Bioshock Infinite (

2013

)

I hope by now, my reviews have shown that I am not simply a contrarian who sneers at popular things while exalting the obscure. For god's sake, I gave a good review to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare [2007]! In the world of game reviews, it doesn't get much more mainstream than that! So, when I give the much-loved Bioshock Infinite a worse review than the much-reviled Bioshock 2 [2010], you can at least rest assured that I'm not just some troll out to get a rise out of irate fanboys. Indeed, though Bioshock Infinite is far from a bad game, it is still one of the most criminally overrated games in the history of the medium, falling far short of both its predecessors in virtually every regard. I really cannot fathom the rapturous praise that this game garnered at release, it's mediocre at best and a pale shadow of Bioshock's glory.

The game begins with the player character, Booker Dewitt, a hard-boiled Pinkerton detective already en route to a mysterious lighthouse with a simple mission: “Bring us the girl wipe away the debt.” He's accompanied by two riddle-speaking, weirdos who seem to know more than they let on. From there it's a quick rocket ride to Columbia, a floating city that looks like early 20th century America (imagine A Stop at Willoughby only with more racism). The only significant difference is that Columbia, unlike America, is a theocratic dictatorship ruled over by Father Comstock, a self-styled prophet (which is rather an odd choice when you think about it, as America even when it was not ruled by Enlightenment-era deists was never even close to having a unified religion; it's a bit like making a fantasy version of Czarist Russia where the biggest problem is the endless democratic debates). Booker is baffled by his new environment but plays along, as admitting he has no idea what's going on would probably end with him getting a bullet in the back of his head.

For reasons he cannot recall, Booker is branded with a mark on his right hand reading “AD” which is going to be a problem because Father Comstock has foretold that this symbol is the mark of the false shepherd, a villain that would seek to destroy Columbian society. So after blending in with Columbian society for long enough to go to be baptized and go to a carnival, Booker is exposed. From there he has to battle his way past the police and military on his way to the tower where Elizabeth, the girl he's been tasked with retrieving, is being held prisoner. After freeing her from the tower Booker will need to protect her from the Prophet's agents as well as lie to her about getting her to Paris when he really plans to take her back to New York.

A great deal of effort has gone into making Elizabeth likable, not just to the characters in the game but to the player as well. She is invulnerable in combat, to avoid the common issues of escort missions where NPC stupidity can cause you to lose the game. The last thing that the developers wanted was to turn her into Ashley from Resident Evil 4 [2005] and make protecting her a chore. Since Elizabeth is a walking Macguffin, this invisibility is a touch immersion breaking. Supposedly, all the soldiers and police that Comstock sends after you are trying to recover her, yet they just ignore her and focus all their efforts on killing Booker. It is, at best, an inelegant solution to the problem posed by escort missions, made all the more frustrating by games like Ico [2001] that handled similar problems with more grace. In addition to not harming the player by getting herself killed in combat, Elizabeth also proves quite helpful, throwing you additional cash in between firefights as well as ammo, health, and salts during combat. She's also, in a Bioshock series first, a conventionally attractive character (though she does still have a faintly simian look to her). It doesn't hurt that she spends the first half of the game in a schoolgirl costume and the second half in a corset. Moreover, she's pleasant company for the player, always reading with a joke or light-hearted quip.

All this effort to get the player to like Elizabeth backfired in my case though, because I can recognize obvious authorial manipulation when I come across it and I resent when a developer is so brazen with their attempts to toy with my heartstrings. Indeed, before long it started to grate on me just how perfect and precious this little bitch was. Moreover, the way she's constantly cheerful and quippy seems to contradict her backstory. A girl kept in isolation her whole life should show some psychological scars from her ordeal, if she's not going to be sullen and withdrawn then she should at least be a little shy. Elizabeth is dancing with strangers not ten seconds after being sprung from her prison. Moreover, she should be baffled by even small things out in the world, no matter how many books she was able to read while in her confinement. Yet she is never confused by anything save for the first time she encounters an elevator. Moreover, she also adapts to her changing circumstances with an absurd level of quickness, going from being sickened by seeing Booker kill police officers to accepting it in and even helping him in the span of a single scene.

The issues with Elizabeth's character are clearly a result of the developer's carving away any rough human edges from her in the name of making her more likable to the player. Player's aren't going to want to escort a weird, traumatized shut-in no matter how big her tits are, so they gave Elizabeth an improbably bubbly personality. Likewise, they aren't going to want to wipe away her tears after every gunfight, so the game makes her adjust to violence with a remarkable speed. At the same time the game is unwilling to simply ignore this aspect of her character, but putting in the smallest token efforts to fix these problems only draws attention to the shortcomings in the writing. Honestly, this is a case where it would have been better not to try, as all the attempts to give Elizabeth depth and nuance do is make the absurdities of her character worse.

The developers could have created a situation where the player was accompanied by a cheerful young woman who was being hunted by the Colombian authorities for reasons unknown to her. They could have made her a girl with a rough past that has given her an easy familiarity with violence, and a tendency to use humor to get past difficult situations. There is simply no reason for Elizabeth to be this inconsistent a character. Certainly, the story they were looking to tell and the characters they wanted to populate it were within reach, they were simply too married to the idea of a girl in the tower guarded by a monster and couldn't let it go even though it creates a ton of problems with the rest of their narrative. It's a damn shame, as Elizabeth (even more than the player character) is at the heart of this story, and as it stands she is unable to support that kind of narrative weight. However, she is far from the only issue with Bioshock Infinite's narrative.

Indeed, The plot of Bioshock Infinite is, simply put, a fucking mess. Any story that uses time travel and alternative universes is all but guaranteed to be a bit sloppy on the details, especially if it's trying to tackle other concepts and topics at the same time. However, not all Bioshock Infinite's issues can be traced back to its use of dimension-hopping, some are just old-fashioned lazy writing. Most notable of these is the sequence that happens after Elizabeth realizes Booker is taking her to New York rather than Paris and knocks him unconscious. When Booker wakes up the airship he was on with Elizabeth has been taken over by the Vox Populi, a group of rebels fighting against the Prophet's rule, and Elizabeth has vanished. How the hell did that happen? Clearly, the ship was not attacked and captured by the Vox, because if it was, Elizabeth would be in their custody as well, so the Vox must have found it after Elizabeth abandoned the ship. However, it doesn't make any sense for Elizabeth to dock the airship and then try to stowaway on another airship. Why didn't she just lock Booker in a closet and set the coordinate for Paris? She knows them, as that is what clued her into Booker's betrayal in the first place. Does she not know how to pilot an airship? Well, then why the hell does Booker? At least she grew up in a world where airships were common. Elizabeth's actions here make no sense, the only reason any of this happens is so we can have the rest of the game.

Yet the story isn't the only problem that Bioshock Infinite has, it has also managed to significantly downgrade the combat from both Bioshock [2007] and Bioshock 2 [2010]. On the surface everything is the same, you have a variety of guns supplemented by plasmids, here re-skined as vigors. This fact alone is a little troubling, as in Bioshock [2007] plasmids were central to the story of Rapture's fall whereas vigors in Bioshock Infinite are just sort of there. They serve no narrative purpose and only exist because the game wouldn't feel like a Bioshcok game without them. Still, the core combat is mostly unchanged and still just as solid as previous entries. The addition of zip lines that let you quickly maneuver around the combat arenas is a welcome one, as it makes the combat more dynamic and less likely to bog-down in cover-based shootouts. First aid kits are gone, presumably because some focus groups thought managing your own healing was too challenging, and in their place, you have the regenerating shield from Halo: Combat Evolved [2001]. You can also restore health by eating hotdogs from trash bins, an aspect of these games that will never cease to amuse me.

On the surface it's just another Bioshock game with all the associated strengths and weaknesses, however when you dive deeper, some of the technical decisions in this game are simply incomprehensible, and none more so than the decision to remove the ability to save your game. The previous entries in the series had used a combination of autosaves and manual saves which worked perfectly fine. Sure there were times in Bioshock [2007] where I quit out and lost progress because I forgot to save, but Bioshock 2 [2010] addressed this problem by simply asking the player if they wanted to save before quitting to desktop. That's not to say relying entirely on autosaves couldn't be made to work, plenty of games do it and do it well, the only problem is that in Bioshock Infinite these autosave locations are few and far between. It was not uncommon for me to lose fifteen or twenty minutes of progress as a rule when I quit the game because I simply didn't have time to finish up the current level I was on. The level Downtown Emporia, towards the end of the game, is an especially galling example of this. It just stretches on forever with nary a checkpoint in sight the whole time! I probably lost more than an hour of progress on that fucking level.

The other crucial misstep is to confine the player to only two guns at a time in a lame attempt to make the game feel more like Call of Duty [2003]. Naturally, this means less options and variety in combat, as you will always be stuck with whatever two weapons you have on hand or any other you're lucky enough to stumble across in the middle of a firefight. Variety is further curtailed by the removal of specialist ammunition, a move that further robs Bioshock's combat of much of its spice. Since you're constantly swapping out weapons it means that the upgrades you purchase throughout the game have no cosmetic changes. Granted this is a relatively minor gripe but the upgrade designs in Bioshock [2007] were generally pretty cool looking (particularly the one that upgraded your revolver into a 24-shooter). The only way that this change makes the game better is that it can result in some extremely heated firefights, especially on the higher difficulties, where you can easily expend all your ammunition and then have to desperately hunt for more while evading enemies.

Indeed, the mere act of upgrading your weapons and powers can be a pain in the ass, as the upgrade menu just lists out all the available upgrades for the twelve guns (about half of which are lazy re-skins which nonetheless have their own upgrades). The upgrades for each gun aren't even grouped together, so if you want to upgrade your shotgun you'll have to painstakingly scroll through the menu searching for the tiny shotgun emblem that means this is the upgrade you'll want. It's a minor issue, but a frustrating one nonetheless, as both Bioshock [2007] and Bioshock 2 [2010] handled this mechanic better just by grouping each weapon's upgrades together in a single spot. Moreover, the gun upgrades here are just so boring, always being unseen things like increased damage or faster reload and never anything cool like electric ammunition or exploding rounds.

Yet for my money, the biggest issue with Bioshock Infinite is not related to its jarring technical issues or gaping plot holes, but rather to a central confusion over what the hell the tone of this game is supposed to be. At times, the game is trying to evoke a feeling of a swash-buckling adventure like something out of a John Carter novel. It is, after all, a game where the player character rescues a captive girl from a tower where she is guarded by a hulking monstrosity, just the sort of job for a dashing hero played by Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flinn. Yet Bioshock Infinite is not content with merely being an uncomplicated adventure story, it also wants to be a horror game at times like its predecessors. As if that wasn't enough the game also wants to comment on American history and Christian religion with all the nuance and subtlety of a 14-year old who just discovered Howard Zinn. That's not even considering the time travel and alternate reality crap going on. It is a strange jumble of elements that never comes together effectively.

The horror elements are a particularly confusing misstep. Previous games in the series had been set in the ruins of a failed utopia where the gloss of its surface appearance gives way to monstrous qualities lurking beneath. Yet in Bioshock [2007] these monstrous elements always made sense in the larger world, and all too often in Infinite they are merely tacked on unnaturally. Take for instance the scene where Booker visits the Fraternal Order of the Raven (Columbia's answer to the KKK). The halls are all dark and spooky, bedecked with bird-shit covered statues and rotting food. Yet the order is not some collection of post-human ghouls like the splicers in Rapture, they're just a bunch of racists who have no reason to want to pass their time in a birdshit and offal laden building. Surely they'd at least like to keep the lights on! This would be out of place even if the rest of the game wasn't trying to be a fast-paced adventure story with lots of quips and thrills!

Yet where the story is really let down is in its underlying themes. This is a real shame because the creators did such a better job of it with the original Bioshock [2007]. The intellectual themes of Bioshock [2007] engaged the audience because, despite his many failings and short-sighted idealism, Andrew Ryan was onto something. He was simply taking reverence for freedom to its natural extreme and trying to fashion a society where everyone rose and fell to the level where they belonged, irrespective of the artificial limitations of class, race, custom, or morality. Sure, most players wouldn't agree with Ryan but it's easy enough to understand his point and see how things went wrong despite his best intentions. Bioshock Infinite cannot do the same as its predecessor though because Comstock is utterly incomprehensible to the audience. He's racist and wants to annihilate the rest of the world... for some reason.

Indeed, the most complex message the game attempts is a lame “racism is bad... mkay.” While that is a perfectly fine viewpoint to hold, it's also an extremely boring and banal one, that is about as controversial in today's society as being in favor of sunny days and puppies. Moreover, as Columbia serves as a stand-in for American history at large, the message has overtones of the insidious 1619 project. Like Bioshock Infinite, that largely ahistorical history project argues that racism is the defining characteristic of American history, arguing that the arrival of the first slaves was a more important date than the founding of the nation or the ratification of the constitution.

I'm not saying that America's history is not marred by the specter of racism, to ignore that aspect of American history is to ignore reality. However, to treat America as a uniquely racist entity or a nation that is inherently racist from its inception is just as much of a simplification. The USA is far from the only nation in the New World (or the Old for that matter) to practice race-based slavery, and to act as if the nation is uniquely racist is to indulge in the worst sort of American exceptionalism. The interesting tension of American history is the way in which reality often conflicts with the ideals of our founding and the awful compromises that were sometimes made in the process of forging a more perfect union.

Moreover, it doesn't make sense in the game for race-relations to be much of an issue in Columbia. Specifically, I'm not sure why there are even blacks in Columbia at all. The city is an explicitly white supremacist state, that regards all other races as less than human and an insidious danger to the public order. Throughout the city, the player can see numerous signs that simply read: “protecting our race”. During the game's opening sequence the player can see that miscegenation is a serious crime that warrants severe punishment for both parties. Rather than devote so much time and effort to a racial caste system, I don't understand why the Colombian authorities simply prevent all non-whites from entering their city? Surely it would be easier and simpler just to not let them move in, it's not like illegal border crossings are going to be much of an issue when you're located at 40,000 feet above sea-level.

The game does try to offer some explanation for this, claiming in an audio log that the blacks of Columbia were prisoners imported as cheap labor, but this doesn't make much sense either. We're talking about the gilded age here, a time when there was no shortage of cheap white labor flooding into America. Surely it would be easier to import European immigrants to Columbia, particularly given the game's setting at the peak of European immigration to the New World. Surely, a white supremacist society would prefer to import German peasants than African-American criminals. This attempt to explain Columbia's background not only doesn't make any logical sense, but it also exposes the limits of Bioshock Infinite's creators. Blacks are in Columbia for no other reason than the fact that the developers cannot imagine America as anything other than a racist state and need to break the rules of their setting to make it fit with the America they see in their minds. If they had an iota of introspection, perhaps they would have realized that the reason they're having all these issues making their setting make sense is that their conception of America is equally nonsense.

The setting also freely combines negative aspects of America from across its history. So in Columbia, we have a racist segregationist society that is also a militaristic imperialist power. Back in real history, America was an isolationist power for most of its history with an aversion to military adventures abroad that was imbued so deep in the marrow of our cultural DNA that the founders debated whether they could get away with no standing military at all. Obviously, America became an imperialist power by degrees throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries, but the major thrust of this imperialist drive came only after racism had become a nationally unpopular belief. Combining these two negative traits of America into one in a fantasy setting is fine, but acting as if they are inextricably linked is a massive pile of horseshit.

Though, before I go too hard on Bioshock Infinite, it does bear noting that the game does attempt a degree of nuance. After Daisy Fitzroy's revolution begins in earnest we see her trying to murder the children of one of Columbia's founders. It's a rare instance of a video game acknowledging the dreadful human costs that revolutions invariably (excepting, of course, the American Revolution and the revolutions of 1989) bring with them. Normally games just depict the fascist bastards and the heroic resistance and pretend that once the evil authorities have been removed then it will all be sunshine and rainbows henceforth, without considering the dangers of power vacuums and personal vendettas. Indeed, it's one area where Bioshock Infinite actually makes a stand and says something interesting. Naturally, the historically illiterate communists (it's always amusing to me when someone knows nothing of history but is 100% certain about where it is going and why) in the gaming press despise this sequence.

The uniform reaction against this sequence from the gaming press puts to lie one of their most cherished delusions: That they want games with weighty political themes. If they really wanted political games, they wouldn't be so fucking squeamish about a game depicting a revolutionary leader killing an innocent child. If they bothered to read a history book, then they'd know that this is neither an unfair or unreasonable scene. Indeed, it might be far fairer to show Daisy murdering the child of one of her accomplices, as revolutions seem to invariably target and destroy those they claim to be uplifting with far more accuracy and cruelty than those they seek to topple. No, what the bloggers at the mainstream publications want is political-flavored pap, dull predictable propaganda that assures them that their most cherished beliefs are correct and everything they despise is evil. For the most part, Bioshock Infinite is just that, happy enough to trot out the same boring critiques of America that were required reading in High School and College. Tellingly, the bloggers cannot stand the one moment where the game breaks with this approach and tells them an unpleasant truth. However, if a game or any other artwork is going to be a serious meditation on politics and history then it must, from time to time, be willing to tell us something we would rather not hear.