Bioshock Infinite Review a.k.a. Bioshock Infinitely Overrated

Lucas Versantvoort / October 3, 2014

Yeah, I know, clichéd review title...

Bioshock Infinite, despite all the marketing and its revolutionary aura, is quite a disappointment. Although it has all the hallmarks of a typical Bioshock title – great set design, great original score and licensed music – the gameplay makes me feel like I’m playing Call of Duty and that's just one of its many problems.

            Let’s start from the beginning. The year is 1912 and most of the game takes place in a city in the sky, so already the game’s giving you the idea it’s trying to differ itself from its predecessors. The city is called Columbia. You control Booker, a man on a mission given to him by a stranger to find a girl, Elizabeth and return her to them. This way, he’ll ‘wipe away the debt.’ What debt is meant, remains a mystery. You arrive at the city and all seems well, but of course eventually things go crazy and you are perceived to be some ‘false shepherd’ who will overthrow the city’s leader, Comstock, and corrupt Elizabeth. Eventually you find Elizabeth and you both embark on a long quest to escape the city. Seems pretty straightforward, except it’s not. Elizabeth has special powers with which she can tear open reality and bring part of another reality, an alternate universe, into the current one. As they march onward, we discover more about Booker’s past and who Elizabeth really is.

            Let’s talk about the story…which is both boring and even more boringly told. The only scenes that kept me pressing ever onward were Booker’s black-and-white nightmares, the occasionally interesting relationship between Booker and Elizabeth, etc. My main question however is: were all the parts about America’s bloody history and religion, etc. actually intended as some intellectual Big Statement on the Folly of Man or something? I’ve read so many articles saying they felt bludgeoned to death with these big messages that it almost makes me feel all these messages are meant ironically. I will say this for the story: space-time issues aside, the final twist was pretty good. I know stories dabbling in space-time concepts, alternate universes, etc. are all likely to be criticized for not making sense, but I still liked the twist. It was a pretty satisfying payoff after enduring this game. It felt like something I hadn’t seen before, to me anyways. The rest of the game however…

One of the things I realized again and again whilst playing was that…I don’t really care about any of these characters. You control Booker who, despite being voiced by Troy Baker, is about as interesting and charismatic as a brick. Watching him discover more and more about his past didn’t feel interesting or compelling at all. I suppose it doesn't help you're spending 99% of the game shoving your 'hook-saw' into people's faces, so any soul-searching he does in between is automatically suspect. What's even worse is that the final twist likely implies all the things he's experienced over the course of the game don't mean anything; in other words, there is no character development. More interesting is the case of Elizabeth who was touted by Irrational Games and lots of reviews as being a fantastic character and a breakthrough in AI programming. Although her character is relatively speaking one of the better parts of the game, I don’t feel her character is so amazing as to be remembered for years to come. Why? Because she was specifically created to resemble an actual human being and when that’s your goal, the ways in which you fail become even more apparent; more specifically, the programming behind Elizabeth becomes more obvious and it makes you actively think about A.I. rather than simply experiencing ‘a real person’. For instance, when Elizabeth leans against a wall, I wasn’t thinking going like 'wow, what is she thinking about right now', but going ‘oh I see, they programmed her to lean against that exact wall’. Another thing often repeated is that Elizabeth can take care of herself during combat, that you don’t need to babysit her. Yeah, you know why? Because she’s invincible. She’ll go from cover to cover like you’re doing, but she doesn’t have a health bar, so the whole idea that she can take care of herself becomes meaningless. She’s also programmed in an artificial attempt to make her more useful. During combat, she’ll toss health and ammo at you when you’re running low on either. However, the items she’s tossing weren’t there before she tossed them. The illusion that’s being created is that she stumbles upon ammo that you missed after which she tosses it to you, but it’s artificial in that those items didn’t exist until she ‘found’ them and she only throws stuff when you’re running low. It’s an artificial attempt at making you like Elizabeth, to make you see her as a Real Human Being rather than just another NPC. I don’t want this to devolve into a discussion on artificial intelligence as it’s incredibly complex and the people at Irrational Games acknowledged this. I will say that despite these failings, one can’t deny that Elizabeth avoids the common pitfalls in A.I. programming: standing in your way and dying too easy. *cue tepid golf claps*

However, the main thing that drags the entire experience down is the gameplay. In a sense, it’s the same as the other two games, but crucially, the balance between gunplay and using your powers is completely gone. I played through the entire game, rarely using my powers as I could get through pretty much everything done using regular weapons. The use of the skyhook also feels limited and could have been really exhilarating. I also felt the use of tears during combat was gimmicky, as it would only work during very select places. You’d think there’d be some radically creative ways to use tears in combat, but it pretty much boils down to accessing some platforms for your hook and extra weapons and ammo. Most importantly, the entire game turns into a huge Call of Duty-esque slog, going through boring battle after battle with Elizabeth not being hurt or captured in the process (of course) and conveniently tossing items my way so as to just elevate this game above being one giant escort mission...and all the while I'm wondering what this game could have been like.

The set design is something of a mixed bag. Although the concept of a floating city is great and it all looks impressive, the game doesn’t allow you to fully explore it. Except for the beginning and after you first save Elizabeth, you’re pretty much always on the run and denied the opportunity to talk to the citizens, to delve into Columbia’s history beyond those incredibly boring kinetoscopes which are in essence merely collectibles, a.k.a. artificially lengthened gameplay. Though you may use the story as an excuse, the fact remains that that’s merely an excuse. That’s like saying the people at Square Enix wanted to make Final Fantasy XIII really open, but the story, which involved the party being constantly on the run, forced them to adapt. Infinite is at its core a linear, Call of Duty-esque, on-rails shooter, because it’s the only thing that sells really well these days and the storytelling suffers for it. The moment this is felt the most is when, after happily exploring a very Vaseline-coated Columbia for a while, you stumble upon a show where you are suddenly confronted with the city’s racism. You have to throw the ball either at the interracial couple (thus condemning them) or at the announcer. Regardless of your choice, two guards stop you. All of a sudden, to escape death, Booker slams one guard’s face into the skyhook, killing him (a head-on collision with a rotating hook will do that). It's astonishing how in one single second, the game drops all pretensions of being about exploration and story etc. and goes into Call of Duty mode and never looks back.

Composer Garry Schyman

On the more cheerful side of things, Garry Schyman returned to compose the music. His scores for the previous two games, especially the first, were quite unique in their use of 20^th century, modernist musical traditions, i.e. their dissonant use of strings, etc. His score for the first game remains one of my favourite game scores. In Infinite, his style remains recognizable, but he’s adapted it to fit in with the 1910s setting. As such, his music sounds older, raspier and makes extensive use of aggressive, metallic percussion to represent the Industrialist city of Columbia. For examples, listen to the old school piano at 0:14 in Welcome to Columbia and the hard-edged music in The Songbird and The Battle for Columbia I through V.

Even if you say that in the end it’s the story and game world that people wanted to experience and not the gameplay, then you’ve still got a failure on your hands. Though I quite like the twist and how it might add some replay value (if only the core gameplay was more interesting), you’ve still got characters who are at best only moderately interesting and a game world that may as well be one giant jpeg in terms of interactivity. When I think about it, it’s probably best I didn’t see all those trailers that appeared over the years, because when you compare what those trailers promised and what we eventually got, I’d have been even more disappointed.