Removing even more from the shock formula than the first game did, Infinite is proof positive that gameplay is now dead.

User Rating: 6 | BioShock Infinite PC
Gaming has evolved quite a bit during the past 30 years since that fateful day I began my digital addiction and anyone who has played through one of today's traditionally story-heavy titles would have a hard time going back to those old bleeps and boops of my 1980s youth. Games like Planescape Torment, Knights of the Old Republic, Baldur's Gate and Bioshock helped usher in an era of deep storylines and thought provoking climaxes, all the while blurring the line between games and art. Thanks to this new devotion to storytelling it's a great time to be a mature adult gamer who enjoys well written narrative.

While this all makes for some great back-of-the-box brag lines and helps players defend their hobby against the older generation that considers gaming to be full of nothing but violent killfests it has had the unintended side effect of forcing the actual gameplay mechanics into a downward spiral.

Oddly enough, no other game series better explains this "story over gameplay" effect more succinctly than the "shock" series this title belongs to. With the first two system shocks being deep RPG hybrids full of micro management, backtracking, unfair combat, skill points, "character builds", puzzle solving and almost no "hand holding"...every game AFTER System Shock 2 has taken more away from the gameplay and crammed that excess material straight into the story.

Though I run the risk of being seen as a jaded System Shock fan the truth is that I was quite happy with the cuts Bioshock 1 made to the established formula. I didn't mind the removal of an inventory screen or the lack of being able to craft an RPG character "build" since the game retained its research system (in the form of the camera) and the cleverly forced backtracking through old combat zones. It was a nice gameplay-to-story trade off and I had no complaints with either that or Bioshock 2's own compromises.

The problem is that Bioshock Infinite has, unfortunately, gone much too far.

The first thing that struck me odd about Infinite was the level design and area progression. Unlike every single "shock" title before it, the game is divided into tiny chunks that load, save and store themselves like individual FPS levels. By this, I mean you cannot simply re-enter a door you just exited from and go back to a previous area to unlock doors you now have lockpicks for or loot containers you may have forgotten about. Each level is completely cut off from the rest of the world and is its own highly scripted, non-random, always the same entity that can only be replayed by way of reloading the level through the main menu in a gears of war-esque fashion.

Though it wouldn't do much good to replay them since unlike every "shock" game before it the enemies will always be in the same place and using the same weapons every single time. Enemies do not repsawn and there is no random element to monster spawns. The days of having a wall climbing splicer appear randomly behind you in a cleared out hallway or a cyborg assassin tossing shurikens at you from 50 feet away from the door you just walked through are a distant memory. Now every experience is the same and backtracking for fun (and loot) is seen as unnecessary. Some may call this nitpicking but it's really yet another depressing symptom of this "story over gameplay" problem that now pervades the hobby.

Another strange removal from Bioshock 1 and 2 was the ability to improve your powers and have at least some semblance of a character build system. While you can in fact increase your "vigors" in Infinite, the total money required for doing so is obscenely high. So high that even after two playthroughs I could only afford a few and found the entire system to be broken beyond belief. Granted, the game is easy enough that you don't need anything but basic powers, but it still stuck onto me like a splinter that kept nagging at my internal obsessive gamer. The same goes for the gun upgrades which are just as outrageously priced and yet woefully unimpressive in combat.

To be fair, I'll give Infinite credit for its slight nod to System Shock's inventory system by way of letting you equip "gear" to your character, but much like the vigors you accrue during your journey it isn't quite the game changer the previews led you to believe.

The same goes for Elizabeth's much ballyhooed pulling things through rifts ability.

All Elizabeth's powers truly amount to are the ability to temporarily make something appear that should already be in the environment in the first place but is only there to create the illusion of strategy and choice. Need to heal? Hit the action button over the medkit portal and take one. Need assistance? Hit the action button over the rampaging George Washington automaton to take out a few of your enemies for you. Need to reach the level above you? Hit the action button over the sky rail and fling your way up. It's a very simplistic and silly system that seems poorly thought out and lazy. In reality it is just static little items that you hold down a button to make appear.

It would have made more sense, considering the game's love affair with pseudo-science and quantum physics, for Elizabeth to be able to do something like rewind time as you would in an arcade racing game or perhaps TAKE YOU through portals into those alternate dimensions DURING actual combat and let you flip from one side to the other as you could in Legacy of Kain Soul Reaver...

...ahhhhh, but that would have taken far more time to do correctly and simply turning her into an item manifestation vehicle was an easier task.

Once again, you could say I'm being unfair, but if you separate yourself from the love we all have towards this series and you factor in the amount of money they were given to craft this sequel you can't honestly consider this the best they could do. Granted, it's no Dragon age 2 in terms of series betrayal, but it isn't too far off either.

By now you're probably thinking that if the gameplay is bad at least the storyline makes up for it. That if they took time away from core combat mechanics they pooled those newly freed up resources into the plot to make up for it, right?

Well, the story isn't as breathtaking as the glowing 10/10 industry reviews would have you believe.

I spent most of my time in the game cringing at the flawed grade-school implementations of quantum physics and laughed heartily at the community that hailed them as revolutionary storytelling devices. Written by people who obviously stayed up late watching those Morgan Freeman hosted theoretical physics specials on the science channel these plot devices are nothing more than garbled facts gleamed from those shows and thrown together piecemeal in such a way that casual watchers of these programs and laymen can feel empowered by being introduced to their rather hard to grasp concepts. It's like when you learned your first line of HTML code by copy and pasting some of another website's source code into your own and marveling at what it did. You experienced it, sure...but you didn't learn anything and were not properly exposed to it.

Now, like Portal, you have a bunch of people sauntering about web forums acting as if they've had chats with Stephen Hawking.

....then there's the race thing.

While I appreciate a game tackling the whole issue of bigotry and slavery it doesn't really do so in a constructive manner. It's merely a small under-utilized plot device that, much like Elizabeth's powers, goes mostly unexplored save for a few bones thrown to the player here and there. What could have been a tale about the evils of oppression and racial inequality became a game where people of color simply washed floors and led a violent but ultimately ineffective militia group.

There isn't much "shock" left in Bioshock Infinite and it has become a first class example of how supposedly high-brow storytelling has supplanted hardcore gameplay as the main impetus for the player's continued attention.