BioShock Infinite

Nice try, Irrational. Ken. Seriously, the utmost respect to you guys for even trying to pull together so many ideas and ambitions into a singular product, but it's fractured; BioShock Infinite feels like pieces of many different versions of a game stitched together into something that struggles to maintain coherency. Knowing about the game's storied development history has probably heavily influenced that last sentence, but that's the overriding sensation of playing through the game and has managed to make me want to admire the game from a distance, occasionally nodding at it to give it a tacit acknowledgment that it tried so, so hard to be about something.

Just look at Columbia, this outrageous city in the sky. It floats, it works, people live here. The architecture is amazing. The artists should impart their precious knowledge of art to all that are willing to listen. You want to believe in Columbia. I only went as far as wanting to.

Irrational fails to address the pragmatic problems with building a city in the sky. Where does the food come from? The water? Where do you get your materials to build... things? There's nothing and instead Columbia's lavishness only springs more questions that are never truly answered. To compare, Rapture had enough of a context to make sense of its underwater city. Oh, Neptune's Bounty, you get most of your food from the sea. Yeah, okay. Geothermal energy powers Rapture; you know this because you were in Hephastus. It was enough to give Rapture this great verisimilitude, while Columbia stays firmly within the boundaries of being a very pretty theme park. It's a fatal problem; Columbia isn't interesting.

There's a definite weirdness to the entire game though, right after the first two lines of spoken dialogue, and the strangeness is pervasive – it's everywhere to the point that it seems strikingly meta. By being so purposefully disruptive, it creates an odd effect where questioning the reality of the game world is more valid than trying to believe in the game world being presented. “Maybe there's a reason why the NPCs look so garish and look the same.” or “Maybe there's a reason why this flaw is here and is distracting.”

Is there a reason for its linearity? The distinct lack of truly exploring a space, absorbing its history? Maybe, Columbia lacks history because it has none? Will any kind of reveal retroactively make BioShock Infinite The Best Thing Ever?

Whether it does so or not, it's a lingering question as I trudge through linear gameplay spaces, simultaneously gawking at the city that surrounds me while never truly having any kind of investment in it and being bothered by how your NPC helper lady, Elizabeth, just seems to fidget between a light jog to an awkward sprint, like, all the time.

Elizabeth is a big deal to the story in the game and has been just as big of a deal when drumming up interest amongst all of us cool video game playing peoples and fails to really live up to her big dealness in both respects. As a companion AI, she's unobtrusive and always helpful. Never a hindrance, never a debilitating distraction, there's never a moment to be concerned when firefights get heated. She's perfect to the point that it's artificial.

That's a precarious line to straddle – if the AI is too dependent on you to survive, then that's a drag. If the AI's too good, then its utility as a gameplay device overwhelms any semblance of believability. Get it right and you get someone like Alyx in Half-Life 2 and its subsequent episodes, where the companion truly inhabits a space and is acknowledged by the world as an entity. Elizabeth goes too far into Resource Girl; Enemies don't recognize her as anyone, much less anything, during combat, despite her incredible importance to the people chasing after her.

In break zones between shooty time, her artificiality becomes even more apparent. She does her best to always be in front of you, acting as a sort of objective marker as she scopes out for things she can interact with to convince you that she's human. The mathematics behind her decision-making seem so obvious; leave her in a room full of things and she'll dash and dart around to initiate an animation with the things in the room.

Elizabeth feels entirely too bound by rules and too developed around the idea of being endlessly resourceful that she comes off as robotic. Visually, she has the same problem as all the other NPCs have in this game – outside of the few times when her expressions are beautifully handcrafted, she's full of empty stares and nutcracker mouth flaps. (Digression: It's weird, isn't it? Half-Life 2 really got NPCs right as far as not looking awkward and keeping up with your freedom of movement during any scripted dialogue sequence. It hasn't really been since Dishonored when that same level of craftsmanship was met again. Just weird. Anyway.)

And then there's the subtext, the themes. Racism, religious zealotry, capitalism, jingoism, the... tears. BioShock Infinite is filled with ideas, filled with things to say, but anything outside of... dimensions fade away as quickly as they arise. There's a lack of focus – there's a master thesis somewhere, but right now it's a scattershot of bullet points, a bunch of scholarly resources on Google Chrome tabs and a vague idea of where some of these ideas will go. Characters represent a message but lack character; nearly all of them represent an end of a spectrum with little leeway for any kind of ambiguity and their extremes make them extremely uninteresting. Look at me with a straight face and tell with a genuine conviction that Comstock is as interesting as Andrew Ryan. YOU TELL ME NOW YOU SON OF BI-- THAT'S WHAT I THOUGHT

But oh, but oh, does Irrational eventually find its way. In its last few hours, BioShock Infinite truly finds itself, brimming with so much giddy excitement because it wants to tell you something and wants you to internalize its scope. It's a beautiful thing, full of emotional power and it's an outstanding bit of fiction.

But god, BioShock Infinite is a mess. It's a gorgeous, passionate and ridiculous mess that must be played. Giving it any stars just seems senseless, as 2 stars doesn't make much sense on face value and needs explaining. BioShock Infinite gets 2 stars because I didn't have a lot of fun with it, but it is so worthy of respect and so worthy of discussion that it's a must-play. It's an amazing game, kinda. Sorta.

Not really, but it is? Yes.