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BioShock Infinite

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This just came to me, but this game has the perfect setting for there to be a barbershop quartet in it right? It might be a bit early timewise, but it's close enough. I don't care if it's some crazy barbershop quartet that freaks out or even a dapper robot quartet please make it happen Irrational.

Listening to Giant Bomb discuss this for best music made me recall this post!

I thought I had posted in here at some point after I played the game, but I guess not. Uh, pretty cool game, low points being the arena style fights near the end; high points being the music and style. The way this game ends goes to credits and plays a song is masterful as all hell. This also game has one of the worst (poorest/nonsensical) heel turns/betrayals I've experienced in a game and that's saying a lot.

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Listening to Giant Bomb discuss this for best music made me recall this post!

I thought I had posted in here at some point after I played the game, but I guess not. Uh, pretty cool game, low points being the arena style fights near the end; high points being the music and style. The way this game ends goes to credits and plays a song is masterful as all hell. This also game has one of the worst (poorest/nonsensical) heel turns/betrayals I've experienced in a game and that's saying a lot.

 

Listening to Giantbomb, it did make me realize this game had maybe the highest high points of any game I played this year. Songbird dying, the first like half hour, any time the Lutecci's showed up, the entire lighthouse sequence at the end. When you sit down to play the guitar while Elizabeth sings May the Circle be Unbroken was simply magical. And original too! I'd never, ever done anything like that in a game before. Not in The Walking Dead or The Sims or even Rockband had I ever just... done something both everyday and yet magical with a god damned NPC.

 

Too bad that game couldn't keep it up all the time. The arena fights were just tiring by the end. And I still insist the ending is a poor man's Fight Club. At least in Fight Club, when you watch or read it a second time, you see that it was in your face the whole ride through. I think it's my favorite "reveal at the end" because of that. Clues are being shoved in your face repeatedly, it's not even that mysterious. You just don't really think it's actually happening because "no way, that's insane!" On the other hand Bioshock has you go out of your way repeatedly just to get small clues, and they never actually add up to being coherent anyway.

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Listening to Giantbomb, it did make me realize this game had maybe the highest high points of any game I played this year. Songbird dying, the first like half hour, any time the Lutecci's showed up, the entire lighthouse sequence at the end. When you sit down to play the guitar while Elizabeth sings May the Circle be Unbroken was simply magical. And original too! I'd never, ever done anything like that in a game before. Not in The Walking Dead or The Sims or even Rockband had I ever just... done something both everyday and yet magical with a god damned NPC.

 

Too bad that game couldn't keep it up all the time. The arena fights were just tiring by the end. And I still insist the ending is a poor man's Fight Club. At least in Fight Club, when you watch or read it a second time, you see that it was in your face the whole ride through. I think it's my favorite "reveal at the end" because of that. Clues are being shoved in your face repeatedly, it's not even that mysterious. You just don't really think it's actually happening because "no way, that's insane!" On the other hand Bioshock has you go out of your way repeatedly just to get small clues, and they never actually add up to being coherent anyway.

 

Bombcast made me think again about how the 'gamey' combat padding and collectable...collection diluted the great moments in both Infinite and The Last of Us (though I'm only 6 or so hours into the latter). Losing 50% of the combat stuff would tighten them up no end. In Bioshock you can see Irrational getting mileage out of the environments, but The Last of Us churns through locations like it's EASY to throw them together. TOO. MUCH. GAME. The Walking Dead flushed that bullshit to its benefit.

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The Besties (Polygon) talked about Infinite in their GOTY podcasts and Chris Plante brought up a great point about it that I hadn't given much thought. Really, so much of what makes the game exciting in the first half (the World's Fair stuff, all of the class/race stuff, etc) is completely diluted by both events in the middle part of the game and the metaphysical elements of the latter game. I liked both how the weird American jingoism created this society and how the metaphysical elements played into the Bioshock universe as a whole, but the way they meshed together was really quite poor and resulted in a disjointed total experience.

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I've seen this brought up before in this thread, but that's a definite problem with this game. Its plot is entirely driven by a man coping with his actions and opinions towards race, but the game is also not about that at all. The game in general is more about, uh, love and what it can drive someone to do and believe which is why I find the ending credits so powerful. I went back to confirm the sequence of events and I had missed a section:  the game ends, the credits play, there's a 2 minute orchestral piece (it's the part I had forgotten, and it's probably only there to allow you some time to process the finale), and then their amazing version of God Only Knows plays. It hit me like a ton of bricks. "Oh, that's what the game was about." It felt pretty masterful.


However, to get there all this interesting meat about dealing with race is just left behind. The way the Fink Manufacturing section ends, specifically with Daisy Fitzroy, is so ridiculously bad. It's shockingly bad. I'd even say offensive. And I think it's because the game feels like it started from the seed of the relationship between Booker and Elizabeth and its collision with these sci-fi elements, and then a setting was chosen. Oh, it's set during this time so we can use world's fair style imagery and tone. Oh, lets incorporate Wounded Knee and the Boxer Rebellion as important historical events. Oh, they'd definitely have and overt racial schism as a primary conflict. Then, when the player is expected to transition from asking, "What is this place I'm in?" to, "What's the deal with the main characters?" they ditch any attempt to use that world building to good effect. They ditch it hard. I don't really think I've gone from intrigued to put off so abruptly in a long while.


It puts the game in a weird spot in my mind. In a lot of ways I think you could make the game that this game is about* without having to engage with those topics at all. On the other hand I felt so intrigued in spots (the gunsmith's wife changing race, for example) before my hopes were dashed and I realized the racial aspects were superfluous. I feel like it's better to have had my mind try to bend around a notion rather than just a mindless experience. On a third hand, there are still spots of writing regarding those heavier topics that work if you ignore the poorly handled parts.Specifically, I think Comstock's story about how being accused as a young man of having Native American ancestry drove him to commit atrocities as a sort of social conditioning that mirrors that of Columbia is a good example.There are not many others I can think of.

 

In the end the result is a disjointed experience, as you said. It really makes me wish they just went further with it from the sci-fi end. Why couldn't the game, instead of going to alternate Columbias, go to completely alternate lighthouses? They could have avoided the turn of the vox by introducing completely different conflicting groups. This probably wouldn't stop the game from feeling disjointed, but avoiding the way they dealt with Daisy Fitzroy would be enough for me.

 

*The game where I think about infinite Bookers dying in an off-screen Sisyphean loop to save a loved one they've mistreated so poorly they've blocked out all memory of them in shame and liquor, but are still compelled to save by an innate sense and then I listen to God Only Knows and I feel sad and tear up. Yes, the part of this game I think is crucial, or at least the most personally affecting, is the part you don't play before the snowy section, signified by like 2 lines of dialogue.

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The only things I now remember about this song are a misunderstanding, my lack of enjoyment and lots of sunshine.

The misunderstanding was thus: The thumbs talked about how great the modern songs made old were in the game. They mentioned waking up on a beach and hearing Girl's Just Wanna Have Fun playing in the background. During this sequence, I heard some Irish Trad music being played on a fiddle in the background. For quite a few minutes, I thought that there had been some sort of oddly specific localisation going on in the game, and I was hearing the 'Irish' version of the soundtrack.

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I came to this a bit late, only finished it a few days ago. I'm curious, does anyone here enjoy the first person cutscene spectacle this game likes to indulge in? Maybe I'm just weird because I didn't like it back in CoD4 either. The moments where Booker is screaming because he's strapped to a rocket or whatever, those are the ones in which I'm the most detached from the game and I'm just waiting for them to be over. In general even people who didn't seem to like the game still love the opening, but for me it did nothing. It's not that I don't appreciate how insanely good the world looks, it's that I can barely interact with any of it and the only interaction I have is a generic 'F' prompt. That too makes me feel detached from the game.

The structure of the whole thing is weird to me too. It's completely segregated into arena combat and kind of pointless exploratory downtime, neither part complements the other. Compare it to System Shock 2 where the enemies exist to add tension to the exploration. Imagine that game if you walk into a room, the doors close until you've killed 30 hybrids and then you're free to explore the area. It would be garbage. Everything is weird. They have bigger story ambitions and at every point they move the design in a direction that impedes storytelling. It's a not-yet ruined city, why couldn't we have NPCs to talk to and some proper dialogue trees?

Not that every game needs dialogue trees, but I quite like them. In Mass Effect 1 the first thing out of Shepard's mouth is something you pick. It doesn't have any bearing on the story, it doesn't make you feel like you're Shepard, but it does make you feel participatory. The way Infinite presents its story has the complete opposite effect on me. When the game prompts you for a choice it feels out of place! Even setting the actual storytelling methods aside, I didn't particularly care for the story they were trying to tell. The few characters you do encounter are only there to deliver painfully contrived justifications for why you're going to be fighting more "people". Seriously, the plot contrivances are bad even by video game standards.

About the ending

The plot should follow naturally from the characters and in a sci-fi story it should also follow naturally from the internally consistent rules of the world. With "should" I mean I think it should in order to be interesting. I think the twist is garbage because it uses a plot device that doesn't have any rules. It could have been used to explain just about anything and it feels like it's there for shock value. I suppose the stupid "constants and variables" line is there as meta-commentary on this series of games as well, but it's weak as hell. The stuff in the last 20 minutes is entirely self contained, it doesn't add anything to the story, it doesn't clarify anything. The only thing it clarifies is why Comstock had to steal Booker's child, but even that was a pointless twist introduced minutes earlier.

BioShock's twist worked because it was right under your nose the entire game, so when you get the reveal it recontextualizes everything and it was key to the point the whole game was about. In Infinite, the fact that Booker is Comstock in another dimension doesn't change anything. Such a heavy handed plot device for so little gain. If the point is about different ways of dealing with guilt I don't think you need to introduce infinite parallel universes to say something about that.

I'm not even a particularly big BioShock fan, but I can appreciate it anyway. Infinite however feels like a huge mishmash of ideas that are never explored and a script that's been re-written half a dozen times while having to accomodate all the assets they'd already built.

 

edit: I watched the Errant Signal video, I pretty much agree with everything he said in it.

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Due to the point in time in while Infinite takes place, I thought it would have been a really cool idea to have traveled to a parallel universe where the floating city in the sky was not Columbia, but St. Petersberg. Lenin and the Bolshevik Party could have built the city to distance themselves from the Civil War of Russia and used it as a display of Soviet willpower and fortitude.

 

I wish that they had taken a more creative approach to stopping the Vox like completely subverting them like you said. It paints a super-bleak picture of the multiverse that the major prevailing theme of Bioshock is "everyone is bad, granted enough power", resulting in a situation where "oh no, it turns out the oppressed minorities can be just as horrible as the wicked white racists". I suppose that part of the reason they didn't get too wild about universe hopping is that they'd have to develop art assets and equivalent weapons/powers/themes/whatever for whatever universe they create, but it doesn't really excuse disjointed, borderline offensive plot devices.

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I came to this a bit late, only finished it a few days ago. I'm curious, does anyone here enjoy the first person cutscene spectacle this game likes to indulge in? Maybe I'm just weird because I didn't like it back in CoD4 either. The moments where Booker is screaming because he's strapped to a rocket or whatever, those are the ones in which I'm the most detached from the game and I'm just waiting for them to be over. In general even people who didn't seem to like the game still love the opening, but for me it did nothing. It's not that I don't appreciate how insanely good the world looks, it's that I can barely interact with any of it and the only interaction I have is a generic 'F' prompt. That too makes me feel detached from the game.

The structure of the whole thing is weird to me too. It's completely segregated into arena combat and kind of pointless exploratory downtime, neither part complements the other. Compare it to System Shock 2 where the enemies exist to add tension to the exploration. Imagine that game if you walk into a room, the doors close until you've killed 30 hybrids and then you're free to explore the area. It would be garbage. Everything is weird. They have bigger story ambitions and at every point they move the design in a direction that impedes storytelling. It's a not-yet ruined city, why couldn't we have NPCs to talk to and some proper dialogue trees?

Not that every game needs dialogue trees, but I quite like them. In Mass Effect 1 the first thing out of Shepard's mouth is something you pick. It doesn't have any bearing on the story, it doesn't make you feel like you're Shepard, but it does make you feel participatory. The way Infinite presents its story has the complete opposite effect on me. When the game prompts you for a choice it feels out of place! Even setting the actual storytelling methods aside, I didn't particularly care for the story they were trying to tell. The few characters you do encounter are only there to deliver painfully contrived justifications for why you're going to be fighting more "people". Seriously, the plot contrivances are bad even by video game standards.

 

 

I think you'll find a lot of people don't really care for the press F to interact style, and your critique about the division between combat and exploration is also something a lot of people would agree with!

 

It's funny and slightly ironic that you mention System Shock, and then talk about dialogue trees though. Looking Glass studio began with the Ultima Underworld games, and then made System Shock precisely because they found that the dialogue tree system that existed in that style of RPG wasn't as satisfying or compelling as all the immersive simulation stuff of being a character in a 3D world with a physical environment you could interact with in a more or less free manner. So the concept for System Shock was birthed out of this desire to get rid of this awkward, unsatisfactory dialogue system, and it solved the problem by having the setting be a dead world... there were no humans to interact with!

 

This design problem became a recurring issue for immersive sims type games. Ken Levine says he has the dubious honor of being the guy that invented the person talking to you from behind a glass window, which was featured in System Shock 2 and Bioshock. Clearly he had this ambition to get pass this problem in Bioshock Infinite, and I think it's fair to say that Irrational, despite having an immense amount of talent, didn't succeed at solving this problem. I'm sympathetic, because I think it's a difficult problem to solve (not everyone enjoys dialogue trees!). I think it's fair to say that everyone at Irrational is probably trying to rethink the problem too... Ken Levine has done interviews since Bioshock Infinite talking about the idea of "narrative legos" where a player should be able to have these small sorts of narrative impacts that lock together in various combinations so it seems like a problem they are still working on trying to solve, and I wish them the best of luck with whatever their next effort is.

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I finally finished this last night, after having started it months ago.  Disjointed is one of the best words that can be used for it.  There are good things here, some design and story decisions that reflect the absolute best that video games can be.  But then there are elements that represent the worst aspects of games. 

 

I think all the things that bugged me have been talked to death (disjointed narrative, racism, ludonarrative dissonance, pacing, abandoned themes/opportunities, etc.). 

 

What video games need are editors, something that exist in every other medium.  Great films, novels and journalistic works often reach their final state thanks to an editor.  Someone who takes the raw material of the creators, and with a fresh and more removed perspective, puts it all together.  A good editor would have cut about a third of the content in BI, making the whole experience tighter.  They would have questioned elements like how Daisy was handled.  They would have weaved earlier hints about the ending into the story to make it feel less like a separate story at the end.  A great example of this would have been the battle with Slate in the museum.  That whole piece could have, with minor changes, setup the ending in a much more elegant way while exploring racism in a more nuanced way.

 

Unfortunately the nature of video games is such that including a traditional editor into the process may be impossible.  The budgets are so big, the need to make these 20-30 hour experiences so pervasive, and release schedules so tight that I don't know how you successfully change the production structure to allow for that editor to come into play. 

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Unfortunately the nature of video games is such that including a traditional editor into the process may be impossible.  The budgets are so big, the need to make these 20-30 hour experiences so pervasive, and release schedules so tight that I don't know how you successfully change the production structure to allow for that editor to come into play. 

 

Yeah... An editor is something I'd like to see, because a lot of bigger games especially need someone telling them what doesn't work, but more than any other medium, such a job would exist only to throw away hundreds of thousands of dollars of work in the name of a better "artistic experience". I don't think there's anyone who would like the person working that job, except the fans (and not even all of them, considering the "more is more" attitude that still pervades a lot of comment communities).

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The lack of editors historically makes them so much harder to add from a dev cultural perspective.  In journalism (my background), editors are simply omnipresent from your earliest experience.  Sometimes you hate them, sometimes you love them.  But most of the time you recognize that they made your work better and are thankful for them.  This was on my mind recently after reading this retrospective on a classic Rolling Stone piece about the mysterious death of Jerry Lee Lewis' fifth wife.  The whole article is reprinted there, but there is a foreword about the writing and editing process that shows how stressful, but ultimately needed, the editor was.  Of course, that was just cutting dozens of hours of work of one person, and all the work that was cut still informed the rest of the piece that eventually ran. 

 

But how resistant would people who had never worked with an editor be to the process?

 

I wonder if some talented modders could make "Director's Cut" style versions of games like BI?  But even that is antithetical to the modding community, since they are more likely to add or create new content rather than cut. 

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I have no personal knowledge of anything Bioshock Infinite, but I am very pleased by the picture announcing their expansion pack's "1998 mode."

 

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This homage to the old Eidos packaging makes me regret throwing out my Thief Gold and Thief II boxes.

 

The packaging was controversial, too!  Electronics Boutique and Gamestop wanted PC game publishers to standardize their packaging into something that would guarantee more shelf space.  I've been trying for a while to find a contemporary account about this, but could only find someone's recap from 2008 in regards to the Tomb Raider board game packaging, which also aped the Eidos packaging design.

 

Back before about 2001, the standard size for computer game boxes was roughly 8x10. As Isaac recalled, Eidos' games, starting with Tomb Raider, and continuing through about Thief II: The Metal Age (roughly a four-year period), used the distinctive trapezoidal shape you see above.

Eventually, small-footprint CG retailers such as Gamestop and EBGames pushed the publishing industry into resizing their standard boxes into the roughly 4x6 dimensions they currently use (essentially, just large enough to fit a CD/DVD case, a manual, and the usual ad inserts). The reason they gave to the public was that they were environmentally friendly, but, really, the retailers were just able to display (and move) more units this way. And so, the old trapezoidal Eidos boxes vanished.

 

Now Gamestop gives its PC games no wall space at all—they get a forgotten bookshelf in one of the store's corners.  PC game boxes are a lost art!

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Having recently gotten my desktop working, I'm currently trying to catch up with some games and am now playing Bioshock Infinite.  I haven't read any of this thread and have largely ignored any kind of Infinite related discussions, so forgive me if I repeat anything that's already been said, which I undoubtedly will.

 

I'm not very far into it I suspect, the most recent thing I've done is confront Slate and get the good ol' Bioshock zappy lightning powers.  One thing I'm turned off by is the violence.  I can handle seeing it, but in general I don't care for excessive violence and the violence in this game sure is excessive.  I'm not really seeing the reason for the executions other than to just have them, which is a poor excuse.  The other Bioshock games aren't exactly pacifist either, but then again you're not cutting off a man's head with a spinning blade of death attached to your hand.  If there's a message here, I'm not getting it.  In a world full of strange, mutated creatures and bizarre devices, the violence just feels unnecessary.

 

On the topic of the racism, which I hate to even mention but it can't really be avoided, I'm of mixed mind.  I understand the idea of having it in this setting, at least in terms of history, but I really hope they're going somewhere with it.  If it's simply a plot device, as I suspect it is, then I wish they had chosen something else.  I'm not getting any kind of message out of it, nor do I expect to, which is disappointing.  The one thing I did enjoy a bit was that Elizabeth, whose life thus far has been largely academic, doesn't understand the point of racism at all.

 

In terms of the actual gameplay, I'm not impressed.  I feel like I played the other Bioshocks with more tactics in mind.  In this one I'm basically playing it as a normal shooter.  The weapons alone feel like they're more than enough, to the point that the game itself is constantly reminding me to use my vigors.  I've tried setting traps and using the powers more, but most of the time I end up just killing them with bullets before they get anywhere close to setting off a trap.  Granted, I'm playing on medium because I mostly just want to get this game off my backlog, so the combat is probably a little too easy for me.  I'm also not into the tear mechanic.  It feels gimmicky.  I don't get the point of needing to summon these things when simply placing them in the world would be just as effective given your abilities.  Summoning a turret to shoot at guys costs me nothing, but using my possession power costs me half my meter.  Using the possession power feels much more tactical to me because there's a choice I have to consider.  Summoning the turret doesn't feel like a choice at all because there's no downside to doing it.  So I'll do it without thinking because why the heck not.

 

Overall I'm not nearly as impressed with the game as I was hoping I'd be.  There seemed to be a lot of GOTY talk associated with it, but frankly I'm not seeing it.  Maybe the majesty will reveal itself later, but for now it's actually making me question my admiration of the previous two games.

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I don't want to spoil anything, but I am really curious to see what you think of the way it handles race and racism by the end.

 

As much as I do not like BI, I think it's worth playing for a gaming enthusiast as an example of how terribly wrong a great game and studio can go. 

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Yeah, BI is basically the apotheosis of AAA FPS games. It literally killed Irrational. Millions of dollars dumped into something with about as many moving parts as Call of Duty. Not the way we would've expected immersive sims to go...

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Yeah, BI is basically the apotheosis of AAA FPS games. It literally killed Irrational. Millions of dollars dumped into something with about as many moving parts as Call of Duty. Not the way we would've expected immersive sims to go...

 

Deep down, every game that ever has been made and ever will be made is a cinematic first-person shooter with light role-playing elements. The progress of a given genre is how closely its latest game approximates this platonic ideal.

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Deep down, every game that ever has been made and ever will be made is a cinematic first-person shooter with light role-playing elements. The progress of a given genre is how closely its latest game approximates this platonic ideal.

Well, the data fits.

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I'm glad to see I'm not totally alone in my thoughts about the game.  I do plan on finishing it unless it turns into a slog at some point, but this far I'm not being IGN.com'd by it.

 

One thing I'd like to know in advance.  Is there any kind of point the some of the choices I'm being presented with?  Is it some kind of obfuscated morality system like the decisions to save or harvest the Little Sisters?  I already have a general idea of how the story plays out so I'm not overly concerned with spoilers.

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I'm glad to see I'm not totally alone in my thoughts about the game.  I do plan on finishing it unless it turns into a slog at some point, but this far I'm not being IGN.com'd by it.

 

One thing I'd like to know in advance.  Is there any kind of point the some of the choices I'm being presented with?  Is it some kind of obfuscated morality system like the decisions to save or harvest the Little Sisters?  I already have a general idea of how the story plays out so I'm not overly concerned with spoilers.

 

As far as I know, there is no impact at all from any choice or action you can take.  I only played it through once though, so I could be wrong.

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This game is one of the sloggiest slogs that ever did slog. I started the game on hard and progressed about 70% through it before hitting a difficulty spike so maddening I wanted to castrate Ken Levine. Stupidly, I restarted the game on normal and played through to its conclusion.

 

There is absolutely zero player agency (the game has one of the most linear paths I've seen in a game not named Call of Duty in probably a decade). There is no choice--even the lottery sequence (Shirley Jackson asks for you to not bite her shit, Mr. Levine) is a false dichotomy, as both choices have the same exact outcome. Furthermore, you're forced into combat scenarios and given no control over the engagement, which is a massive step back from the original Bioshock (wherein i would hack an entire room full of turrets before luring a Big Daddy to his doom). There isn't even an attempt to give the tactically-minded player a way to stealth around enemies, and most doors are gated until you've murdered everything.

 

I don't want to ruin the "plot" for you, but most of your fears are well-founded. The examination of socio-economic and racial issues is merely window dressing for one of the least interesting (and nigh-incomprehensible) "twist" endings in a game ever, and the interesting elements go largely unexplored.

 

This game was a cynical, unfun turd.

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