As the heir to one of modern gaming’s royal dynasties,
BioShock Infinite follows an impressive legacy.
Despite taking the series into the clouds, Infinite lost most of the
charm that made BioShock a masterpiece, feeling more like your average shooter
than the epic companion to a classic game.
Here’s why:
To put BioShock Infinite’s mediocrity in perspective, it’s
worth looking back at why BioShock became the phenomenon that it is. In terms of fundamental mechanics, BioShock
is a great first-person shooter, with smooth controls and fun features that
make it exceptionally exciting.
But BioShock stands apart from all other great shooters
because it created a wonderfully detailed and engrossing world. The underwater city of Rapture (BioShock’s
setting) and the beautifully twisted society crafted by Andrew Ryan (the
in-game personality behind Rapture) are incredibly compelling, in large part
because they take a real-world philosophy to an absurd degree, which in turn
leads to all the game’s major conflicts.
This setup puts BioShock’s world squarely in the uncanny valley for
societies – it’s similar enough to our world to be recognizable, but bizarre in
subtle ways that make it unsettling.
As a result, exploring Rapture and discovering its secrets
was fun (due to the gameplay) and intriguing (due to the world). It was a brilliant game all around.
BioShock Infinite starts strong. Protagonist Booker DeWitt, seeking to
retrieve a particular young lady, travels to the floating city of Columbia and is
immediately greeted by a strange cult.
There are white robes, a charismatic prophet, candle-lit altars, and an
unrequested baptism in the opening minutes of the game.
After awaking from his near-drowning experience during the
baptism, Booker finds that the powers-that-be behind Columbia have developed a
religious order that worships the founding fathers of the United States as
gods, taking patriotism to an uncomfortable extreme (in much the same way that
BioShock treated individualism).
That. Is. Awesome!
I was tingling with anticipation, hoping to learn more of
the philosophy behind this patriotic cult and expecting to see conflicts arise
as Columbia ’s
citizens fought with the overzealous adherence to this radical religious
thought. Infinite was set to be another
delightfully twisted adventure.
But then, little more than 30 minutes into the plot, the
cult disappears almost completely. Sure,
they still refer to their leader as the prophet, but there is virtually no
discussion of the principles governing this world. Instead, the narrative shifts into one
focused on segregation and class warfare.
Although not explicitly bad,
this storyline was awfully mundane because it was historically appropriate for
the game’s 1912 setting – that’s the kind of stuff that was really happening in
the United States
at that time.
In the latter half of the game, we see yet another plot that
supercedes the previous two. This final
story borders on pretentious, as it introduces extreme science fiction elements
with very little explanation. It’s
almost as if the game’s conclusion is trippy purely for the sake of being
trippy; it’s the gaming equivalent of M. Night Shyamalan’s later films.
That’s ultimately my biggest complaint with Infinite: rather
than creating an epic, detailed world for the player to explore, they tried to
merge three, resulting in three underdeveloped (and therefore uninteresting)
storylines. By the game’s final scenes,
I honestly didn’t care about the story or the world. My hope that everything would get tied together
in the end never came to fruition, so I completed the game disappointed with
the journey as a whole.
On the bright side, this underwhelming story is
fantastically presented. The world is
stunningly detailed, with gorgeous environments and fabulous character
models. As an example, you spend much of
the game traveling with Elizabeth (the girl Booker’s sent to bring back), and
she will idly lean against walls or look out windows while you’re looting
nearby trashcans. Those little details
bring some realism to the game, despite the somewhat cartoonish visual style. The voice acting and sound effects are
similarly immersive, so it’s a solid all-around presentation.
In terms of gameplay, Infinite is about what you’d expect
from a modern shooter. It features
several different weapons and a familiar control scheme for eliminating your
enemies, plus a gimmick that makes the game different from all the other
shooters on the market. Infinite’s
gimmick, the indistinguishable-from-magic “vigors,” are functionally identical
to BioShock’s plasmids – you wield a vigor in one hand while holding a gun in
the other, and they allow you to shock your enemies or possess machines. Unlike plasmids, the vigors aren’t explained
(why do I need salt to throw a
fireball?), but it gives the game the same basic feel as its predecessors.
There are some new features, though. The most prominent is Elizabeth . You spend about half the game traveling with Elizabeth , but it’s never an escort scenario; although she
makes you do most of the fighting, Elizabeth
helps out in some interesting ways and is able to defend herself. She will even occasionally throw restorative
items or ammunition to you in the heat of battle, which is pretty cool.
Infinite also introduces a Sky-Line system of rails circling
some of the bigger battlegrounds. These
rails allow you to quickly move through an area and let you drop on your
enemies for a devastating melee attack from above. This system is unfortunately pretty
disorienting, as your perspective will change rapidly when jumping onto or off
of the rails. It’s also the one part of
the game that really requires precision, but it felt pretty clunky to me; I had
a hard time with both getting on and off these rails quickly.
The most disappointing aspect of the otherwise solid
gameplay is the difficulty curve. For
the most part, the game ramps the difficulty up pretty slowly, with some spikes
each time you encounter a new type of enemy (and therefore have to develop new
combat strategies). But then it blasts
you harder enemies and much more difficult objectives in the last couple
sections. It can be infuriating to
progress through the majority of a game without any serious complications only
to be greeted with a difficulty wall at the end. If the rest of the game had been a bit
harder, I wouldn’t have minded the final scenes nearly as much, but as it
stands, the last bit of the game is exceptionally frustrating.
In the end, BioShock Infinite is a decent first-person
shooter. It’s built on the same great
gameplay as earlier BioShock titles, with only some minor hiccups along the
way. The real flaw, though, is in the
story – instead of boasting a flavorful plot in a fantastic world, we get a
schizophrenic narrative that can’t quite decide what it wants to be. As a result, it really does feel just like
any other faceless shooter on the market.
It’s a fun game, and it’s worth at least one playthrough, but it doesn’t
have nearly the same charm as the rest of the series.
My Rating: 6/10 – decent.
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