BioShock 1 and Infinite both have the same problem.

On your first time through, the story pulls you through the game. There setting and characters are so mysterious and interesting you’re compelled to figure out what the hell happened and get to the bottom of it. You might notice, on your first run, that the games are really easy and the gun play isn’t particularly good. The actual gameplay gets repetitive, basically moving from big room to big room shooting things.

The special powers are fun the first couple times you use them but are mostly situational and the kind of thing other games just use items for (land mines, grenades, etc), just re-skinned.

Then at the end there’s a big reveal. Some plot twist that re-contextualizes the whole game and leaves you thinking about the game for an entire week.

Then you replay them and realize… The big twist at the end? There’s almost zero foreshadowing and it would be impossible to have predicted either of them on your first playthrough.

There are plenty of factions that have different political ideologies, but they are nothing more than a setting. The most obvious is how they spent the first half of Infinite pretty clearly establishing that Comstock and his associates were violently oppressing the working class in Colombia and that Daisy Fitzroy’s rebellion was both personally and ideologically justified. Then all of a sudden Booker is there enemy because… He thinks they were too violent in their pursuit to overthrow that oppression or something? It really felt like the devs just needed to throw more enemies at you in the back half of the game so they made a flimsy excuse to do that.

The BioShock games give the illusion of talking about politics and ideology, but really the only message is just “extremism bad”.