Genuinely the worst game in the Bioshock franchise and an incredibly frustrating experience. I replayed the game recently taking it slow and absorbing the atmosphere to give it the most fair shake possible. I think the art design and environmental artists in this game deserve immense praise for the work they did fully realizing Columbia and adopting the aesthetics of early 1900s art and advertising as well as reflecting the racist caricatures that were spread during that era. Unfortunately this incredible art and aesthetic is dedicated to a story I find completely underwhelming and lacking in so many places. Booker is a non-character unless you pay attention to audio logs where every bit of his character and who he is as a person is told to you clearly. How anyone thought that Booker for all of his actions in Wounded Knee should be a blank slate boring character is beyond me. Accompanying that you have the worst elements of multi-dimensional storytelling rearing its ugly head from the moment you are tasked by Daisy Fitzroy with supplying her revolution with arms all the way to the end. By the conclusion it turns out none of your actions actually mattered because you end up erasing yourself, Elizabeth, and Comstock (who turns out to be another version of Booker) from reality. Somehow this still got a DLC about these characters who unless I misunderstood something in this "genius" story should have been erased from reality. My thoughts on that are in a separate review. I think what I find most offensive about this game is the way it was held up as an incredibly intelligent story when it came out by major figures in the industry like Cliff Bleszinski when in reality it's a very muddied and confused product with too many things going on to satisfyingly resolve any of them in any way besides erasing every key character from reality by the end. In short, play it for the aesthetics and art, not the story. My experience was mostly positive when examining the historical inspirations and art of the world only to be brought down by a mediocre story and incredibly bland shooter gameplay.

Fluctuates from an interesting experience with elements of Dishonored in Part 2 where Elizabeth can play nonlethally and turn invisible while Part 1 features some more generic Bioshock Infinite gunplay but this time Booker can carry all his guns which is a feature that should have been added retroactively into the base game. The cowardice in their storytelling to take Daisy Fitzroy's revolution with the Vox and turn it into a vehicle for Elizabeth's character growth is insane. You find audio logs that describe how Fitzroy is unsatisfied with a bloody revolution and concerned about her role as a martyr which I feel pushes this idea that everything the Vox do in the sake of fighting the racism and class oppression they experience in Columbia is something they could or should have resolved nonviolently. A nonviolent revolution is a nice idea but when your main story presents the Vox revolution as no different from Comstock's racist oppression it seems cowardly to then back away from presenting the Vox as bloody killers and instead show how Fitzroy was actually a heroic martyr for the sake of making Elizabeth a "woman" through spilling her own blood. Just an incredibly stupid retcon in a DLC filled with incredibly stupid retcons like how Elizabeth had a direct hand in drawing Jack (Bioshock 1's protagonist) to Rapture and helping the process of imprinting Big Daddies onto Little Sisters.