I am a broken man.  I completed Bioshock Infinite last night and I woke up this morning still thinking about the ending.  Don't worry, I have no plans to spoil anything for anyone, no matter how much I'd like to talk about it.  Needless to say, the team at Irrational Games have managed to recover that magic the original Bioshock had (if you've not played/completed the original Bioshock... do so immediately!).

You play the game as Booker DeWitt, a former Pinkerton detective with a troubled past.  Faced with mounting debts, you have taken a job to travel to the flying city of Columbia to find a young woman and bring her back.

The woman in question is Elizabeth.  Imprisoned in Columbia since childhood and guarded by a giant flying monster, Songbird, she is desperate to find freedom but has little experience of the outside world and a lot of questions.

When you first arrive in Columbia, it is a stunning sight. The sky is dotted with an untold number of floating islands; each one filled with people going about their business. Shops and attractions draw their attention and, to begin with, you are simply one of the crowd.  If you spend the first ten minutes or more just wandering around admiring the environment at this point, you certainly wouldn't be alone.

According to the story, in the late 1800s the US government build Columbia to serve as a floating world's fair, travelling from continent to continent to demonstrate America's success.  As with most things, the floating city wasn't all it seemed as it was also packed with weaponry effectively turning it into a "death star". Political strife causes Columbia to secede from America and the city disappears...

While wandering around Columbia it is clear that it is almost as broken as Rapture, but for different reasons.  Racism and religion are quite obvious banners, especially early in the game, and that always creates tensions within society... you know it's not going to be long before something breaks. 

Due to the very nature of the game, there are going to be a lot of comparisons with the original Bioshock... it really can't be helped (for many reasons).  As with the original, Infinite is a beautifully realised world.  It looks and, more importantly, feels like a real place.  It is a very different place, however, and it feels far more... focused.  Where the audio logs and stories in Bioshock would often stray from your path giving you more insight into the world around you, but not your particular story, the audio logs and stories in Infinite, while hidden in every corner of the world, are pretty much all tied to your story.  The progression through the city is also very linear.  You will return to some locations from time to time, but you are being constantly being driven forward with no way to return to most areas.  Does this make it a worse game? No, not at all... but given how similar the game feels it does make you wonder how much better it could have been if Irrational had opened it up for exploration a little more.  It's especially upsetting if, like me, you're the sort of the person to reach the end of the game and realise that you're only a handful of audio logs short of getting the whole set and there's no way to go back and fetch the remaining ones.

There are also a few other areas I feel there could have been some improvement.  Silly little things like the weapon upgrades; in Bioshock the upgrades were very visible steampunk addons to your weaponry which really added some feeling that you'd 'improved' your weapons.  Infinite has no such visual cues... the upgrade version of a gun looks just like the original.  With all the fanciful things in the environment: Handymen, Patriots, airships and flying barges, you'd have thought it would have made sense to add something to show that your weapon was somehow better.  Again, it's a silly thing... but it feels like a rough corner that they'd missed.

The Infinite equivalent of Plasmids, Vigors, are another area where they don't quite measure up.  That's not to say they are bad, far from it, but there is room for improvement.  I love that they all have at least two different uses.  Some, like 'Shock Jockey', can be charged up to create traps which prove invaluable, particularly when combined with other vigor-based traps.  Others, like 'Return to Sender' use the charged version to trigger an alternative form of the power.  Maybe it's because I was playing on hard difficulty but I struggled to pull together the finances to really take advantage of the upgrades available and ended up sticking with just two Vigors for 95% of the game: Shock Jockey, to control enemy advances, and Possession, for getting cash out of machines and dealing with mechanical enemies, mostly because some of the others felt a little under powered by comparison.  Maybe the idea is that it promotes a second playthrough with a different approach?

One of the other major features of Infinite, sky-lines, proved to be quite a lot of fun.  Originally installed to allow the movement of goods around and between islands, it's not long before you are whizzing around on them using your 'sky-hook'.  Again, it's a shame this wasn't expanded further as most of the sky-lines you'll encounter are restricted to quite a tight space.  Opening this out a bit so that you could travel between areas using the sky-lines would be more useful.  Using them also pulls you away from exploring the areas which, due to the more linear nature of the game, means you won't be using them much outside of the times when you need to.  Combat on them is fun, even if it does make you a bit of a target... speed isn't nearly as useful as cover unless you're running away.

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~ Naiboss