Bioshock: Infinite is perhaps the most ambitious game yet to be released in 2013, and I really don’t think that’s an exaggeration. Bioshock is, as the press for Infinite reminds us, still one of the highest rated games of all time, and for good reason. Its setting, villain(s), gameplay, ideology and narrative were all top-notch, and the experience as a whole made the lackluster ending and arbitrary moral choice system bearable. After a failed initial sequel with more leaks than the underwater city in which it was set, Infinite seeks to capture the spirit and the high-mindedness of the original. This, it fails to do, and while Infinite is indubitably better than the lackluster Bioshock 2, if only for its reach, it is that very reach which exceeds the grasp of Infinite, which fails to deliver the motivation, the comprehensive vision and the unique spirit of the first game.
The most obvious problems early on in the game are structural problems related to the gameplay itself. The game sets itself up well, finally assigning the melee attack to a button instead of a weapon slot, an improvement over the previous games. What’s more, the game has melee executions which both emphasize the rough-hewn nature of the player’s character and enhance the personal, adversarial nature of each combat encounter. Further improving over the previous games, the player finally has the ability to sprint, and movement is further aided by the addition of a skyline system whereby, in the proper contexts, players can leap and fly around the sky like energetic lemurs. It is worth noting that this skyline system is probably the best-executed system of fast, first person movement in any game.
That being said, the game’s structural problems become almost instantly obvious when it becomes clear that players cannot store medkits or “salt”, the substance which powers the renamed plasmids. In previous games, the player could store 9 medkits and 9 “eve hypos” which would refill the meter on the powers the player was given. This was good because, for one, it let the enemy encounters become more complex, allowing the player to take a hands-off, long range approach while recovering health and utilizing the powers on a frequent basis, or similarly allowing for a more melee-focused approach by once more allowing the player to recover health and power while dealing damage to each enemy in rapid succession.
In Infinite, the player is forced to pursue a kind of middle road since they can neither utilize their powers with great frequency or go too long without having to search for a health-kit on the map while being attacked on all sides. This is alleviated somewhat by the presence of Elizabeth, who will throw you health and salts when you need them, but she does not do this reliably enough to fully rely on it as a strategic point. Further helpful is the addition of a regenerative shield, but in dense firefights even this becomes moot at certain points, and it still doesn’t address the use of the powers which the game encourages you to use at every turn.
Speaking of powers, or vigors, as the game calls them, there seems to be a bit lacking here. In addition to the aforementioned problems, you acquire the powers in a linear fashion that would be more fitting for a Zelda game. This wouldn’t feel so limiting if the first two Bioshock games hadn’t allowed you to freely purchase the powers that you wanted. Sure, there were limits to how you could do this, but there were more of them in total and you could still essentially get all of the important ones early on. Here, some of the most useful plasmi- I mean vigors, are not available until the last few hours of the game.
Further complicating the matter is the way the guns work, or rather don’t work. Early on you receive a pistol and then a machine gun. “Oh,” my excited mind said, “I’ll upgrade these as much as I can, just like in Bioshock 1!” Sure enough, there was a place to buy upgrades close by, and I dumped a good chunk of my money into my Machine Gun and pistol. Later, I found a shotgun, and much to my dismay I discovered that, in another annoying departure from the original, now I was only allowed to have 2 guns at a time. “Oh well,” I thought, “the pistol and machine gun will just have to serve their particular, kickass, fully upgraded purpose until the end of the game.” I expected this, I reiterate, because that was the precedent set by the two games to which this claims to be a sequel. However, much to my surprise, a few more hours in I happened upon a “hand cannon” and a “repeater”. I picked them up, noting a red background on the upgrade menu as I did so, and sure enough, they were a kind of second-tier pistol and machine gun. At first appearance of these second-tier guns, there’s no real issue, but as the game goes on, the amount of money in your pocket becomes more important and suddenly your puny first-tier weapons might as well be potato guns against the waves of armored and heavily armed foes you have to gun down. In the first Bioshock, you could circumvent this problem through heavy use of plasmids, but in this one you have to find salts on the map during the fight to recharge them, so that is eventually an invalid strategy.
It was around the time I figured this out that I noticed another annoying deviation from the first Bioshock. In #1, money and adam were two completely separate things; money purchased supplies that you would use up like bullets and medkits, and adam purchased the upgrades that allowed you to progress further in your superpowered fantasticness. Here, cash powers and upgrades everything, buying supplies, upgrading weapons and upgrading plasmigors. Aggravating this process, there are several sections in which the only way to acquire ammunition for the gun you’re carrying is to purchase it, and what’s more, dying costs money. Furthermore, upgrade prices vary so much across so many expensive items that in order to really progress you both have to be very careful with how you spend your money and be very careful to search for cash anywhere and everywhere you can. Again, your blue-dressed cocker spaniel Elizabeth helps with this, but not so much that you can afford to not scour every single room everywhere for every possible bit of cash.
This touches on yet another frustrating aspect of the game. It often seemed, at least to me, that there was no way to really survive the game world other than to explore every possible nook and cranny for every piece of cash, every upgrade and every medkit. Maybe I was just bad at the game, but it often seems like you’re being indirectly coerced to explore every part of the map for no other reason than that you really can’t afford to do otherwise. In one infuriating instance, I found a codebook in a dress store which pointed me to look in the bank for a secret puzzle. An ardent player of RPGs, I left for the bank with a determination to complete the side quest and get the powerups before continuing with the main mission. I found my way to the bank, but I couldn’t get past the front door. Not so easily discouraged, I scoured every inch of the map outside looking for some kind of backdoor into the bank. To my chagrin, I eventually figured out that you have to proceed a bit more with the story quest before the sidequest can be completed, because opening the door to the bank requires Elizabeth to open a tear (the game’s version of deus ex machina) to the front door.
These “tears” form one of the central gameplay mechanics, allowing Elizabeth to open windows to alternate dimensions in which there is cool stuff that you can use. These often include ammo, medkits, cover and other useful items, but it always comes across as more of a gimmick in more solid gameplay mechanics than a gameplay mechanic in and of its own right. This is because there’s no time delay between opening tears, and while you can only open one at a time, the speed with which you can open one and switch to another makes it so that they just feel like cyclical parts of the same environment.
Of that environment, there is some good to say. On the whole, the aesthetic presentation of the game is strong, and at the very least it presents a (mostly) cohesive creative vision that is strong and constant until the last hour or two. The city is beautifully rendered, and so are most of the games effects. Particularly impressive are the segments that accompany the acquisition of a new vigor. The first of these, in which the player’s hands seem to be boiled and burnt off, only to be restored anew, is well crafted and immersive, but after that each one becomes increasingly less interesting.
The same cannot be said of the character design. All of the enemies the player faces are fairly bland, and felt simply uninspired to me. There is one character, the “Songbird” whose design is truly interesting and breathtaking, but he barely really appears at all, and when he does appear he does so in cutscenes. There are some aesthetic cues there to the Big Daddy, but the Big Daddy was such an icon because the player had to fight something like 23 of them throughout the game, and as long as you waited to engage them you could really get a good look at how they moved and reacted to the world around you. Songbird only serves as yet another kind of deus ex machina, inexplicably finding the player and foiling his plans wherever the plot deems it necessary to do so.
The single consistent exception to the flaws in character design can be found in Elizabeth, the player’s constant companion throughout the game. Her costume and design are at once simple and elegant, expressing her character and the way that character develops visually. As mentioned, her costume changes gradually throughout the game, sometimes in ways which are subtle and other times in ways which are drastic. There is one annoying point at which her costume significantly changes from a simple, fairly practical outfit to a more revealing, completely impractical corseted gown which is explained away with a classic “this is all I could find”. The game later pays lip service to an explanation for this move, but to a critical eye the purpose is clear, and it’s disappointing given the otherwise strong, central portrayal of Elizabeth’s character.
All of these issues make the gameplay feel simply lacking, but beneath the generally enjoyable, though terribly problematic gameplay, Infinite sports what is at once perhaps the most ambitious, carefully written, thoughtfully constructed and ultimately empty, emotionless narrative in recent memory.
However, given the length of this article as it stands, my criticism of Infinite’s narrative and thematic structure will be given an exclusive treatment in a second part later this week.
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