Bioshock's Latest: Civil War in a City in the Sky

The first release by the Massachusetts studio Irrational Games since the original Bioshocks transfixed players more than five years ago there were open fears on blogs, in discussion forums and in conversations among video game journalists that the new BioShock game just wouldn't be any good.

Surely that was why it was taking so long to make it, why its release was twice delayed, why the studio seemed to be bleeding personnel. Some people even asked themselves if the impeccable reputation of Ken Levine, the mercurial creative director at Irrational, was perhaps undeserved, given that it was largely dependent on only two games, System Shock 2 (1999) and BioShock (2007), made almost a decade apart.

Everyone can stop worrying. With BioShock Infinite, which goes on sale on Tuesday, Mr. Levine and his colleagues at Irrational have produced yet another video game that is a model of what the medium can achieve. This world — an alternate history with a dollop of science fiction that is set in the United States of 1912 — is dense, fascinating and inventive. The combat is exhilarating. The ending manages to be both mind-bending and moving.

The game begins at a lighthouse off the coast of Maine but quickly moves to Columbia, a utopian — or dystopian — city in the sky built by Zachary Hale Comstock, who calls himself an American prophet. Comstock has transformed this country’s secular religion of Constitutionalism into a theocratic system of white supremacy that worships the founders as gods.

Booker DeWitt, the playable character, is a former Pinkerton agent turned private investigator who was sent to Columbia to find a girl named Elizabeth and bring her to New York City. Booker and Elizabeth are caught in the middle of a civil war between Comstock and the Vox Populi, a violent leftist group modeled partly on the socialists and anarchists of the period.

Source: nytimes

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