Perhaps the one silver-lining - even if Infinite might not live up to its name in gameplay, is that it sure does manage to be a source of infinite discussion.Irrational Games has spoken about playing as Elizabeth in the upcoming BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea DLC, saying that the team is working on making sure the sequences don't feel like playing "Booker in a dress." All these years later, compartmentalizing this game into a simple thesis is still damn near impossible. It's okay to enjoy a mess, and 10 years on, Bioshock Infinite is one of the best looking, smoothest playing, broken games ever made. It does all the right sort of emotional signaling you'd expect from a Naughty Dog or Insomniac Games production. There's nothing wrong with enjoying Infinite at a surface level. To play Infinite is to navigate a graveyard of unfulfilled ambition and lofty goals that are better explored in the likes of Disco Elysium, Dishonored 2, Wolfenstein: The New Order, and, most ironically, Bioshock 2. It relies so heavily on presentation that calling it style over substance is being polite. This was back when removing too much of what you'd already promised from a game would result in significant backlash, so everything promised is technically in the game, but in the easiest to execute fashion possible. Not that Infinite wouldn't try to backtrack its own backtracking later, but everything tends to play out like this. Don't worry though, because later in the game, the leader of the minorities, at the start of her revolution, is suddenly painted as being as cruel as the masters that used and abused her for years. The decision isn't even binary - Infinite interrupts you either way, and the only person who knows what you would've done is you. Except you don't get to live with that action. The 'racism' level with the obvious Klan-inspired cult that worships ravens, the 'religious intolerance' level where you face the ghost of Elizabeth's 'mother', the 'violence begets violence' level that weirdly undercuts the enitrety of the opening arguments about racism - feel like token setpieces rather than meaningful discussions on their central themes.įor instance, when at a horrendously racist rally where white supremacists want to punish an interracial couple, there's actually the option to either play along or try and defend them. ![]() The themes explored in Infinite over Bioshock are spread extremely thin, and weirdly comparmentalised into distinct in-game levels rather than functioning as a whole. The problem is that those ambitions for a headier story beyond the M-rated Disney fairytale of Booker and Elizabeth's escape from Columbia often sees them dragged into plot elements that are problematic at best.ĪLSO READ: Atomic Heart's Polymer Glove Is The Best Gadget I've Used In Years Courtney Draper gives one of the best performances of her life as Elizabeth, and it's safe to say that Infinite is part of why Troy Baker is cast in any story that involves a duet of likable leads, because he makes Booker DeWitt much more than a stale pair of hands rendered on your screen. Bioshock, whether you loved or hated its simplification of System Shock, had one hell of a twist, told with some of the best dialogue and acting in the industry up to that point.ĭon't get me wrong, the leads are incredibly well acted. All the mechanical shortcomings - from only having two guns to most of the more interesting elements being ripped out with a chainsaw's elegance - could've been forgiven if Infinite managed just one thing: a good story.
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