding up in Rapture I did enjoy the surprise of seeing it. Is it just another world, or does it have some explicit relationship to Comstock, Elizabeth and Columbia? Did Elizabeth just purposefully open a tear to it to and underwater place to deal with Songbird, and it just happened to be Rapture? Maybe she's drawn to dystopian places. OMG, did she CREATE Rapture in her mind and call it into being?! Maybe she created all the lighthouses and doorways too. Is Elizabeth God? Maybe that explains why DeWitt isn't fearful of God but is fearful of Elizabeth.
Geez, this would be great to play again to find clues about the story.
Oh hey look, there's something after the credits...huh. Shouldn't he be dead..? Or was that pivotal choice after Anna came along? Must have been...that explains how she can exist but he can't.
One of my favorite things about the game was the detail in every location. There were so many things in all the shops, so many conversations between NPCs to eavesdrop on, so many voxophones, just so much stuff that fleshed out Columbia. I feel like I've been there.
The gameplay itself wasn't anything particularly interesting. It felt like Bioshock 1 and 2 with ziplines. Sure, there were some fun guns and fun vigors. The enemies were by and large easy to deal with. The only one that was much challenge was the...I forget the name...you know, the big mechanical guy with the heart as a weak spot. But there are only a few to fight. There wasn't anything like the Big Daddies in Infinite.
I think there were tons of opportunities to use a variety of guns and vigors and tears to deal with enemies, but no real urgency to try out different things. Yes, I saw the oil and water spills for fire and lightning, but unless you lure an enemy there, who cares? Yes, there are health kits and grapple hooks and hidden RPGs in all the battle areas, but if you can just dispatch everyone with the crows and a machine gun, then why would you need all that extra stuff? Like, it was all available, but just no need. I found and used lots of tears and hidden weapons and hooks and all when there was a challenge, especially when I was forced to move around. As that didn't happen a whole lot, I feel a lot of that stuff was...not wasted...but misplaced. Many of the battle areas could have been smaller, and useful tools located closer to where the battle starts. I would have used more of them.
As it were, my #1 tactic was to blast enemies with the upgraded crows, kill them with a machine gun, which created new crow's nests where they died. Using this method, I wound up absolutely obliterating waves of enemies because there would just be like 10 crow's nest traps springing all the time, enemies dying and creating new traps...it sure was fun to watch and listen to them screaming all the time. That was by far my #1 vigor. I also used possession for mechanical turrets and enemies. I liked watching them suicide. Umm, I used the shield vigor for a while when I got it. I did use the levitate one a good deal. That's pretty much it. On enemies that were immune to the crows, I shocked them.
The gear was also a nice idea, but I didn't find it terribly useful. I paid attention and equipped them for the first 1/2 of the game, then just ignored them.
The looting got very very tedious after a while too. At first it was fine because looting was part of exploring and seeing all the detail in the world. But after a while, once you'd pretty much knew all the posters and desks and room details, looting sucked. At one point, I was using the piece of gear that makes you cause 2x damage if your health is super low. This was a great strategy for me, and I invested in shield upgrades to make it work even better. But it basically meant I couldn't loot anything because I'd inevitably eat food and gain health back, taking away my double damage. It was dumb. But you have to loot because you need money for upgrades. So...what choice do you have? Just deal with looting...
That's about all. Gotta thank my girlfriend's boss for letting us housesit and letting me play some games this week! Need to borrow The Last of Us from him.
Oh, I'm in the middle of reading the Bioshock prequel novel. I found it in a hostel I was in in Beijing last month and swapped a book I was carrying for it. Quite interesting, talking about the origin of Andrew Ryan and the building of Rapture. It's not a particularly exciting book so far, but interesting nonetheless. I wonder if it has anything to do with Bioshock Infinite later on.
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