Well I finally played this thing. And I am gonan jump of the wagon of..... unpopular opinions.
This game is not by any stretch of the imagination a masterpiece, or even anythign other than average. If I were to give it a numerical score, I would give it a 6, 5 for just working, it doesn't crash at the start s I guess it at least succeeds in that, and 1 point for pretty graphics.... from afar.
The gameplay is pretty boring, and before you tell me "play on 1999 is the way to play" I did, I did the konami code on the title screen and I played "fuck balance, mode" I wasn't challenging, enemies just deal more damage than you deal to them, even headshots can't down them but their batons can break your shield in a hit. You lose 100 eagles upon forced revivial (hey, not even let me choose to save when I want and rethink my stuf whe nI reload), you can only carry 2 weapons at a time, yet you find ammo for all types of weapons, all 9 of them. There are no alternate ammo types so you just have to keep clicking that button. Vigors could be fun, but most of the time you just need to use Lightning and Crows to prevail in any fight, if they are inmune to Crows they won't be inumne to Lightning. A good chunk of the powers are the same "Click to shoot projectile, hold and release to create an explosive trap" and it even pops up a Tutorial explaining htis to me every time I get the power, even after watching the little "old timey" presentation I get with every power, like I just forgot the same instructions I get everytime a second after getting them for the 5th time.
Elizabeth gets praised for her "incredible ally AI", and I just have to ask if people even know what AI even means. The game tells you "She can take care of herself in battle", but it doesn't accomplish this by giving her clever enemy evading behavior, hiding places or anything, she just ceases to exist during combatm she is there but nothing hurts her, yo ucan even get shot THROUGH her and she just keeps telling you "I haven't found anything yet", well cool Elizabeth, only thing 1999 mode does is make one of your behaviors so rare it becomes virtually useless. She also finds stuff for you randomly, didn't know a dice roll was "incredible AI".
Also "she" can make things appear on the field one at a time, but that is not really brilliant AI, it's just "Hold button for part of the level design to appear". Also she tends to very conveniently find Sniper Rifles when there are snipers, and if you have less than 100 eagles and thre is another wave of enemies coming she always HAPPENS to find exactly 200 coins, enough for 2 revives, wow toots, how convenient, thanks...
I gotta give ti that it has enemy variety, altho it doesn't have situational variety, the game is basically a series of arenas were you fight a waves of enemies until the game decides it's time to advance it's plot. They tell you "not every situation needs to be a fight" but more often than not enemies just randomly start to attack you for no reason. In shanty Town I LOOKED at an item labeled as "steal" that i didn't even bother taking because I was at full heltah then the peopel there started atacking me, police officers just inmediately mean "combat starts now", to the point were I just started killing every npc I found because it made no difference, I mean even when you kill a sick man being tended by his wife/girlfriend/sister/whatever the woman kept looping in her "tending him" animation, seemingly oblvious to the fact that I just jammed the skyhook on her partner's face.
The skyhook lets you get easy kills.... except in 1999 mode were the damage you do with the thing is so meaningless the whole mechanic just works for escaping, and if you have a RPG to do cluster damage to enemies.
You can also use possession on vending machines to get a couple of coins, but considering that a Salts recharge costs 36 coins and you only get 8, so there is n oreason to do that at all.
So yeah the combat is pretty whatever.
Now the story, the thing people are praising to the SKIES (heh).
Well, it's not that good.
Let's talk about the setting first.
At first Columbia seems like an interesting place, a city in the clouds powered by old timey ballons and helixes (or not, later on that), people fled there to create a society where certain values would prosper, kind of like Sky pilgrims.
But then you realize the city is conceptualy floating on nothing, is a castle in the air, it's too big for it to work in universe. Columbia is more like a theme park ride than an actual breathing world, you want to talk about roller coaster worlds? look no further than Columbia, Everythign is made to look old timey, with ragtime music, wholesome haircuts and clothes, narrators with voices out of the clichest of period pieces and jokes. But where do they get all those flat textured sacks of fruits? how can they go about their normal lives so high up on the sky? Wouldn't this people have problems breathing, or need asistance of technology? in the case that they just got used to it, shouldn't Booker have problems breathing as he just arrived? Where do the yget mateirals to build stuff when they have no mines, fields or any form of natural resource to mine? Do they just regularly send mining parties to "the sodom below"? wouldn't that be a pretty ineficient system for a city that supposedly works independent of the world below? Why would they allow for a sink hole of disease like Shanty Town to exist in their isolated community? wouldn't that put them at risk of a pandemia? Even for treating the people in Shanty town (basically all minorities in the US) like slaves you would think they would at least try to keep them alive so they can keep having their cheap labor force, considering they have no way of replenishing them, nless Columbia goes on Slaving parties to the world below to collect all irish, black and asian people they can.
Technology is just all over the place and not in a way that feels like they had a proper vision.
For example, there are vending machines that have a limitless supply of "Salts" healthkits and all kind of amunition. Why would a city with a very publicly known revolution brewing under their shoes have vending machines that dispense ammunition to any person with enough coins? Booker can literally go in the middl off battle to one of those machines and replenish his weapons ammo to continue mowing the Columbian police force.
Vigors are another thing, Magical Sodas/liquor/beverages that allow the use of magic abilities, they seem to be open knowledge in Columbia. Unlike the Plasmids in Bioshock 1, Vigors seem to be perfectly safe ad only require you to chug them down once to get their powers forever. There don't even have effects in Columbia's society, you get a bottle of a soda that lets you turn autamted guns against the cops, and later to strip people of their free will and make them committ SUICIDE for fuck sake. Why isn't that even integrated in any of the plot? You can get a pwoer that lets you throw crows at people, and later explodign crows. CROWS? why crows? seems like someone was trying to ape a game where yo usent carrion creatures at your enemies but couldn't think of a good excuse for it *cofratscof*
I mean with all of the racism thign goign on in the game you would at least think the Possession powers is being used to keep the slaves from revolting or something like that, but no. Also they are fueled y a esoteric resource known as "salts". What are those? Is Booker high o nbathsalts and I am just rampaging in a town allucinatign the whole thing?
Then the Skylines, aparently the police force in Columbia and Booker like to exercise their left hand a lot (har har obvious joke here) because they can hold onto their skyhooks for ages supporting all of their weight. You can also jump 20 meters in the air to reach the skylines and hooks and jump that same distance for no damage. The only "explanation" we get is "Damn hook must be magnetized!!!!", yeah Fucking Magnets how do they.... fuck it. Also the big bad of the game woud have been able to render Booker incapable of reaching him by removing all of those convenient skylines he had everywhere in his Zepellin.
And when thing couldn't get more disjointed we are introduced to their boneheaded Sci-fi elements of dimensional travel and a rather techno babble use of Quantum Physics.
How does Columbia stay up in the air? Giant baloons and propelers that must consume insane amounts of fuel? No, Elizabeth explains that it is mantained in the air by "Quantum Particles suspended in Space time at a fixed height", yeah toots, that doesn't mean anything. Try harder to sound smart, altho it's a great idea to build your setting with the Technobabble generator.
Then they try their hands with the trite sci fi trope of the multiple reality theory, bit they get lost i ntrying to make it tie into the disjointed setting and the last act of the game just gets mudled, Elizabeth can open tears in the dimension and later in the story they use it to go to an alternate Columbia where a guy didn't die, but then they stay there and act like if they just took a stroll on another street. They try to explain this by basically bullshiting you with handwaves "oh when a universe is generated by a nonsensical action it ceases to exist" "when you arrive in another dimension you adopt te memories of your counterpart there" "If you die in another dimension you get confused nosebleeds in another" that last one, guards that we just killed fall to their backs and start convulsing, yet when we get into this dimension where Booker died (for whatever reason) he just gets a minor nosebleed and carries on like nothign happened. This part of the game makes more harm to the whole thing that good, it provides rather bullshit explanations for how they can do what they do "They looked into a dimension were X was accomplished and copied it". They try to make it seem smart by throwing the cliched Quirky British Scientist(s) that speak in riddles, How original.
Now let's talk about the socio political envirorment in Columbia: White Guilt The game.
The writers try to talk about issues they obviously have no idea about, try to inject modern sensibilities into it with no regard for period consistency and over simplify thigns like religion and race relations to a laughable degree.
It happens that Columbia apparently was founded by people that hated Abraham Lincoln for passing the enmancipation reform, they even have the Sic semper tyrannis line John Wilkes Booth said before killing Lincoln in Banners inside churches. The people of Columbia are all the worst republican extremists and the Ku Klux Klan all rolled into one, they are white rich southeners that depsise all minorities and are extremely religious.
The minorities (The Vox Populi) are all either innocent pieces of scenery perpetualy suffering in the background or the extremist guerrilla Black Panther like revolutionaries that kill babies, scalp people and murder civillians, all the while spouting "anti American" speeches about the founders.
This game has all the subtlety of a bag of living cats being thrown into a woodchipper... that is on fire.
There are also the "progressive" civillians that don't believe in racism (why did they even go to Columbia then?) but don't think drastic actions should be taken, they are invariably good and proclaim to you "I am different than them, I am a progressive", yeah, guys, progressive had a different meaning back in the early 20th century...
Everything i nthe game that is not a piece of scenery is an enemy, you have a section of the game where yo uare aided by the Vox Populi (this si before yo ufind the scalps btw so you don't think they are evil yet) But then their leader decides that you are to be killed because you are in the dimension where Booker died for the Vox so the logical thing is to send troops after troops after you so the player now hates the Vox Populi too. I got to wonder where did the Vox got so many people and resources when they were the oppressed masses in an isolated community, kind of ties into the "too big to work" thing I mentioned earlier, I mean they get a fleet of Zeppelins, their own Handymen and Motorized Patriots. WTF?
On the villians:
Comstock is just a evil overlord hell bent on beign as much of a dic kas possible. A rather one dimensional character that ost of you already know what the twist with him is.
Daisy Fitzroy also decides that she needs to fight fire with fire so she goes completely blood thirsty and sends her revolution into a massacre. Maybe she just intends to destroy Columbia? if so, why don't they just organize a Slave exodus and leave the city to fall apart without their Asian, Irish and Blac kslaves they seem to rely way too much? Anyway, we know she is evil when we meet her for the first time, not because she does anything evil, but because both Booker and Elizabeth keep telling us she is not different from Comstock.
Slate, an insane coronel allied with the Vox that decides that the best course of action is to send all of his men to get killed by Booker because he want to take revenge on Comstock (he doesn't know the Twist) for whitewashign his past... so he wastes all of them on Booker and then orders hi mto kill him so we have fighting sections in the info dump that is the Hall of Heroes.
The only believable villian is Fink, he is not an evil racist religious zealot, he is just a douchy bussinessman that sees an oportunity in the cartoony evilness of Columbia to make a buck. He also offers you to join him by sending 3 waves of the same enemies as all the other waves, but with special introductions as if to trick into believieng this is unique in any way.
Now the two main characters.
Booker, he is a troubled guy that commited acts of violence in his past and seeks to forget them and is completely opposed to the extremes the Vox takes.... even if you just mow down every NPC you find, wich I did. He has the talent of Troy Baker as his voice, but his character is pretty bland, he just yells and snarks. Well everyone snarks, because Sarcasm always means that something is well written right? .......(heh)
Elizabeth, oh Elizabeth, are you such an obvious construct meant to appeal to nerds before being an actual character.
She is a 19 year old girl, so she is yougn enough to need protection from the 6.5 foot tall Protagonist, but old enough so she is legal. She snarks a lot even tho she is meant to be a sheltered girl that lived all her life in a tower (pretty original btw), but she also reads LOTS of books, so HEY NERDS! she reads books, she is smuhrt and a bookworm. She is a strong independent woman because she gets all hell bent on killing Comstock by the end, but she causes her own kidnappings Twice. She is a market study construct.
She also knows how to lockpick, she is the master of poorly concived mechanics.
She also has the power to open tears in dimensions and go to different places, at first is justified she doesn't just escape because her powers are underdeveloped and limited. But by the end of the game she apparently can transport you to a corn field somewhere to show you her powers, but yo ustill need to fight off the Vox in the horrible last fight instead of just opennign a tear to New York or Paris after SPOILER Booker kills Comstock SPOILER. All of her powers are scaled to the convenience of the plot, taht is the mark of a good story, right?
The ending is also pretty anti climatic, it renders everything you made during the game, the little choices that there were completely meaningless because
[spoiler:da8d47f55e] You prevent Columbia from ever existing. [/spoiler:da8d47f55e]
THe whole game as a whole felt like a Poor man's version of Dishonored, but it obviously costed waaaaaay more than Dishonored. I would even say, it obviously went over budget, the delays didn't help at all.
And that is my opinion on it. Refute it or call me an idiot if you like.
"Story masterpiece"? 
