BioShock Infinite dropped Booker DeWitt into a city in the clouds and asked players to rescue a girl who could tear holes in reality. Thirteen years on, it remains the most ambitious thing Irrational Games ever shipped.
Trailer, via Ghost Story.
Columbia, 1912
The setup is a kidnapping story dressed as science fiction. Booker DeWitt is a disgraced ex-Pinkerton agent with gambling debts he cannot pay. His ticket out is Elizabeth, a young woman locked in the airborne city of Columbia since birth. Bring her back, and the debts vanish.
Columbia is not Rapture. Irrational built a floating steampunk city-state named for the female personification of the United States, founded by the self-proclaimed prophet Zachary Hale Comstock and funded by the U.S. government as a floating world’s fair. It seceded after independently intervening in the Boxer Rebellion, then disappeared into the clouds.
By 1912, Comstock runs a theocratic police state. The Founding Fathers are venerated as religious icons. Institutional racism and elitism are the norm, with minorities serving as a labor underclass. The Founders who rule the city are opposed by the Vox Populi, a resistance led by Daisy Fitzroy.
Tears in the Sky
The city sits on a science-fiction hook: Tears in the fabric of space-time that reveal alternate universes. Some people mine them for new weapons and technology. Others copy futuristic media heard through the Tears, which is how anachronisms end up scattered across a city stuck in 1912.
Elizabeth can open those Tears herself. She was confined in isolation since childhood and groomed as Columbia’s future leader. Booker, a U.S. Army veteran scarred by a life of violence, is the wrong man for the job and knows it.
The authorities recognize him as a “False Shepherd,” prophesied to corrupt Elizabeth and overthrow the city. He frees her from her tower, narrowly evades Songbird, and commandeers an airship. He tells her he will take her to Paris. She learns they are bound for New York City instead.
Two Guns and a Vigor
BioShock Infinite is a first-person shooter with role-playing elements. It adapts the BioShock formula, renaming weapons, powers and upgrades rather than rebuilding them. The player carries only two weapons at a time and scavenges the rest from enemies and the environment.
The powers are Vigors, and they cover real ground:
- Shoot lightning at enemies
- Launch enemies into the air to disable them
- Control enemies or machines
- Lay Vigors on the ground as traps
Vigors run on Salt, the equivalent of magic points. Booker has health and a damage-absorbing shield; the shield regenerates out of combat, while health needs medical kits or food. Dying revives the player in a safe area at the cost of money, and local enemies are partially healed in the bargain.
Gear grants passive abilities, with one piece per slot across four slots and extras kept in inventory. Infusions upgrade shield, health or Salt. Enemies range from ordinary infantry to Heavy Hitters, mini-bosses that punctuate the campaign, plus armed automatons that serve as Columbia’s security system.
Fighting Across Open Ground
The combat arenas are the real departure. Rapture was corridors. Columbia is open, with an emphasis on sniping and ranged fighting against as many as fifteen enemies at once. Interior spaces still deliver close-quarters brawls, but the streets and rooftops reward distance and planning.
The gunplay is thinner than the setting deserves. Two weapons at a time is a constraint that forces decisions, but it also means the arsenal never becomes a character the way Rapture’s did. Vigors carry the load, and Salt management gives every fight a budget.
The open spaces are the best argument for the whole design. Fifteen enemies across a plaza demand a plan, not a reflex. What separates BioShock Infinite from its predecessors is Elizabeth. She is computer-controlled, she hands the player supplies, and she never becomes a burden to escort.
What Columbia Is Actually About
Irrational based the setting on historical events at the turn of the 20th century, including the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, and built the story around American exceptionalism. The team folded in influences from more recent events, among them the 2011 Occupy movement. That mix is why Columbia reads as both period piece and argument.
The class war is not decoration. The Founders rule, the Vox Populi resist, and the game refuses to make either side clean. Daisy Fitzroy’s rebellion has its own violence. Comstock’s city has its own liturgy. Booker walks through both and belongs to neither.
This is where BioShock Infinite takes its biggest swing and where it will keep being argued about. A game that puts institutional racism and elitism on screen and asks the player to shoot through them is making a claim, and the claim is not always as sharp as the imagery.
The Numbers
- Release year: 2013
- Developer: Irrational Games
- Publisher: 2K Games
- Platforms: PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Linux, PC (Microsoft Windows), Mac, Xbox 360, Xbox One
- Setting: Columbia, 1912
- Mode: Single player
- Perspective: First person
- Score: 9.3/10
What Holds Up
BioShock Infinite is the third game in the series and not a direct sequel or prequel to any of the others. It shares concepts and gameplay with what came before while standing in an entirely different place. That decision looks better now than it did at launch, because it let Irrational build a world with its own politics instead of inheriting Rapture’s ruins.
The flaws are real. The shooting never matches the ambition of the city around it, and the middle stretch leans on arena fights that blur together. But the parts that work — Elizabeth, the Tears, the open rooftops, the ugly argument at the center of Columbia — are the parts players still describe thirteen years later.
BioShock Infinite earns its 9.3. It is a shooter that thinks it is a novel, and for once the reach is worth the risk.
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