Bioshock Infinite feels like a game with far too many good ideas. I can’t decide whether this is really an issue I have with the game or just an indicator of precisely how great it actually is. The direction it eventually shifts its focus when it comes to presenting its many, many topics wasn’t where I hoped it would go, but the game is such an exhilarating, engaging and tight ride that it’s hard not to consider it completely successful.
Bioshock Infinite, ostensibly unrelated to the previous Bioshock titles, takes place in the year 1912 in the floating city of Columbia, where a man named Comstock rules over his people as a prophet. He and his people have taken the ideas of American Exceptionalism and national pride to some crazy new extremes, and the result is a city that is breathtaking and beautiful on the outside, it’s readily apparent that something about the place is horribly wrong.
Players take the role of Booker DeWitt, a former Pinkerton agent and army veteran who, after accumulating an enormous amount of debt, is sent to Columbia by his debtors to bring back a girl named Elizabeth who Comstock is holding in the city.
Elizabeth is special, though. She has the ability to open tears, which are rifts between the reality that she exists in and another random one. In gameplay, she can open tears that benefit Booker in combat, but the tears also have an enormous narrative significance.
If you’ve made it this far without hearing any more plot details for Bioshock Infinite, I won’t go any further. I’d love to really dig deep and discuss more of the amazing things that this story does, but the way that the game so effortlessly shatters your perception of its universe in the end makes it difficult to talk around what happens. The narrative is big and complex, and the more left for you to discover rather than be spoon-fed, the better your experience.
Bioshock Infinite doesn’t really discuss its themes, which include nationalism, racism, revolution, and identity, so much as it presents a world and ideas and lets you piece things together. It’s not exactly subtle (if you don’t catch the fact that almost everyone in Columbia is insanely racist, then I have no words), but it doesn’t come forward and explicitly tell you how it feels about what is going on in its world.
The game takes a huge amount of inspiration from American history, and having a decent amount of knowledge in that field will improve your experience immeasurably. Likewise, playing the game through a second time reveals a frankly unbelievable volume of foreshadowing from the moment the game begins. Columbia is as rich a world as Rapture before it, filled with audio logs (called voxophones) that deepen your understanding of characters and environmental storytelling on par with the Portal series.
When Bioshock Infinite begins to shift into the mid/endgame, it feels as though it’s abandoning its commentary on various aspects of American culture in favor of a more heavily science-fiction style story. The change in focus was not what I expected, nor what I had hoped for, but it handles everything so well that I feel like I have no room to be upset. If I’m judging Infinite on its execution, I have no qualms in the narrative space.
It’s still hard for me to believe that a game that deals with so much can be so tightly constructed from a narrative standpoint, especially considering how often it shifts tonally. All the more surprising is that all of this intricate, challenging material is coming out of a hugely marketed, big budget AAA game. It’s a resoundingly polished piece of work with the heart and soul of an indie title.
Where this game shines even brighter than its predecessors, however, is in the combat, which is frantic and exciting. Thanks to the inclusion of Vigors, which act similarly to Bioshock’s Plasmids, giving Booker special abilities such as electricity, shooting a murder of crows, or possessing your foes, the combat feels distinctly like Bioshock while still diverging enough to provide a unique experience.
The combination of Vigors and guns (which consist of a mostly standard repertoire, including a machine gun, pistol, grenade launcher, shotgun, and rocket launcher, but everything has a distinct steampunk style) make up the fluid flow of combat, which allows Booker to quickly swap between whatever he has access to. The Vigors work extremely well in concert together and with your assortment of weapons, and combat is fast, snappy, and brutally satisfying.
My favorite element of the game’s combat is the Skyline, which acts as Booker’s most convenient method of movement and traversal. With a Skyhook attained early in the game’s campaign, Booker can jump up to or onto rails that are strewn throughout a number of Columbia’s environments. From there, Booker can reach more out of the way places, as well as leap down to deliver a powerful melee attack to any enemy below him. It takes the solid but somewhat ordinary combat and gives it a sense of dynamism and speed that is unrivaled in first-person shooters.
To top it off, Elizabeth is a nearly constant companion in your adventure, and before you cry “escort missions suck,” know first that Elizabeth cannot die in combat and, in fact, does not require any of your babying. She is perfectly capable of handling herself and acts only as an asset in combat rather than something you need to be worrying about constantly. It’s a testament to her design, her animation, and Courtnee Draper’s fantastic voice performance that I always saw her as a character rather than an NPC, which is more than I can say for the rest of the inhabitants of Columbia.
In addition to all of this, Bioshock Infinite is also one of the best looking and sounding games I have ever played. Columbia is the closest I’ve ever seen paradise rendered graphically, with its cascading lighting, bright colors, and its sheer inventiveness. It is a shockingly beautiful and well-realized world throughout, and exploring Columbia is beyond a joy.
The soundtrack and original score might be even better. The shrill battle themes, filled with disturbing screeches every time Booker executes an enemy, gets the adrenaline rushing during combat, and the anachronistic songs played throughout, including a barbershop quartet rendition of the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” and ragtime cover of Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love,” demonstrate fairly subtly how messed up this world is, while also cluing you in to what might be going on.
The game’s voice acting, as with the original game, is phenomenal, especially in the case of Comstock and Elizabeth. Despite what you learn about Comstock throughout your journey in Columbia, it’s hard not to be swept up by some of his voxophone messages. But it’s Elizabeth that really acts as the emotional tether for the game, as her arc and interactions with Booker are the very core of the game’s narrative, and Courtnee Draper’s beautiful, occasionally heartbreaking, occasionally heartwarming performance are basically perfect.
I have complaints, but they are few. The astounding visual creativity of the first few hours of the game dies off as the civil war in Columbia begins, the PC version, while the best looking of the three iterations, is also plagued with some serious stuttering and frame-drop issues, and the fact that the entire game isn’t more deeply a critical commentary on America still sort of bummed me out a little.
However, this is no reason not to play Bioshock Infinite. It’s astoundingly successful in just about every way, and I personally believe that it triumphs over its predecessor. Unless there are some major surprises at the end of this year, I almost expect it to be my favorite game of the year.
