I've talked so much shit about this game over the years that I've decided to just blog about it. I know it’s a welllll worn topic but I’m gonna just post. Read if you wish....

Bioshock Infinite is a game that has gone though several cycles of adoration, hatred, backlash to the backlash, etc etc. Generally, opinions these days are pretty low. I can’t think of any other game where a review writer wrote a correction for their own review.

I’ve found the decaying of its status very satisfying. When I played it back in 2013, the disconnect between how little I was enjoying the game and the overwhelming praise made think that maybe I don’t actually like videogames. I paused buying anything but indies for a pretty long time afterwards.

So to explain what’s going on, here’s a haters review of a mediocre game!! I’m going to mostly talk gameplay, there’s a little bit of story stuff but other people have dug into that deeper.

A quick little note: while I will be flexing my hater muscles here I do want to say that there’s a ton of craft on display here. It’s gorgeous, sounds great, music is good. It is a shame that all that work went into this game.

Also, not really going to talk about the politics. I’m okay praising a game with rancid politics, but Infinite is just a bad game, Lol.

Vestigial Systems

It’s pretty clear that big systems were ripped out and added to BI during development. There’s remnants of the original Bioshock’s simplified immersive sim/ survival horror systems all over the place, and you’ll frequently be pushed into situations that appear to have the same kind of obstacles.

However, that’s not the kind of game it is. It’s a superpower action shooter that just kind of pretends to have the level of map detail you get in an ImSim. You’re meant to have a real relationship to Columbia as a space, but everything is really just these big warehouses for shooting people. Nothing has texture, nothing gets in your way. You’re given tapes to listen to, which works in a game where you can listen to those while looting the environment or solving a puzzle. In Infinite, you can just stand there I guess?

This would all drag down a game that was a great shooter, but BI is like, fine. Enemies don’t have a ton of variety, and you don’t have a ton of choices to make. The gimmick of bringing in elements from other worlds through portal tears is solid, but you’re limited to what’s baked into the environment. There’s no room for any kind of expressive gameplay.

Elizabeth is you

Complimenting the frictionless environments, you get an ai companion who also has no friction. A big part of the game is telling her to open tears, but there’s not anything there to really make it feel like she’s the one doing it. Like, you’re the one pressing the button, and it happens instantly. It might as well as be your power.

You never have to think about where Elizabeth is, or meaningfully change your approach based on anything she does. I think the developers were so worried that people would make fun of her for being in the way that she’s not really there at all. She could be replaced by like, talking equipment or something.

I didn’t find having a companion who just kind of did whatever they were told to be empowering. Maybe if the story was written differently it would be like, interestingly creepy? I’m sure it took a lot of work to get Elizabeth to the place where she’s at in the final game; I just don’t think it’s fun.

Is this an RTS?

There’s a handful of moments in Infinite that popped for me. You’re able to move very fast across the map, and take on big groups of enemies. You have to prioritize certain enemies over others, and can obstruct enemies and build ways to attack back through tears. At times, there’s an elegantly simple fusion of RTS and shooter mechanics here.

But I only started to feel this towards the end, and it didn’t really click for me until the last fight before the story-only final stretch. The issue is that they were so afraid of actually putting an actual obstacle in front of the player that none of these systems got time to sing.

And you can’t bring out any of this possible cool stuff just by making the game harder, as you’re still just kind of barging forward with no reason to really think. It would take an additional redesign to make everything click, and instead we just have the game we got.

(Maybe the DLC fixes this? Didn’t play Lol)

Ploty plot plot

The design of Infinite is clearly meant to get the player in a state of flow, just kind of passing through it, and that includes its storytelling. Things just kind of happen, and I never felt like I was given space the process things or confronted with anything that made me excited to know more. Sometimes something was shocking, but not in a way that produced anything more than a “huh?”. The ending is kind of cool, but it’s disconnected from everything it was thinking about before.

There’s just a real lack of hooks between the gameplay and the story, in either Columba as an environment or Elizabeth as an AI character. Storytelling requires some friction, something to make you wonder about what’s going on outside of what you’re doing. If you design to remove that there’s nothing there.

What to make of the reviews

Reviewers experience games in ways that most people don’t. They’ve played a lot of games, are in a time crunch to finish and write about things, and probably get more annoyed with friction than we do. They want games that do something new, and stand out among others (but not by too much, at least in 2013).

I think Bioshock Infinite is less a videogame and more a pitch specifically to 2013 game reviewers. In that specific window of time, it offered everything they were looking for. The reviews reflect that!

They didn’t have time to look around and see that it all didn’t fit together, that the familiar things they brought out were shadows of their former selves, that if you pulled on the themes at all nothing was there. They needed the web traffic, they needed to tell gamers what they wanted to hear.

There’s a handful of games that have been able to pull off this gambit of appealing specifically to reviewers. And I don’t mean to get all gamergatey about this, I don’t actually think they’re evil for this or something. Videogame press as a thing is basically dying. It’s just kind of a fact of life that this kind of thing keeps happening.

What I would rather play

Infinite came out at the end of the era where the AAA single player shooter was a dominant genre. Now we maybe get a good one of these per year. It’s sad, this is a genre that drove games forward for a very long time. There’s great ones that come out, but they exist in a niche. I don’t think we’re ever going to get one that’s the center of conversation like Infinite was again.

I wouldn’t trade the type of games that come out in 2025 for 2013, though. AAA games these days are going deeper and more niche; there’s less and less value in games that are so flowy and mainstream as Infinite. The audience that used to pick up something like Infinite are invested in time-sinks like Fortnite and Call of Duty.

What’s a mainstream game look like these days? Is it Fromsoft? Is it something like Baldur’s Gate 3? Is it Clair Obscur? Maybe we’re missing something in this age where everything is an RPG. And yeah, the industry is teetering on the edge of the abyss. But I do know that the kind of slop Infinite is wouldn’t get made these days, and that makes me smile.