3) BioShock Infinite
Of course, you can’t mention Ken Levine and Irrational Games without name-dropping BioShock. When the original game was first released back in 2007, it became instantly recognized as one of the most important entries into the genre. It was – for lack of a better phrase – a work of art, taking everything the studio had learnt from System Shock 2 and upping the ante by utilizing the explosion of current-gen technology.
What’s interesting about BioShock Infinite is that it isn’t the second game in the series, it’s the third. Why didn’t we mention BioShock 2, then? Well, because quite frankly, it just didn’t match up to the original game.
Created by a different development team all together (2K Games), the second entry into the series took the unique design of BioShock and only made a slightly different game from the perspective of a different character (a prototype Big Daddy, of all things). It was obvious that it couldn’t stack up to the original. Though it was still met with positive reviews, BioShock 2 was evidently missing that certain spark.
And so, BioShock Infinite saw a return of Ken Levine and Irrational Games and the result was something that completely turned the gaming world on its head. With a beautifully crafted world, a superior storyline, strong character development and one hell of an ending (seen below), it did the impossible by proving that a threequel can outshine a poor continuation of a game that was already considered near-perfect.
