Review: Bioshock: Infinite
Okay. This one is going to be difficult without any spoilers but I'll do my best.
So.
Thing 1: 2003 called, they want their gameplay back. This is a smooth and polished take on the trad-FPS, very much in the Bioshock mould. A one-man army takes on a many-man army and wins through sheer badassitude. Gore flows in bloody runnels - this is a violent game, this is a bloody game, and it is a genuinely adult game as in 'grown-up'. I was genuinely shocked by the violence that appears, and I continued to have the appropriate response throughout. The difficulty became a pain in places but never overwhelmed, and the penalty for death is large enough to make dying something you avoid while small enough to make the game flow nicely. I never had to reload the game, and this was brilliant.
And the game has the best blasphemous altar - genuinely blasphemous, genuinely altar - that I've seen in modern computer games. I mean, when I say that it's an adult game, I mean that there's overt racism, casual sexism, explicit blasphemy, shocking levels of ultraviolence and while there's no Beethoven there is a wonderfully placed bit of Mozart that sent a shiver down the spine.
Thing 2: Zeerust. Sheer concentrated steampunk aesthetic, and beautifully so. The City of Columbia is absolutely stunning. The weapons are lovingly detailed, the grime is lovingly detailed, the gore is lovingly detailed, all the components fit together nicely. So nicely, in fact, that when you jump thirty feet in the air and throw lightning bolts it kind of jars a bit. There would have been room for a higher realism bar than the one that we have, which is an over-the-top romp through Silly Town with steam-powered mecha and spectral crows from nowhere.
Thing 3: Inside all of this, we have a story. A genuine lump-in-throat story (granted, I'm easily affected and tend to take in media uncritically if it passes a certain threshold) that had me engaged from relatively early on in the game. The iconography and symbology is well done, the setting coherent, and the ending doesn't suck.
Thing 4: A great deal of the gameplay revolves around escorting The Girl. She manages to be neither useless nor annoying, and while the impulse they're trying to get from the player is 'man must protect woman' - more on that later - the woman is actually her own person, can do things that the protagonist really can't, and that's very much clear from early on. When she wasn't there for short periods of gameplay, I genuinely missed her assistance more than her ass. And through her reactions to specific things, the plot is brought to life and pointed out in a way that (for example) F.E.A.R. has to do via grabbing control of the camera. The story's at least as much about her as about him.
But that's the thing (5). The gameplay and the story, they do not fit. On the one hand, I've got an engaging story about, well, spoiler redacted. On the other hand, I've got an FPS from the days before cover-shooters, with very much the same mechanics as the original Bioshock. The plot is - at least until you start to realise what the hell is going on - seriously on the trippy side, and it does continue to deliver right up until the end, which is nice. But I feel that given that there are these metaphysics, and the player ends up understanding them, they could at least have explained the supernatural powers of the protagonist in terms of the metaphysics that they spend so long explaining so well. And there are so many great moments that don't make sense given what the player just did. Although I really do like the fact that if you're spending ages going around collecting loot, The Girl will begin passing you loot.
And now a separate cut for discussion of this game's deep, glaring white-male-privilege issues.
See, this doesn't set out to be a sexist or a racist game. The female who I'm going to dub the co-protagonist is deeper, better developed and fundamentally a better person than the protagonist, and she stands up for herself and puts herself forward and answers back and is coded to actually run ahead of me most of the time.
But it's still me that she's running ahead of, not a player who's anything other than a Stereotypical White Male. It's actually a plot point that the main character is a Stereotypical White Male. The game derives a lot of its emotional impact from creating in the player an identification with the male protagonist's strong protective instinct. There are several sequences which - while I'm sure they'll still have impact if the player isn't - are definitely aimed very very squarely at a white male in his twenties or thirties. They are deliberately trying to engage with this audience without trying too hard for the others. It's not just that the protagonist is one - it's that if he weren't, the world wouldn't work like this, and he wouldn't feel like this, and everything - almost absolutely everything - would be different.
And I realised as I was writing this that yes, actually, The Girl was actually rather shapely now I came to think about it, and she does do quite a bit of bending over from the waist and innocently looking at things on the ground, and she is in at least one place quite seriously distressed and disempowered in a way that never happens to her co-protagonist. At least she is wearing appropriate clothes.
And as far as the racism goes - sure, the racists are bastards and the racism is in-your-face enough that it might as well have a UI element pointing at it saying 'Please disapprove'. But all the good people are white as the driven snow. This game is clearly aimed at one specific subset of humanity, and while all other subsets may attend and play it as they wish, the fact of the matter remains that this is targeted specifically at one particular audience.
I really hope that they enjoy it as much as I did. You couldn't tell this specific story in another way. But you could tell a similar story. One day, someone shall.
In short - I think the game's deserving of a good score. I plan to replay it. I especially like the lack of multiplayer, and the emotionally gripping story - like a good thriller, one you don't want to put down. Aren't I glad that I'm the target audience.
So.
Thing 1: 2003 called, they want their gameplay back. This is a smooth and polished take on the trad-FPS, very much in the Bioshock mould. A one-man army takes on a many-man army and wins through sheer badassitude. Gore flows in bloody runnels - this is a violent game, this is a bloody game, and it is a genuinely adult game as in 'grown-up'. I was genuinely shocked by the violence that appears, and I continued to have the appropriate response throughout. The difficulty became a pain in places but never overwhelmed, and the penalty for death is large enough to make dying something you avoid while small enough to make the game flow nicely. I never had to reload the game, and this was brilliant.
And the game has the best blasphemous altar - genuinely blasphemous, genuinely altar - that I've seen in modern computer games. I mean, when I say that it's an adult game, I mean that there's overt racism, casual sexism, explicit blasphemy, shocking levels of ultraviolence and while there's no Beethoven there is a wonderfully placed bit of Mozart that sent a shiver down the spine.
Thing 2: Zeerust. Sheer concentrated steampunk aesthetic, and beautifully so. The City of Columbia is absolutely stunning. The weapons are lovingly detailed, the grime is lovingly detailed, the gore is lovingly detailed, all the components fit together nicely. So nicely, in fact, that when you jump thirty feet in the air and throw lightning bolts it kind of jars a bit. There would have been room for a higher realism bar than the one that we have, which is an over-the-top romp through Silly Town with steam-powered mecha and spectral crows from nowhere.
Thing 3: Inside all of this, we have a story. A genuine lump-in-throat story (granted, I'm easily affected and tend to take in media uncritically if it passes a certain threshold) that had me engaged from relatively early on in the game. The iconography and symbology is well done, the setting coherent, and the ending doesn't suck.
Thing 4: A great deal of the gameplay revolves around escorting The Girl. She manages to be neither useless nor annoying, and while the impulse they're trying to get from the player is 'man must protect woman' - more on that later - the woman is actually her own person, can do things that the protagonist really can't, and that's very much clear from early on. When she wasn't there for short periods of gameplay, I genuinely missed her assistance more than her ass. And through her reactions to specific things, the plot is brought to life and pointed out in a way that (for example) F.E.A.R. has to do via grabbing control of the camera. The story's at least as much about her as about him.
But that's the thing (5). The gameplay and the story, they do not fit. On the one hand, I've got an engaging story about, well, spoiler redacted. On the other hand, I've got an FPS from the days before cover-shooters, with very much the same mechanics as the original Bioshock. The plot is - at least until you start to realise what the hell is going on - seriously on the trippy side, and it does continue to deliver right up until the end, which is nice. But I feel that given that there are these metaphysics, and the player ends up understanding them, they could at least have explained the supernatural powers of the protagonist in terms of the metaphysics that they spend so long explaining so well. And there are so many great moments that don't make sense given what the player just did. Although I really do like the fact that if you're spending ages going around collecting loot, The Girl will begin passing you loot.
And now a separate cut for discussion of this game's deep, glaring white-male-privilege issues.
See, this doesn't set out to be a sexist or a racist game. The female who I'm going to dub the co-protagonist is deeper, better developed and fundamentally a better person than the protagonist, and she stands up for herself and puts herself forward and answers back and is coded to actually run ahead of me most of the time.
But it's still me that she's running ahead of, not a player who's anything other than a Stereotypical White Male. It's actually a plot point that the main character is a Stereotypical White Male. The game derives a lot of its emotional impact from creating in the player an identification with the male protagonist's strong protective instinct. There are several sequences which - while I'm sure they'll still have impact if the player isn't - are definitely aimed very very squarely at a white male in his twenties or thirties. They are deliberately trying to engage with this audience without trying too hard for the others. It's not just that the protagonist is one - it's that if he weren't, the world wouldn't work like this, and he wouldn't feel like this, and everything - almost absolutely everything - would be different.
And I realised as I was writing this that yes, actually, The Girl was actually rather shapely now I came to think about it, and she does do quite a bit of bending over from the waist and innocently looking at things on the ground, and she is in at least one place quite seriously distressed and disempowered in a way that never happens to her co-protagonist. At least she is wearing appropriate clothes.
And as far as the racism goes - sure, the racists are bastards and the racism is in-your-face enough that it might as well have a UI element pointing at it saying 'Please disapprove'. But all the good people are white as the driven snow. This game is clearly aimed at one specific subset of humanity, and while all other subsets may attend and play it as they wish, the fact of the matter remains that this is targeted specifically at one particular audience.
I really hope that they enjoy it as much as I did. You couldn't tell this specific story in another way. But you could tell a similar story. One day, someone shall.
In short - I think the game's deserving of a good score. I plan to replay it. I especially like the lack of multiplayer, and the emotionally gripping story - like a good thriller, one you don't want to put down. Aren't I glad that I'm the target audience.