Clockwork Revolution Has Definitely Defeated The BioShock Infinite Clone Allegations

When Clockwork Revolution was first revealed at the Xbox Games Showcase in June 2023, it immediately drew comparisons to BioShock Infinite. The debut trailer’s comment section is filled with viewers saying things like “BioShock Infinite 2.0”, “BioShock Infinite vibes”, and “Wow this new BioShock game looks great!”.

You can’t really blame people for coming to that conclusion back then. Clockwork Revolution takes place in a steampunk Victorian era metropolis called Avalon that looks a lot like BioShock Infinite’s Columbia. Both games have vehicles that travel on rails suspended over the city, lots of old-timey saloon-like buildings, and towering statues reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty. There are robots, guys walking around in suits, zeppelins in the sky. Both deal in themes of politics and power, and have a big bad ruling the city. Both are FPS games with magic-y weapons and powers you use with your hands. The similarities are glaring.

From a first-person perspective, the player perpares to load a bullet into a rifle in Clockwork Revolution, with mechanical soldiers in the middleground and a machine of some kind in the background. Each layer is in a different color, with blue in the foreground, green in the middleground, and red-orange-yellow in the background.

“Change The Past, Control The Future”: Clockwork Revolution’s Xbox Showcase Trailer Buries The Lead On Its Most Fascinating Hook

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Clockwork Revolution Wants Your Choices To Actually Matter

But the newest trailer has done a lot to prove that Clockwork Revolution is far from a BioShock Infinite clone (and thank god for that, am I right?). Sure, the aesthetics are still very similar, but the game actually seems to be far closer to an RPG, letting you customise your character’s appearance, classes, traits, and attributes, and weapons.

While it looks to have immersive sim mechanics, I can’t actually find any interviews where the developers explicitly say it is one. Game designer Chad Moore did call the title the “love child of Arcanum and Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines”, both of which are generally considered to be members of the genre, but interviews (like this one on Xbox Wire) focus more on its “crunchy systems and reactivity”, “character creation”, and “meaningful consequences” that “actually pay off”. There’s a big emphasis on player agency and choices that reshape the entire world.

All this is to prove a point that while the two games may look similar, they are likely going to feel very different to play. BioShock Infinite is a fairly linear game without a huge focus on player agency – this is one aspect that has been widely criticised, especially in retrospective reevaluations of its legacy. What we’ve seen and heard of Clockwork Revolution indicates that it is aspiring to implement a level of reactivity that we rarely see in video games because of how hard it is to pull off. Whether or not it’ll stick the landing is yet to be seen, but I’m looking forward to finding out.

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Clockwork Revolution Is Way Funnier Than BioShock Infinite Ever Was

Lady Rottenwood defaced poster in Clockwork Revolution

Tonally, the games also feel wildly different. This wasn’t apparent from the reveal trailer alone, but the second trailer made this overwhelmingly clear. BioShock Infinite had its funny moments, but I wouldn’t characterise it as a funny game – humour is certainly not the main focus here. I can’t say that humour is a focus on Clockwork Revolution either, considering it hasn’t launched yet, but the trailer does show us quite a lot of jokes. One character, a puppet dressed up as a Victorian man, is called “The Pissed-Off Doll”. Another is called “The Knob”.

I generally also find cursing in British accents to be very funny, but that might just be me.

There’s quite a lot of physical comedy as well, and the kind of dry humour that I find almost reminiscent of Obsidian’s games, in a good way. It turns out that apart from the aesthetic similarities, which one could chalk up to there being fairly few prominent Steampunk video games in the space, these two games aren’t all that similar at all. In fact, Clockwork Revolution seems to be shaping up to be a far more interesting game than BioShock Infinite ever was, if it manages to execute on its lofty ambitions. Then again, Ken Levine hyped BioShock Infinite up too, and we all know how that shook out.

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