Will the Founders crush the uprising Vox Populi, or will the People make their voice heard? Secret answer: Booker kills everyone.

Review copy would you kindly provided by Plaid Hat Games (www.plaidhatgames.com)

Plaid Hat Games sent me a copy of Bioshock Infinite: The Siege of Columbia, so I’m going to whip its top off and wave its bits in your face!

At least the Handyman is having a laugh.

I’m not entirely sure what the box is trying to tell me; Daisy Fitzroy is rather poodley and vacant, while Z. H. Comstock has clearly seen someone trying to steal his bike. Your gaze is pretty much drawn to the Handyman’s giant victory fist in the lower right, but his face makes him appear to be cheering on a greyhound he’s staked his entire pension on to win.

I want to go to Flophouseland!

The game board is a map of Columbia, featuring all the locations from the game, but with fewer visible corpses. It looks a lot like a paint-by-photoshop theme park map, but is laid out in a pleasantly functional manner. The art style doesn’t really match the rest of the game, but works very well during play, being clear and not distracting. Well, almost…

A shopping list of conquest!

Brown on brown! A splendid colour choice for some of the most important information in the game!

Columbia’s Next Top Model

 Next in our cardboardvalcade of wonders are the timeline cards. You get three of these for a differing experience each game. The “Wanted” poster on the back of each sheet is a pleasantly superfluous addition.

I’ll order the Songbird platter, please!

These faction-specific reference cards are very useful, well themed and laid out and bizarrely missing one important step of the game turn. As before, the back of the cards holds some lovely art…

Racists, or Rebels? You decide!

This is very cool – the two alternate futures of the game, appropriately rendered for each player. Good job, guys.

According to the rules, the dark blue is “blue” and the light red is “red”, but the others are “light blue” and “dark red” respectively.

These are my favourite bits of the game; the four faction decks – one each in two colours to enable the four player game. The card backs are beautiful little political cartoon style illustrations of the Founders and Vox Populi. The faux-griminess of the cards makes them look worn and used, as if they fell straight through a tear into our reality.

Does the Boy of Silence use trombone mutes as earmuffs?

And the card fronts are nicely rendered as well, featuring some of the memorable inhabitants of Columbia and the Vigours, too. It’s always easy to see what you have, what they are worth and what effects they can bring to bear. The font is a little bible-small though.

Fear Booker and his GIANT SHOE!

The Event and Victory Point cards keep up the theme and I especially like the ‘newspaper headline’ look of the Events, however the Event card backs drop the ball a bit with a generic piece of Booker/Elizabeth art.

I think my car keys are in there…

Continuing the card bits, you get a big ol’ dump of tokens. They are nice and thick and sturdy, with usefully distinct shapes, colours and artwork; no tokens can be mistaken for any other.

Also available in ‘not enough when you need them’.

Oh I do like to see great big piles of cash in my games. These authentic Silver Eagles cannot be used in a vending machine, trust me. Your opponent might get annoyed if you flip these at them and shout “Booker, catch!” for the 50th time.

Shove your Monopoly money, grandma!

This has to be the single largest First Player marker I have ever seen. You could brain a spaniel with it.

The red dice go up to 8. Scary.

Custom dice! Engraved and not at all cheap-feeling. I love the hefty clunk these things make; they are truly dice worth twatting someone with. The white represent your ‘grunts’, blue are for your special forces and red are for leaders. Booker rolls 3 red dice and kills you. The jaunty ‘thumbs up’ tells you that you didn’t fall to your doom from the sky lines.

Seriously, these are, like, 1-1.5cm tall.

But what about the toys?! Games like these have to have toys! Indeed it does and they are very, very small. Considering their minute stature, they are actually well detailed. From the left: Booker, Elizabeth, Meyer Herzog, Daisy Fitzroy, Z.H. Comstock and Saltonstall.

In addition to the leaders, you get two colours each of Handymen and ‘grunt’ units: Flackmen for the Founders (blue) and Shotgunners for the Vox (red). A Handyman figure was included in the £60 special edition of the video game, but it doesn’t have any special place in the board game, it’s just a spare part.

Finally, you get two big pieces – Songbird and the Airship. These are very cool and it’s great to see them moving about the board. Both have special cards, which give them more flavour than simply being fancy components.

Right then, that’s your lot. There’s no doubt, this game is a looker, but looks aren’t everything, so come back once you’ve rinsed your eyes and watch my video review of how the game plays! Up, up and AWAAAAAAYYYYYYY!

If Ken Levine ever heard the adage that you bury bad news in a busy cycle, he certainly didn’t adhere to it this week. Maybe you didn’t notice, but February isn’t a hotbed month for videogames. The big titles get pushed out the door for the holiday season, and companies ride that wave through January, as new systems get populated with new games. Then, in February, we crunch the numbers, lick our wounds, and wait.

In case you’re counting, the biggest titles of February so far are a graphically upgraded Tomb Raider title, a graphically upgraded Fable title, and a handful of DLC and episodic content. I’ll grant you, the new Thief game (a series with Ken’s influence all over it, by the way) hits shelves on February 25^th, but it’s so close to March that any responsible human being (so I don’t count) won’t have time to dig in until the weekend anyway—which, you guessed it, puts us in March.

Quick aside:

Some might argue that the biggest game of February wasn’t a full release at all, but instead the Beta for Respawn Entertainment’s Titanfall. In fact, I’m planning an entire article on that Beta in a few days, so I’ll say only this: The demand for the Titanfall beta was so high that keys were going for 35-40 dollars on eBay.

Which brings us back to the top. Ken Levine, with what is only perfect timing if you’re going for a pratfall, announced the dissolution of Irrational Games, “as [we] know it.” You can read the press release, but the basic premise is simple: Most of the 110-120 staff members at Irrational are out of a job, the reins to the Bioshock franchise are in the hands of 2K Games, and Ken is creatively huddling with about 15-20 hand-picked staffers to do something smaller, and more meaningful.

This is exactly what many critics have been calling for from our luminaries for years. A creative mind who’s willing to step back from the AAA development cycle and deliver something a little less flashy, but a little more substantive. Obviously, we don’t know for sure that Ken’s new adventure is going to turn into success—but neither were we sure about Bioshock: Infinite after years of delays, and that turned out pretty well.

In fact, some of the surprise of this announcement is that Bioshock: Infinite, rightly or not, is carting home award after award from the gaming press. Even people who have quibbles about the game’s narrative, or its ludonarrative dissonance, tend to heap mostly praise on what has turned into, perhaps ironically, a swan song.

I spoke with an industry friend yesterday, and there is some perception of Levine as “Ken the control freak”, unwilling to leave his masterpiece in the hands of others, so he tore it down like one of the characters in his universe (I’m embellishing some). However, in his goodbye letter, he says clearly that Bioshock is going to continue in the hands of 2K Games—so control freak or not, I don’t see him white-knuckling his baby on the way out. In fact, Irrational belongs to 2K Games, and they—not Ken—write the paychecks.

If 2K is keeping the franchise, why in the world would they fire the team most comfortable and familiar with its moving pieces? There’s been an outcry, especially in the hipsterverse of the gaming community, that Ken gets to keep doing what he loves at the expense of a lot of people he cast aside. These are the same people, by the way, that ridicule Ubisoft for releasing an annual Assassin’s Creed game, or moan about HD Remakes. You know, the kinds of games that turn a quicker profit, keep people employed, gamers happy, and the industry afloat?

We can’t have it both ways.

Either we push for an auteur driven medium and recognize that an auteur driven medium naturally recedes in scope, or we push for a place where all 50,000 game industry professionals get to keep building modular corridors to pay their bills. I imagine we can have a little of both—but we have to stop setting up each side as the straw-man in our news cycles.

This industry, ladies and gentlemen, is a madhouse. There are journalists out there acting like social watchdogs, trying to keep the big-bad game developer in check, when those developers probably make less money to build games than many pundits do to critique them.

Bioshock: Infinite was relatively successful, selling around 4 million units, but that doesn’t take into consideration that it hit shelves in 2013—six years after Irrational Game’s last title, the original Bioshock—which sold about 3 million copies. Bioshock was revealed in 2004 and launched in 2007. That means Irrational Games shipped 7 million units during its last 6 or 7 years of development.

Beyond that, they struggled to get Bioshock: Infinite out the door at all. They lost director Tim Gerritsen, eventually replaced him with a mercenary job from Epic’s Rod Fergusson, and then spent a full year after release struggling to push out two pieces of relatively tiny DLC.

Financially, this isn’t a company that could afford to sit around, 120 people strong, and wait for Ken to come up with something to do. I’ll admit that’s disappointing. I’ll admit that I’d rather every person in development keep their jobs, and that more jobs opened up for rookies like me. But, the secret concussion problem of the game dev world is that almost no one is safe.

We poke our heads up and lament firings at companies like 38 Studios, or LucasArts—but we tend to ignore the brutality of most of the industry. We forcefeed readers cynical narratives when a company with great intentions and ideas, like DoubleFine, slip a deadline, or try to get creative with revenue streams.

There is a segment of our community that seems to revel in the Schadenfreude of a failed Kickstarter project. The joy of writing or reading a snarky review has somehow replaced the solidarity of enjoying something together. Ken Levine has  never produced a flop.  Even when he was still at Looking Glass he was making great games.

Still, the voices rolled out during the long development cycle to tell us that Bioshock: Infinite was sure to fail. Wrong again. But, it doesn’t change the underlying issues of the industry. It’s hard to keep a  120 person machine rolling. It’s harder when you don’t have a giant project full of set pieces for those people to put together. When you add the no-win pressure of impatient fans and critics, there’s little incentive at all to open your arms to that grind over and over again.

This industry chews people up. Spits them out. There are no unions to protect all the people who got fired this week. That’s the problem. Not that one guy wanted to step away and make games on his own terms again. Not that we have people with the clout to make AAA titles who are willing to, instead, take a shot at true artistry. The problem is an industry that perpetuates the NEED for cold-blooded severance.

It’s got to be a pretty slow news cycle to take the story of Ken Levine taking a small team off into the proverbial woods to make great content, and twist it into a tale of a man so beset with hubris that he fired 100 people to get his way. If he’d walked away from EA this industry would call him a hero. If he’d announced a new Bioshock title too quickly, we’d have called him lazy, and out of ideas. Then we’d have questioned whether we need another Bioshock game so soon after the last one.

There’s plenty of hubris in our industry. I’m just not sure we ought to pin it all on Ken Levine—even if his timing is terrible.