This Review is Infinite
Last time on Load Last Save, I thought it would be funny to pretend to review Bioshock Infinite without having played it. I used my intuition, limited wits and patented Gamer Sense to predict how the game would be. I based my predictions on the fact that it’s a cinematic shooter from the 2010s, and I know those well, and dislike them.
Now, I’m going to do the titanic task of actually playing the game I’m critiquing. This shocking new concept is what brings us to this overly-long review of one of gaming’s greatest masterpieces… Question mark?
Can Bioshock Infinite live up to its predecessors? Will it be a heavenly experience, or the work of a false prophet? Will I ever write a positive review about a shooter? If I review Quake, yeah.
For now, enjoy this review for Bioshock Infinite, and see if my gamer-brained predictions come true, or I’m just another fraud game journo.
Gameplay
Bioshock Infinite (2013) is a first person shooter. Set in Columbia, a city in the sky, you play as Booker Dewitt aka John Bioshock, as you shoot your way through an amusement park masquerading as a videogame. Use a variety of guns that work the same, sling powerful vigors that all do the same thing and rescue a cute girl who may or may not be a romantic interest. She could be your daughter. I don’t know. It’s off-putting how she acts towards me, and she’s always staring into the camera with her big ‘ol eyes.
With this being a shooter, you’ll be glad to hear that the shooting feels alright. Guns are punchy, sound nice, they’re snappy. This doesn’t seem like much, because it isn’t, but it’s a definite improvement over the first Bioshock. The guns aren’t a consistent source of disappointment here. That burden is for the level design, enemies and everything else to carry. The guns are fine. Functional. The bare minimum. Congratulations, you didn’t pass the driving test but you didn’t cause a five car pile-up in the freeway.
In more broad terms, this is a shooter from the early 2010s. You shoot uninteresting weapons, enemies shoot uninteresting weapons at you with pinpoint accuracy, you move like you have a sofa strapped to your back and your health regenerates if you wait long enough. It’s bog-standard. Store-brand gameplay in a white box that says “Shooter” on it in Times New Roman. Default Unreal Engine 3 shooter template-ass gameplay.
The variety of guns is lacking. They’re all different flavors of hitscan. Again, generic, uninspired and basic. I foresaw this in my predictions. Games of this era were allergic to fun and creativity. The interesting stuff is relegated exclusively to the plasmids, while the guns are just different flavors of hitscan. It’s such a boring arsenal that I got my prediction wrong. I thought there would be a lot of boring guns, which there are, but I also said there would be one or two fun guns, but no. There aren’t any. No cryo launchers, no napalm sprayers, no drill gun. I expected nothing and I was still let down.
As for the guns themselves, there’s a pistol, shotgun, hand cannon, machine gun, carbine rifle, burst rifle, grenade launcher, RPG, heated shotgun and something called a volley gun which is just a weird version of the grenade launcher. Each weapon is beautifully modeled, with an eye-catching level of detail, and they even have different attachments and looks for when you upgrade them. If only one fifth of that effort went into actually making them feel or function different.
Each gun is a standard point and shoot. Sure they have some obvious differences. The shotgun stops dealing damage if your target is outside of sneezing range, the pistol does negative damage to anything tougher than a water balloon and the sniper rifle exists only because the enemy has snipers. They have different ammo counts and magazine sizes, which the game insists on calling clips, but nothing else. A magazine and a clip are two different things. You’d think a shooter would get something that basic right. That has nothing to do with the gameplay, but it’s annoying, especially when every single upgrade for magazine capacity says it “increases the clip size”.
“But Roger!” You might exclaim. “Aren’t guns pretty much the same? They’re just metal tubes that fire a lead projectile. They may vary in size and power, but they’re all pretty similar, right?” I mean, yeah. If you go for realism without any of the tiny details that make real guns interesting, you end up with things you point at stuff to do damage and not much else, but this is a game. In games, guns should have different applications. Ones to do big damage at short range for when you need to take something down quickly and you can risk getting close, explosives to deal with a lot of weak enemies at once, grenades for lobbing over cover or around corners, hitscan weapons to take down fast moving enemies, powerful weapons to save for when you meet a tough enemy. The ones in Bioshock are more or less interchangeable. Sure, some do more damage at slightly different distances, but there isn’t much of a need to switch.
Another reason why the guns are so similar is because they need to be able to work in multiple situations. Back in the day, each gun had a particular situation it was good for. You could get away with that specialization because the player always had access to all of their weapons, limited only by their ammo. In Bioshock Infinite, you need each gun to be a jack of all trades because there isn’t a guarantee you’ll have the specific weapon you need. All because of that one thing games from this era loved to do: The two weapon limit.
As I correctly predicted because I have basic pattern recognition, Bioshock Infinite limits the number of weapons you can carry to two. You’re going to be swapping between guns constantly, not because you’ll be facing different challenges that need different tactics, but because you run out of ammo and switch to whatever is at hand. A pistol? Point it at someone and shoot. Machine gun? Same. Shotgun? If they get too far you can’t do much, but hey, you can still do it.
Thanks to this undifferentiated gun pool I spent most of my time with the carbine. It does decent damage and it’s accurate. I always kept it in reserve and swapped out my other weapon for anything I could find, but the carbine ruled the day. I never really found a reason to use the others, except for the rocket launcher to take down the motorized patriots. That’s if there was an RPG nearby to use.
This way of handling the guns lends to the game’s linearity. Picking the right gun for the situation at hand is a basic decision you make in a shooter. In this game, the decision is already made for you. You get to an arena and see a rack of carbines. Well, guess I’m using those. If you go forward and there’s an RPG, you know there’s going to be a motorized patriot or other tanky enemy coming up, so you should use that for them. Find a sniper rifle? Enjoy the next few minutes of playing peekaboo against dots on rooftops that are trying to decapitate you from another postal code. It’s unnecessary hand holding in a game that is already too hand-holdy.
Plasmids (Vigors)
The plasmids are the most interesting part of the game. They’re basically a magic system. You cast them using mana. You don’t have to reload your mana like in the first Bioshock. Thank Goodness.
There are eight of them:
Possession: Long-ranged hack. Turns a mechanical thing into a friendly unit. Useful at first, but it costs too much to use and you can destroy turrets more easily and efficiently with the others. It barely lasts, too.
Fire: Throw a fire grenade. It bounces around in a weird way. When it hits, it makes enemies panic and burn. Dass it.
Electricity: Still useful like the one in the first game. It lets you shoot electricity which shocks enemies and damages them. It briefly deactivates some mechanical things and I think it makes them take increased damage when shocked.
Knock up: Make enemies float in zero gravity. Its effect is a lot like how the leash works in Bulletstorm, which gave me flashbacks. Enemies take increased damage when flying, supposedly. It’s probably around 10% more damage. Negligible. Mostly useful for knocking people off the world. It seems like it’d be good for crowd control, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
Shield: Stop incoming damage, then shoot it back when you let go. It’s effective, but it comes really late into the game, and there is something better. Planting some suspense, we’ll get to it in a second.
Kraken: fun in concept. It sends a wave that knocks enemies back. Good for sending enemies off the world. You may start to see some redundancies here. Its alt-fire spawns a tentacle that drags an enemy towards you. I have no idea why you’d ever want to do that. It’s completely counter intuitive. You drag some guy towards you to get a better shot at your squishy little head? I never used this, not even as a joke.
Charge: Instead of bringing an enemy to you, you bring you to an enemy. Charge at someone and hit them for damage. Allegedly. This one is also a waste of time, effort and probably even money. Why would I want to run at an enemy? So they can more easily place a gun barrel in my mouth? This doesn’t do anything. You fly out of cover into an enemy, and slightly inconvenience them while all his buddies turn you into a collander. Amazing stuff. Glad it’s so well thought out.
Crows: Here it is, folks. The end-all be-all of vigors. You get this one pretty early on, but it’s hands-down the best. It humbles any other power and makes them eat crow. This sends birds at an enemy. Once afflicted by the bird flu, enemies will start flailing and wailing, unable to move as a bunch of crows pecks at their face. Now, there’s a lot of redundancy here, sure. Like most vigors, it stops the enemy in their tracks and damages them. It also has an alt-fire that spawns a trap, but what makes this one so special is its insane area of effect and its fancy upgrade. Once placed, the trap will spawn a huge buzzing circle of crows that puts Fiddlestick’s ultimate in League of Legends to shame. This means you can paralyze an entire army with one activation of bird beam. The other thing that makes this the greatest thing since sliced bread is the upgrade. For a couple hundred dollars, you can make it so enemies spawn a crow trap if they die while getting birded. This means you can enter a gun fight, throw a nest into the enemy, spawn a cloud of demon birds, then start shooting and turning your enemies into more birds, which causes a chain reaction of screaming, tortured soldiers unable to do anything. It trivializes a lot of encounters, but with how annoying and tanky the enemies get near the end, it’s completely justified.
These magics can also be combined to form a vigor explosion, which imbues them with new effects. I didn’t notice most of these, as they’re negligible damage increases. The only noticeable ones are the crow interactions. You can shoot lightning or fire at the crows and they’ll turn into either flaming or shocking demon birds that do more damage. This means you don’t even have to shoot most of the time. Just set off a bird bomb, set the birds on fire and let them handle everything without you having to lift a finger. Gameplay.
The plasmids are fun in a dumb, overpowered way, but the game deserves to be ignored like that because it’s kinda stinky.
There are two things that stick out about the vigors, and they’re both sort of story related. The first is that these vigor things are mass-produced. You find them in crates and they seem to be sold to the public, you even get to see the factory where they’re made at one point, and they’re pumping them out like crazy. If they’re so common and plentiful, why don’t any of the enemies use them?
There are fire guys and some crow guys who I think are using their respective magic potion, but none of the other enemies seem to use them. How is it that the main bad guy has access to both an endless supply of magical super-steroids, and loyal soldiers, but doesn’t combine the two? If the enemies had some version of these powers, there would be more enemy variety, they’d be a lot more interesting to fight, and it would make more sense within the game’s setting.
In fact, no one seems to be using the vigors other than the player character. If this is explained in the story somewhere, I didn’t see it. If it’s explained in an audio log, I didn’t listen to it. I’m not about that life. I don’t want to hear someone prattling in my ear while I’m playing. If you want to put some lore details, put it where I can see them. For now, I’m going to stay with my assumption that no one but Booker uses the easily obtained vigors.
The other thing is, how does Booker switch between vigors? He drinks them and then he can will each power into existence as he sees fit. The way I see it, it’s like taking eight different drugs at once then somehow activating their effects when you want. Drink an entire case of beer, some ADHD medication and some allergy medication. Then you go to the park, activate drunkenness for a bit, then activate the allergy med because of all the pollen then go home and switch to the Ritalin to get some work done.
I know this is a dumb videogame, and switching between vigors is just a gameplay thing, but this game takes its story and lore very seriously, even if I don’t. If you can switch between magical powers granted by mysterious drugs, and it’s never explained, I’m going to question it.
In the concept art for the game there were illustrations of a system that made more sense. Booker had a wrist-mounted device that he could put the bottles into and it would drip-feed him the vigor in a little tube inserted into his arm. It looked gross, but it at least made more sense than the one we have now.
Overall, the vigor system is the most interesting part about the game, and it’s not very good. The balance is all over the place. Some vigors are pretty worthless, there’s a lot of redundancy and using anything other than the crows feels like a waste of time. Glory to the crows.
Enemies
Enemies are all hitscan dudes with guns.
There are some specialty enemies, but they just jump forward and hit you. The crow guys look great; cool, intimidating executioners with a coffin on their back and they turn into crows. Amazing style, but they just teleport forward and hit you. The Mr Handy is another one. He jumps forward, making your screen shake like crazy and trying to smack you. You’re extremely slow and unwieldy. You can’t run away effectively and in the time it takes for you to turn around and shoot at it it jumps again. They take forever to kill, too.
There are also some fire enemies that spam fire grenades with near-perfect accuracy. They take a ton of punishment and then they explode. That’s it.
The metal patriot is just a less interesting big daddy. It plods forward and shoots off a high-powered machine gun in bursts. Wait for them to stop firing and shoot them back. Shock them like an electric eel. Shoot them until they die. Not very fun.
Levels
Like I predicted, the game takes place mostly in hallways. You run down corridors with one or two pieces of cover and plod your way through them. There is some exploration. There are small deviations from the main path where you can go scrounge for money or other goodies, but each level is mostly a straight shot down the middle.
I’m not against linearity. Old arcade games like beat-em-ups and shmups are completely linear, but they’re still fun and interesting. In beat-em-ups like Final Fight you walk to the right and that’s it. No exploration. Shmups put you on rails, so you can’t even control how fast you go through a level. What makes these interesting is the gameplay, and the fact that, even in these small, constrained areas, you still have enough room to maneuver around the screen and act out of your own free will.
The hallway level problem in these types of shooters is that, when combined with the enemies and the player’s regenerating health, it creates a very linear, binary gameplay style. The areas are really small, meaning there isn’t really anywhere to go. Enemies are hitscan, which means you can’t maneuver around them without getting filled with lead. Your health regenerates, so the game has to take that into account and has to let you regenerate it somehow, which means enemies won’t bother you much. This leads to the binary state: you’re either out of cover, shooting and getting hit, or behind cover, waiting for your health/shields to come back. There isn’t much interaction to be had, you can’t interact with the enemies since they’re in the same binary as you, you can’t look for interesting angles to approach from. You’re stuck in one corner playing peek-a-boo against an armed maniac.
When you’re not in a hallway, you’re in an arena. These are more open areas that, in theory, should fix all the problems that come with the narrow corridors. You have room to maneuver, more angles to attack from and more ways to get surrounded and killed. Wait, that last one doesn’t sound fun.
Arenas in shooters are an okay thing. I prefer the more organic level design of something like DOOM, Quake or the original Shadow Warrior, where you’re constantly fighting enemies in a variety of rooms and situations, but the arena thing is better than the hallways, but the problem isn’t just the level. Remember, the problem with these types of games comes from the rest of the design. If you’re surrounded by pin-point accurate enemies, you can only hide behind cover, which limits your options even further. If you try to move, your insanely slow movement speed just makes you an easy target as you sprint to a new piece of cover. Your speed doesn’t matter, since enemies could still hit you even if you could go faster than light.
A lot of the arenas in the game have a few problems. The main one being that enemies materialize next to you. The only spawns I noticed were when the enemy first enters the area. After that they start undergoing mitosis off-screen and split off into more and ambush you. This is more interesting than sitting behind cover waiting for the enemy to act, but it’s also incredibly frustrating. There were multiple moments where I was sitting behind a piece of wall enduring a category 5 hurricane of bullets, only to be blindsided by some dingleberry that materialized behind me.
The second, less common but more annoying problem with the levels is how they hide things, specifically the things with guns trying to kill you. This has to do more with how the encounters are designed, and the size of the enemies and other things, but it’s part of the level design so I’ll moan about it here.
I found myself asking “where am I getting shot from?” at least once per encounter. Bullets flying from nowhere, turrets far off in the distance, enemies shooting from behind bushes I thought were impenetrable. Yeah, bullet-proof bushes sounds like the stupidest thing ever, but that’s an issue I’ll get to in a bit. The point is that everyone is trying to kill you, and they will do it from across the map where you can’t see them. You try to peek out just to find the assailant, only to get filled with lead in the split second your head peeks out from behind cover. Then you crouch back behind the wall, wait for your shields to come back, peek out, go back behind cover. Lather, rinse, repeat until you realize the guy is shooting you from a rooftop two towns over and you have to kill him with a pea-shooter pistol.
Then there’s the ever-present volumetric fog. This is especially bad in indoor environments, where it looks like you’re always in the smoking section of a bar. In fact, where I first noticed this was in a firefight inside a bar. I was trying to see my targets, who were a few feet in front of me, inside a building, and I could barely see them. They were surrounded by a cloud of fog that would make Turok on the N64 say “damn, that’s a bit excessive”, but this is a problem with the visuals more than the level design. Or maybe it’s more about the way the enemies are designed that it makes them a pain in the ass to fight?
Going back to the bulletproof bushes (this section is all over the place), I have to explain why I would think a hedge would be a good place to hide from gunfire. This game has a lot of fancy set-dressing; its levels are packed with tiny details, hundreds of little props and decorations. It looks great, but it’s very bad on the gameplay side. There is zero interactivity with anything. Nothing in the world is a real object. Every bit of debris, every barrel, every loose chunk of anything is superglued to the floor, so that even if you shoot a stack of wooden crates with a rocket launcher, they stay intact. Glass can’t be broken, wooden crates are immovable, and every surface is a hard wall. Except bushes, apparently. They’re not common enough in the game for me to know that they’re not walls, nor common enough for this to have been a problem, but it happened once or twice, but the first time I was shot by an unsuspecting hedge, I damn near lost my mind. After so many hours of taking cover behind wooden barrels and literal cardboard cut-outs in another section, the hedge is the thing they decide should have some realistic properties.
The levels overall lack real readability and interactivity. There are hundreds of modeled props and objects, and none of them really exist. Having a shootout in a room made of wooden counters and covered in glass bottles, then looking around at the carnage to find that every single inch of it is as spotless as if it had just been cleaned by a squad of elite maids is immersion-breaking. Not to mention completely boring. I hated the original Bioshock, but in that game, if I saw a gas canister, I knew I could use it to do something interesting. It was there for a reason, not just to be set-dressing.
Presentation
I’m not exaggerating when I say that this game looks incredible. Sure, it has that undeniably dated Unreal Engine 3 look to it, with the excessive bloom and weird volumetric fog, but it still looks great. Every area is packed with tons of meticulously detailed objects. If there’s an office, you know damn well there will be a fully modeled desk, with individually made papers, trinkets and a chair. There will be a ton of other little assets thrown around, every surface will be uniquely textured. It’s a joy to look at, and the strongest aspect of the game.
Every area looks distinct. Each part of Columbia has unique buildings, hand-crafted storefronts, all with detailed signs and artfully laid out displays. When things start to go sour, the bombed-out parts of the city have that Hollywood clutter to them, where it’s messy in an intentional way. Rubble and other debris placed in visually appealing ways, made to frame specific craters or blasts. Whenever there are environmental story-telling corpses, they’re always laid out in artistic poses framed by hand-painted blood splatters. You can tell it was made by a team of talented artists and a massive budget.
The art direction is fantastic, too (except for the fog that constantly obnubilates everything). To contrast the first two games, this one takes a much more bright and colorful approach. The colors are more saturated, lots of blues and whites to give that kitschy Americana vibe while also reminding you that you’re up in the sky. When the situation calls for it, the palette switches to darker colors and more moody tones, but it still fits into the art style and it keeps its unique touches. Even in the more somber parts of the game, there are splashes of color here and there to keep things from being too drab.
The original Bioshock was atmospheric and spooky. Games tend to be called atmospheric if they’re spooky, dark or silent. Dark Souls has a great atmosphere, but it’s obvious. Just put someone in a dark, dank room, play some ambient noise and they’ll start screaming “OH THE ATMOSPHERE!”. Bioshock Infinite manages to be atmospheric by being colorful and boisterous. Every detail and minutia is made to give you the impression that you’re in a weird steampunk version of early America. It has a very strong sense of place.
Other than the fog and the fact that all of this is set-dressing and has no real gameplay implications, I have nothing bad to say about the graphics.
The sound design is a whole different story.
To counter-act the good put forth by the visuals, the sound team broke into the room blaring loud trumpets and screaming into a bullhorn. This game has one of the most unpleasant soundscapes since Hard Reset. There’s constant noise. Incessant cacophony. Unrelenting clatter. El mucho noise-o.
There isn’t a single microsecond in this game where something isn’t screaming in your ear. In fights you have the obvious mess of gunfire and other explosions. That’s expected. Then on top of that there are the enemies yelling nonsense, screaming “THERE HE IS! GET HIM!” narrating every one of their actions. The sound of bullets whizzing by your head gets replaced by the sound of bullets going into your head which is then supplanted by the loud noise of your shields shattering. This loud, ear-piercing shriek that happens every time your shields deplete could easily be mistaken for your ear drums exploding. It’s a battlefield, of course it’s going to be noisy, right?
Then you finish the fight and walk around Columbia listening to Elizabeth prattle on like she’s in a podcast. If you think there isn’t enough noise, you can pick up an audio log and listen to that for a bit.
The game loves high-pitched noises. The combat music is constantly running a cheese grater over a violin, when your shield breaks it sounds like thumbtacks entering your ear canal. There was one extended cutscene near the end that was just a mess of explosions, people yelling, metal screeching and a giant bird squaking and blowing out steam like a tea kettle. It gave me psychic damage.
This constant wailing makes it hard to find your enemies in combat. They’re always screaming from different directions and I couldn’t even tell where they were. I had multiple moments where I would hear enemies screaming at me, look around everywhere and not find anything. After a few minutes of thinking the game had made me schizophrenic, I found the offending enemies on a different floor. They were yelling at me through the ceiling. Their hatred was so strong not even an entire floor could stop them from seething at me.
This game joins Hard Reset in the “Games to play on mute” club.
Story
The Bioshock series is a fantastic example of why I don’t pay attention to stories in games. The first one is hailed as some sort of masterclass in writing, but it’s like a bad TV show, with its cheesy twists and dumb logic. Thing is, in hindsight, it’s better than the one in Infinite. It wasn’t perfect, but it at least put some of the gameplay stuff into context. Infinite’s story does away with anything good, exaggerates the fake, theme-park feeling of the previous game and does it all just to set up one of the dumbest twists ever.
Needless to say, spoilers ahead for a game that came out over a decade ago.
Infinite’s story is about Booker Dewitt, a hard-boiled man of mystery. He is sent to Columbia to get rid of some unspecified debt. To do this, he has to find “The Girl”, Elizabeth, and bring her to someone in New York. While in Columbia, he gets discovered by the city folk as being “The False Prophet”, an evil devil figure that stands in opposition to “The Prophet”, the religious leader of Columbia. He’s a semi-messianic figure that leads an unnamed cult based off Christianity. For some reason, he knows about Booker and sees him as the enemy. After being ousted as the anti-Christ, Booker is hunted by every cop in the city.
Later on he finds Elizabeth and breaks her out of her tower prison. He promises to take her to Paris, but instead steals an airship and sets off to New York. This starts the obligatory “You LIED to me!” arc where characters are mad at each other. While in the airship, after Elizabeth storms off, Booker is attacked by the Vox Populi, some rebel group who wants to dethrone The Prophet. They order Booker to get them guns. Booker goes, makes up with Elizabeth, and they both go to get guns, but find that the gun guy has been imprisoned and also killed.
Seeing as how the guy they need alive is currently dead, Elizabeth uses her evil powers to open a dimensional rift to another world where the gun guy is still alive. In this dimension Booker sees some of the soldiers he killed appear as ghosts. Then they find the gun guy, who is working at a ghost machine. Ghosts are notoriously bad at making guns, so they decide to hop into another dimension where things are fixed. In that new dimension, hell has broken loose, the gun guy is dead again but for real this time, and the Vox Populi have gone insane and are attacking the city.
At some point the leader of the Vox Populi threatens to stab a child for some reason, throwing any and all subtlety out the window. Now that I think of it, maybe all subtlety jumped off a cliff in the section where you’re fighting in a museum taking cover behind cardboard cutouts of racist Chinese caricatures. Hey, did you know America was racist and they didn’t take too kindly to foreigners? Maybe this was never subtle and it’s just hack writing.
The next event in this disconnected sequence is that Booker decides to confront the Prophet. Look, I’m going to be honest here. The escalation of events after the time jump was so severe, and things happened so off-camera that the game completely lost me. I don’t remember what happened after a character that was on screen for a total of 40 seconds attempts to stab a child for dubious reasons. After this point the story is a mess of explosions, characters that exist off-screen and a bunch of nonsense that only exists for a plot twist. I’ll use the Ritalin vigor and try to remember what I can.
Booker decides that he should go to The Prophet, who we now know is named Comstock. We go to a factory, owned by a guy named Fink, who is like the Andrew Ryan of Columbia, but Comstock/The Prophet is also like the Andrew Ryan of Columbia. I thought they were all the same guy. Maybe they are, I don’t know. I’ll check the wiki after this, but from what I can tell they were different guys.
A lot of explosions happen, loud noises, dozens upon dozens of non-descript soldiers are slaughtered, Booker goes down a bunch of hallways, Elizabeth yaps and rips open another dimensional goatse. It was all a blur of terrible early 2010s gameplay and forced walk-and-talk cutscenes.
My bad game-induced stupor was broken when my next objective was to dig up a grave, to get Elizabeth’s mom’s corpse to use her finger prints to open a door. Conveniently, her mom was preserved in an airtight coffin, so we could get her fingerprints. Inconveniently, she’s a ghost that attacks you. At that point I actually, audibly uttered “what the hell even is this?”. I’m suddenly in a boss fight against a spooky bride ghost in a graveyard, shooting ghost soldiers with a shotgun.
After re-killing the ghost, you do some other filler tasks, fight the ghost two more times then you can enter Cumsock’s mansion and do whatever it is you’re going to do to him. More stuff happens, more hallways, then Elizabeth gets captured and you see a future where Comstock destroys New York and Elizabeth is old and sends Booker back to the past (to play the shitty games that suck ass).
Then Booker confronts Comstock and you get to choose if you kill him or spare him. I chose to kill him because I thought it’d make the game end faster, but it didn’t.
Then comes the info-dump. Instead of weaving things into the story throughout the game, everything gets dumped at the end. First you go to Rapture. You don’t get to do anything there, but it’s an area of Rapture from the first game, near one of the bathospheres. You descend and go into different dimensions where you see that each lighthouse is a door into another world and in each world there’s a Booker, an Elizabeth a Comstock and a Protector, meaning that the Big Daddy, Little Sister, Andrew Ryan, John Bioshock pattern exists throughout time and space, in different configurations. This means that my prediction that Elizabeth is a Little Sister is technically correct (the best kind of correct). The story sends you to Rapture before saying that about the pattern, so you can infer that she’s the Little Sister of the Columbia universe.
Then it’s revealed that Elizabeth is Booker’s daughter, that he sold her off to Comstock to wipe his debt, which is still unspecified. This is told in a surrealist sequence where Booker hops through dimensions with Elizabeth. Then at the end, the big twist is revealed… Booker is Comstock! What a tweest!
Apparently Booker took the whole “born again” thing very seriously. He changed his name and became a pastor. Somehow he also got the idea to use Elizabeth’s dimension hopping powers to skip all over the timelines and steal technology to build his utopia. He basically pulled a Biff Tannen with the sports almanac, but with technology, so it’s more like if Biff Tannen stole a hoverboard and then went back to 1950 and reverse engineered it.
The twist is surprising, and the sudden revelations are impressive at first, but then when you think about it for a bit it all falls apart. First, the story relies on time travel and alternate universes, which is always a mess. The kick-off for the whole thing is that Booker convinces himself to sell his own daughter to himself. The whole reason for him to sell his baby is to clear himself of his debt, which is revealed to be an emotional debt; guilt over what he did at Wounded Knee.
If, like me, you’re asking yourself how does giving away a baby absolve you of the guilt of killing natives, you’re not thinking in obvious religious metaphors. In order to wipe the slate clean, he gave up his daughter. For salvation, he gave up his only child as a sacrifice. It’s a Jesus metaphor.
The game is full of pseudo-religious themes. It’s heavily based off Christianity; its imagery, themes and stylings, but it’s very light on real biblical things. The quote the Prophet keeps spouting “The prophet shall sit the throne and drown in flames the mountains of man” isn’t an actual Bible quote. It’s loosely based off a quote in the book of Daniel, but it just sounds like it. Much like the rest of the religious symbolism, it’s barely skin-deep.
A charitable interpretation of this would be that it’s deliberate. They use these biblical tropes that are devoid of any real scripture to present Comstock’s brand of Christianity as fake and a distorted version of the original faith, much like the Christian nationalism that gave birth to the United States. That sounds like a stretch, but the shoe kind of fits. On the other hand, it could all be a mess, and they did the biblical thing because it sounds epic and grandiose. I’m leaning more towards that interpretation.
Then there’s the obvious tangle of Booker giving his own daughter to himself. Sure, it’s the Booker from another dimension, so maybe he doesn’t have a daughter, but it’s still a mess. This is explained in the DLC, audio logs and other supplementary material but quite frankly I don’t care enough to find out.
At the end of the day it’s a twist for the audience, same as Booker’s hand being branded with AD. Booker has a mysterious mark on his hand; the letters AD. This brands him as the false shepherd. What do the letters mean? It’s a tweest! They stand for Anna Dewitt, Elizabeth’s real name. Wow! Now it’s all coming together.
Why did he brand AD into his hand? He doesn’t even remember Anna/Elizabeth. He never says why he has that. He just does. It’s almost like he himself doesn’t know why he has it. It’s there so the audience can see it and then go “ooooh THAT’S WHAT IT MEANS YOOOOO”.
Booker isn’t really a character. His development, much like John Bioshock’s development, happens before the game. During the game, he’s practically a blank slate meant to carry guns and watch cutscenes. Before the game, he was an alcoholic soldier with PTSD who murdered countless people in war, and before all that even sold his own daughter. The PTSD soldier part is told to the player through a prolonged sequence in a museum where another of the soldiers that served with Booker tells him all about what happened at the battle. This exposition dump is told to you while you’re in an active firefight against multiple enemies. I didn’t pay attention to it. Oops. I don’t know why the developers decided to put that important information as background noise during active combat. It’s like trying to listen to Moby Dick on audiobook while up in a tree cutting it down with a chainsaw.
Call me Ishmael. Some Years ago VRRRREEEEEEEEOOOOWWWWWW. Having little or no money in my purse, and nothing in parti- VRRRREEEEOOOOWWWWW. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and reg- VEEEEERRROOOOOOOOOOWWWWW.
After all that, what was my takeaway from the story? What did I learn, what would I say is its central theme? What’s it really about?
Well, from what I can tell, it’s about how you can never break free from your past and redemption is unattainable. This story is very Christian-coded, but its message is an inversion of Christ. Booker wanted to become a new man after slaughtering so many, so he became Comstock, and his new purpose was to slaughter many more using Columbia as a weapon. In every universe where he is baptized, he becomes Comstock and turns into a terror. In the ones he doesn’t, he becomes an alcoholic. In the one universe where he seeks to atone for his actions, the game’s universe, he finds out that he’s the central problem, and doesn’t receive salvation until he’s fatally baptized, drowned by multiple Elizabeths from different realities in an oh-so-clever inversion of baptism. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
“Roger! That’s a dishonest reading of the story! That’s only one universe, there are still many more, symbolizing the many paths you can take and the infinite chances at redemption!”
That’s where the multiverse nonsense comes in. Anything can be excused because there’s another universe where another interpretation exists. Booker died before becoming Comstock, but there are still infinite Bookers becoming infinite Comstocks in other universes. The timeline where Comstock bombs New York still exists. The one where Elizabeth bombs New York still exists. Anything can happen. There’s probably one reality where Booker goes on to be the voice of Kermit the frog and lives happily ever after. The only “real” reality is the one the audience perceives, which is the one in the game, where Booker does his best to redeem himself but only ends up dying for his own sins.
The story is a mess and I don’t like how it’s told. Some people might be impressed by the big “wow” revelations and feel that the pseudo-biblical themeing gives it gravitas, but I’m not convinced.
Theme Parking
In my review for the original Bioshock, I complained about how every in-game cutscene happened behind a glass or in another room, making everything feel like a cheesy theme park ride. Judging by how Infinite came out, I’d say that was intentional, since they took that concept and ramped it up to eleven.
Infinite’s world is meticulously detailed and packed with stuff, like I said earlier, and all of it is set dressing. You start the game in a brightly colored area that looks straight out of Disney World’s Main Street, with crowds of people you can’t interact with, along with animatronics and fair food vendors.
This opening sets the tone for the rest of the game. In every other section, there will be people standing around, talking, doing things, but they all feel like theme park animatronics. They perform their little cycles over and over, completely devoid of life. They don’t react to you, and you can’t do anything to them other than shoot them. If you do shoot them, they all cower and run away, and get replaced by angry cops.
There was one section where you go through the slums, to see how the poor, downtrodden masses of Columbia live. It’s run down, deteriorated buildings everywhere, broken and boarded up windows. It’s dark and dingy contrasting with the bright and airy feel of the main street. People stand around with signs that quite literally spell out their plights. “Sick Daughter. Please help”. Little street urchins gather around in their rags and lament their lack of food. All this is happening, and they don’t seem to notice you, and you don’t seem to care.
Booker walks around the area like a ghost, unable to do anything, to talk to anyone. No one acknowledges him. No one even turns to look at him. It’s trying to paint a vivid picture of the poverty and misery these people live under, but it ends up feeling less life-like than an animatronics show at Epcot.
In an interview with Eurogamer, Shawn Robertson, Bioshock’s animation director, talks about the challenges of making the world feel alive. How to animate each character, how to make Elizabeth feel natural but not like a weird cartoon character, that sort of thing.
On the subject of animating the in-game camera, he says
The hardest thing to do is make it feel like you’re not just floating along the ground. The minute you feel like a camera just moving along - which is essentially what you are, a cylinder with a camera on top - we’ve lost.
Here he’s talking about the actual in-game camera. How it feels to move as Booker Dewitt. He’s not referring to being an active participant, but that’s how I felt while playing this game. Like a floating camera. A non-entity. A complete spectator. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “I an a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all.” I am not playing as Booker Dewitt. I am a camera, made to look at cutscenes and experience the story through my screen and then through another layer of abstraction behind actual panes of glass in-game.
Most of the story happens off-screen. The characters that shape your destiny; Comstock, the leader of the Vox Populi, the guy who served with Booker, the gunsmith. Anyone that has a stake in the story does their thing while you’re running around with Elizabeth shooting dudes in the head for the 4000th time. Any important plot point is tucked away in some audio log. Answers to questions are in the DLC (which I’m not going to play because I’m done with this game). I didn’t feel invested in anything at any point because none of it involved me, the player. There were moments where I was asked to make a decision, but they didn’t matter.
The part that made this feeling solidify in my brain and gave me a lasting bitterness towards this game was when Elizabeth gets captured. She gets put into a scary green tube inside a lab, and she gets a tube stuck in her back like an Alaya-Vijnana system. She struggles against two scientists who are holding her down against an operating table, as she fights for her life trying to escape their evil clutches.
Then the animation looped.
I stood there for about two minutes looking at this little scene play out. The way it was framed, lit and presented, with the theatrical movements, cheesy horror setting and weird plasticky feel made it look exactly like the kind of animatronic scenes they have looping in the lines at a theme park. Where you move up in line, see the little scene, then move further in and you can hear the group behind you watching the scene as the audio loops.
Elizabeth herself makes the game’s stakes even lower. She’s with you all the time, and she’s never in danger. She’s immune to bullets, never gets targeted and just exists to look cute, open locks and throw items at you. She’s like Rush from the Megaman games, who you can call up to dig up items. Except you can’t ride Elizabeth like a hoverboard. Unless that was in one of the audio logs. In that case, I wouldn’t know.
You can compare her to Ashley from Resident Evil 4. In that game, you have to protect her in the story and in game. Leon (the player) is asked to go rescue Ashley, the President’s daughter. While in-game, she tags along with you and she can be hurt by the zombies. This could make Ashley annoying and make you hater her, or you take the job seriously and keep an eye on her. Either way, she’s your responsibility, and you’ll be looking out for her and taking care of her. You feel something for her because you have to interact with her in a meaningful gameplay sense. You really feel like you’re Batman- I mean- like you’re protecting her from danger, which is Leon’s mission.
Contrast this with Elizabeth, who’s never in any danger outside of cutscenes. You kidnap the most important person in Comstock’s life, he sends his entire army to kill you, but they never think to grab Elizabeth? You can excuse this by coping that she’s a secret, and no one but Comstock knows about her, so why would the army know about her, but don’t they see she’s with the False Prohpet? She’s helping their version of the Devil/Anti-Christ. He’s super-Hitler, and if she’s with him, she must be ultra-Eva Braun, and none of them think to grab her?
Ashley gets grabbed all the time in Resident Evil 4, and the zombies don’t even have an interest in her. They’re literal mindless zombies, yet they see her, notice her and interact with her. Using characters in gameplay to contextualize the story. What a concept.
Maybe Elizabeth is a figment of Booker’s imagination and no one can see her. There’s a Game Theory for you. That’s why she can materialize through walls and always shows up behind you even if your back is to a wall.
Between this and the complete lack of any interaction with the environment, I can’t think of Bioshock Infinite as anything other than a theme park attraction. A really boring one that takes too long. At least it doesn’t try to sell me souvenirs on the way out.
Conclusion
I don’t recommend Bioshock Infinte. It’s a long, boring, drawn-out, over-produced, self-important spectacle that puts a lame, twist-filled story over gameplay. If one tenth of the effort put into the set-dressing and world design had gone into making the game fun, this would be the greatest game ever, but it isn’t.
The shooting aspects are lifted straight out of its time. They’re just taken from the beginner’s guide to first person shooter design 2010 edition. Slow, awkward movement that doesn’t feel like it’s useful in combat. Over reliance on cover and hitscan enemies. Narrow hallways with designated cover spots. Low enemy variety. An incredibly restrictive two weapon limit. A disappointing arsenal of boring point-and-shoot guns that lacks creativity. It’s so average it’s practically remedial. If this were a kid in school, they’d get a C, but the teacher wouldn’t tell him to stay after school because she knows he has zero potential, and any effort is wasted on him. C is the most he can accomplish, and the worst part is, he’s proud of the fact.
This is a bit of a shame since the shooting itself feels pretty good. The guns are snappy, they sound good when they go off (one of the few things that sounds good in this game) and you can actually decapitate enemies with the shotgun.
In my predictions I said there wouldn’t be in-game gore, but I was wrong. I blasted a dude point-blank in the head with the shotgun and his head disappeared into a plume of blood, and I was delighted. Now, that might get me on a list somewhere, but I was glad it happened. Shooters are supposed to be violent. You’re playing a game where you’re using guns to take lives. I don’t know why so many games shy away from blood and guts in shooters. It might sound juvenile, but it’s fun. There are still no guts in the game. You shoot someone with a rocket launcher and they fly away, they don’t turn into gibs like in the old days. So that prediction was half right, half wrong.
The vigors were fun at first. They offer some cool stuff, but they’re very redundant. They seem unique, but they all boil down to “stuns the enemy, does some damage”. Their alternate fire always puts down a little trap that activates when enemies get near. Once I discovered the crows, I didn’t use any other vigor, except for the electricity one to shock the birds and kill entire armies with my lightning birds.
I didn’t feel bad about cheesing the game with my avian allies because the enemies are unfun to fight. They’re all dudes with guns that shoot at you from behind cover. They don’t implement interesting tactics or do anything cool. The only interesting enemies are the Heavy Hitters, as the game calls them, but they just have one gimmick they do: they jump forward and try to hit you. They also have five times as much health as the regular enemies. What a blast.
The difficulty overall is a sore spot. I played through the game on hard. Normal is the intended way to play, but I tried hard for two reasons: I thought normal would be too boring and because there’s something called 1999 mode.
The boring one is self-explanatory. These games are about the story, with gameplay being an afterthought. Every gun is easy to use, ammo is plentiful and enemies don’t put up much of a fight because they can die in two hits while you have effectively infinite health. Playing these kinds of shooters on normal means you’re an unstoppable behemoth that lays waste to everything in his path. That’s not fun.
Going for Hard mode was frustrating, but I thought it would be somewhat balanced because of 1999 mode. This is a special challenge mode you unlock after you beat the game. If the game has a post-credits challenge mode, I would think it’s because the developers put enough thought into the game to make it actually playable at higher difficulties, but I was wrong. It just does the same thing every other lazy game does with difficulty: it scales up the enemies’ health and damage values. You’re fighting bullet sponges that can kill you in two or three hits, and they all have aim hack. Lots of sitting behind cover waiting for my shields to come back.
1999 mode is a complete lie. I foolishly thought It’d be a cool, specially designed mode meant to be a new take on the game, but I’m stupid. I expected some effort on the gameplay side. That’s silly. Gameplay isn’t a cutscene. It doesn’t need effort.
It sounded like it would be a more shooter-oriented extra mode. Less cutscenes, more enemies, more ammo, all guns at once, etc. Like a new game plus for people who saw the story and want more of the game, but it’s nothing like that. It makes enemies even more damaging, reduces your spawn points, makes respawning cost money, you have less health, your shields take longer to regenerate and enemies are even more accurate. I don’t know how you can get more accurate than 100%. Maybe they start pre-firing, or shooting you through walls.
This goes against what a 1999 shooter is. This is more like “Extra 2013 mode”. I wanted to give this mode a shot, but then I remembered that Infinite starts with a 20 minute intro sequence, and I lost all interest immediately.
The game looks great, but it’s in service of nothing. The story it presents is a mystery box thriller that answers everything in the last few minutes. It has the pacing of a bad creepy pasta.
I’m a bit of a creepy pasta connoisseur, which is a horrible sentence to start a date with, but back in the early 2010s I would read any shitty horror story posted on the web or on /r/nosleep. One thing I noticed in most of the bad ones was their structure: they start off with an interesting premise/hook, they hit a boring mid point where not much happens, the end gets too convoluted for its own good and then in comes the third act info dump, where the author plainly explains the motivations for everything and everyone in excruciating detail. Nothing says “scary” like the eldritch horror monologuing for five paragraphs about the minutiae of his plans for world domination and the exact events that led up to him being summoned.
That’s Infinite’s story. It has a good hook at the start; who’s Booker, what’s his debt? What’s this mysterious floating land? Who’s Elizabeth? Why can she goatse open parallel dimensions? What’s the connection to the original Bioshock? Who is The Prophet? Then in the mid point nothing is answered. You just plod along going from combat encounter to combat encounter. Then at the end everything happens in the last 30 minutes, where you go from cutscene to cutscene watching every detail of the story play out while you just sit there and watch. Then it hits you with the twist: The call was coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE… but if Elizabeth is Anna, then who was phone?
Then when you think about it a little it all falls apart.
“But Roger! You yourself said you didn’t pay much attention to the story, so who are you to judge? Maybe if you weren’t such a crybaby little bitch and paid attention instead of sucking your thumb, you’d understand something.”
First of all, that’s a needlessly aggressive strawman. Second, I only put in as much effort as the game expects from me. In this case, it was very little.
Predictions
Now it’s time to go over my predictions and see what I got right!
Two gun limit? Check! Hallway levels? Check! Constant turrets! Check again! An easy 3-across bingo. Let’s see how many more we get.
Hitscan enemies? Of course. Free Space. Dumb reference to the first Bioshock. Well, considering you go to Rapture, that counts, but I won’t count it since it’s done to establish a thematic link between the two games. The main antagonist also stole all the technology from Rapture, so there’s the connection, but that isn’t told explicitly at that moment. I’ll be kind and say I failed that prediction.
Constant Walk and Talks? Oh boy oh boy. Hard check. No in-game gore? Eeehh. You can blow enemies’ heads off, so I got that wrong, but I was right with the thing where explosives don’t gib people. Half right, so I won’t count it. Stupid story twist? Boy howdy. I even got the Little Sister connection right, even if it’s tenuous and thematic. I’m disappointed that they never blasted Queens of the Stone Age.
Well, they did say that the story of Bioshock repeats infinitely throughout time and space, so maybe somewhere out there, in the vast sea of doors, there’s one where Booker and Elizabeth rock out to some Queens of the Stone Age while gunning down Comstock’s forces.
Maybe in that universe I could even have fun with Bioshock.
Read my heretical review for the original Bioshock here.