Review: BioShock Infinite

BioShock Infinite a first-person game for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, and Mac. I am reluctant to call it a first-person shooter because there is also a lot of exploring and use of magic powers in addition to shooting people. First-person action-adventure game is more appropriate. It was developed by Irrational Games, 2K Marin, Human Head Studios, and Darkside Game Studios.

Elizabeth, standing in a desecrated museum dedicated to deifying America.

You are Booker Dewitt, a private investigator in 1912 who is coerced by parties unknown to travel to the floating city of Columbia and rescue a girl named Elizabeth. Columbia succeeded from the United States several years ago and has built its own society that combines Christianity, the Founding Fathers, and a great deal of xenophobia, and is led by Zachary Comstock, who runs the thing like a cult of personality. Booker busts Elizabeth out of her prison, but not before discovering she has the ability to tear open rifts into other dimensions and pull things back into their own dimension. With this and various other powers and weapons, Booker and Elizabeth have to find a way off Columbia while fighting Comstock’s forces and dealing with the Vox Populi, the underground movement that wants to overthrow Comstock, and learning more Elizabeth’s powers and how Booker is connected to everything.

The game is divided between fighting Comstock’s men and exploring the city, going from one to the other in a linear fashion. Booker can carry two weapons, and picks up replacements and ammo off enemies and just laying around. Booker also has magic powers, called Vigors, which help him in fights too. Booker’s health is replenished by eating food, and his Vigors are replenished by some substance called Salt, both of which are found in Columbia.

You can buy upgrades for weapons and Vigors at vending machines.

Elizabeth spends her time following Booker around, commenting on things, and staying out of fights. All she does is throw Booker health and ammo when he needs it, and is thankfully invulnerable, so you do not have to worry about her.

Columbia's sky-line system gets around the city, and gives you a way to insta-kill some enemies.

The combat is okay. The dozen guns Booker can use do feel different and have their own advantages and disadvantages, so different players can play how they want to. Ammo is not plentiful, but guns are, so you have to switch up your weapons a lot, which makes fights more varied.

The Vigors Booker finds are a lot less fun to use though. About half of them are useful in a fight in terms of how fast they are to use and how effective they are. They also consume so much Salt that you will only be able to use them a couple of times in a fight. It is easier to just use a gun and one Vigor to stun large groups of enemies.

Combining weapons and Vigors can be really destructive, but not often.

The enemy AI is not great either. Enemies do not know how to hide or dodge attacks, and do not recognize sounds you make. They will often stand out in the open or wander around aimlessly, and they will not follow you if you run away, so you have to hunt down everyone. Their only strength is in numbers, and you will probably only die when you get overwhelmed. You occasionally fight special enemies who, unlike regular enemies, can kill you on their own, though like regular enemies it is not because they are smart, they just hit really hard.

Columbia's worship of Americana is downright insane.

Once you get over the novelty of a floating city Columbia, is not that exciting of a place to explore, even when it starts to turn into a warzone. The whole place looks like Small Town America spread over an entire city. There is no style in that aesthetic, just street after street of quaint, harmless houses and shops. Some parts of the game take place in large buildings like a factory or a nightclub, those are somewhat more interesting to run around in, but not much.

At first the story is about Booker and Elizabeth trying to get out of Columbia and getting sidetracked. There is not much story to that, and is pretty boring. All the while you are beaten over the head with the message that everyone in Columbia is a racist bastard.

Columbia's rampant xenophobia could have been handled with a bit more subtlety, so when the rebels start tearing up the city it does not seem stupid that it is portrayed as a bad thing. 

Then Elizabeth start using her powers to travel to parallel dimensions, and that is when the story really falls apart. Booker and Elizabeth start going into other dimensions to get past certain obstacles, and while the other dimensions are not different enough that Irrational had to come up with new looking areas (unfortunately) they do have one or two key differences that make it clear they are different places. But Booker and Elizabeth act like they are in the same place and the characters they were dealing with in a previous dimension are the same as in the current dimension. Even worse, they act like they act like their actions in one dimension carry over to another dimension, and blame themselves for what happens in one dimension when they had nothing to do with it. They never care about staying in their original universe, and it never crosses their minds to go to a safer universe, either by finding a new one or going back to a safer one.

It all culminates in an ending that is confusing, poorly explained, poorly foreshadowed, and trying too hard to be clever and shocking, that creates more questions than answers, trivializes a lot of what you did, and is unsatisfying overall.

I think the saddest part of all this is that, even though Elizabeth’s powers end up overtaking the entire plot, they still come off as lame plot device. It feels like Irrational early on did not know what do with a 19^th-century American steampunk city in the sky going through class warfare, and gave Elizabeth dimension hopping powers to provide a convenient way to move the characters along and bring in additional conflicts whenever they wanted, and it ended up taking over the narrative like some sort of malignant growth.

BioShock Infinite is not that great, it’s average. The combat is okay and the setting is unique, but the story is awful and the characters are dull. It is a real shame, given how much time was spent developing it.