BioShock Infinite may be two years from release, but the first ten minutes already look highly impressive. You can check out the new gameplay footage right here...
With BioShock, game designer Ken Levine firmly established himself as a creator of startling, sometimes disturbing images. First-person shooter may have been the most convenient generic handle for his 2007 shooter, but it could more accurately be described as a survival horror game of the most psychological sort.
The teaser trailer for the forthcoming BioShock Infinite revealed an entirely new environment, one set several leagues above the murky undersea world of Rapture. Yet while Infinite’s new home was set among the clouds and azure skies of Columbia, it’s clear from the new 10 minute demo footage unveiled at this year’s Tokyo Games Convention that the tone of Levine’s new game is as darkly surreal as ever.
Opening on a shot of a poster that economically relates the racism and insularity of Columbia’s celestial city, we’re then taken on a brief tour of its cobbled, steampunk streets before a bell tower, suspended on colossal balloons, comes crashing down at the player’s feet.
Wandering further around Columbia’s environs, evidence continues to mount that something’s rotten at the heart of the place. A woman quietly sweeps some steps, apparently oblivious to the inferno blazing in the shop immediately behind her.
A few yards away, a horse lies dead in the road, while on a bench, a man feeds a cackling murder of crows. Paranoid, far-right propaganda is strewn everywhere, from posters that shriek “Army thyself against foreigners and anarchists!” to rhetoric-spouting men in suits.
Then the guns come out, and things get really weird…
As an early taste of the finished game, it’s as good as fans of the first BioShock had any right to expect. It affords not only a glimpse of the creepy new society Levine’s constructed, but also an idea of how Infinite’s weapon system will work – it appears that the Plasmids of the original game are back, but in a modified form with the demo briefly demonstrating a few telekinetic powers, as well as an ability to unleash a murderous wave of crows at unsuspecting enemies.
The demo looks so good, in fact, that it seems hard to believe that we’ll have to wait until 2012 to play the finished thing – and with the trailer concluding with a colossal boss battle in the middle of a raging storm, Lord knows what else Levine has in store for us in the rest of the game…