Welcome back to the Bioshock Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be covering the final game in the franchise (thus far), Bioshock Infinite. Disappointed that Bioshock 2 had been handed off to a different development team, Ken Levine and Irrational Games set out to make a more ambitious and revolutionary sequel that wouldn’t just rehash the ideas of the first game. The game ended up going through one of the most protracted examples of development hell of its era, although it was heralded as a masterpiece upon release. However, time has not been kind to the game, with it having gained a pretty muted reputation in recent the years for its writing and its changes made to the Bioshock formula. For my part, I really enjoyed Bioshock Infinite back in the day, but I was extremely curious to see if it would hold up as well as the original did for me. You know what I always say: read on to find out if it succeeded…

Love

• Columbia – Rapture is easily one of the most iconic settings in all of gaming, but Columbia is not far behind (which is a massive accomplishment in its own right). While Infinite‘s art design is clearly intended to parallel the original Bioshock (Columbia is sun-drenched and vibrant as opposed to the darkness and decay of Rapture, steampunk Americana vs art deco libertarianism, etc), it is so immediately compelling that it doesn’t feel derivative. Honestly, my favourite parts of the game are the “walking sim segments” that I wished we got in the previous Bioshock games: getting to see the everyday, mundane parts of this city and explore them at your leisure is a joy. Of course, this also gives way to the ugly side of the city, which is captured very effectively: the outright racism and white supremacy, the radical Christian nationalism, and the oppression of the underclass (visually represented with the darkened and dingy semblance of Finkton): stuff that is at the rotten core of the traditional American utopia fantasy. It all helps to make Columbia a very memorable setting that lives up to the old cliché of it being a character unto itself.
• Elizabeth – It’s not exactly a hot take for me to say that Elizabeth is up there with Andrew Ryan competing for the top spot of “best Bioshock characters”. The entire narrative revolves around her, so we get to see her go from a naïve and hopeful young woman, to someone who is much more world-weary and remorseful by the time the credits roll. Her journey is well-written and Courtnee Draper’s performance really brings her to life. This would be good enough on its own, but Elizabeth is also unusually helpful for an NPC companion. She can alter the battlefield to give you cover, new ways to maneuver, automated turrets, and even weapons and supplies. She gives you items that she finds at regular intervals (usually just when you needed it). She can pick locks to access secret areas. She’ll point out items of interest. She isn’t a burden and never gets in your way. These all come together to make her one of the most memorable and iconic companions in gaming history.
• Tighter Shooting Controls – Bioshock Infinite further iterates on the franchise’s core shooting gameplay, to the point where it finally feels good enough that it could carry the game on its own. While it’s still not quite on par with the best first person shooters of its era, lining up shots is intuitive, blasting away enemies feels good, and the weapons have a satisfying, punchy feel to them.
• Sky Rails – The sky rails are one of the flashier new additions to Infinite‘s gameplay formula, allowing you to leap above the battlefield to get a higher vantage point and to reposition quickly as needed. On the negative side of things, they’re arguably under-utilized and can be easily ignored if you don’t care to use them. However, I really like them overall, mainly because riding on sky rails is breathtaking. Irrational have perfectly captured the speed and scale that you’d want out of a system like this, and some of the most exhilarating moments in the game come when you zip around on these things, popping enemies as you go. Speaking of which, enemies will also use the sky rails to chase you to or get to higher ground, so even if you choose to actively ignore them yourself, they bring with them new gameplay possibilities. It’s also really funny to snipe an enemy when they’re riding the rails and then watch them plummet to their death.
• Anachronistic Music Covers – One of the coolest implementations of Bioshock Infinite‘s ideas is that it has a bunch of old-school covers of modern songs. The reasons for this are pretty cool: the city’s experiments with quantum mechanics are inadvertently causing windows to alternate dimensions to open up throughout the city. Jeremiah Fink, a scummy businessman who controls the workforce in Columbia, sees this as an opportunity to plagiarize the next big radio hit, so the city is awash with strangely familiar music, redone in a turn of the century style.
• Hacking Is Gone – One system I’m actually glad has been changed from the previous Bioshock games is hacking. It was a pain in the ass feeling obligated to hack everything in sight in the previous two games. Most hacking situations have been removed entirely, although you can now use the Hypnotize vigor to “hack” turrets to shoot your enemies. I rather like this change, it makes hacking immediate and ties it into the main gameplay systems without having to staple a whole new mechanic on top of everything else. It’s use is also limited by your salt bar, so you aren’t spamming it endlessly.

Mixed

• Politics – I’m super mixed on this game’s politics, because they are simultaneously one of the best aspects of the game, and also one of its biggest disappointments…
  • First off, the good stuff: this game is incredibly bold for confronting core issues at the heart of America: radical Christian nationalism, white supremacy, racial hierarchy, and capitalist oppression. The original Bioshock was pretty bold in its own right, but Objectivism and libertarianism are pretty niche philosophies compared to the shit Infinite is targeting. Hell, the game is even more relevant in 2025 than it was in 2013 (where this stuff would have just been seen as an uncomfortable vision of the past, rather than the current hellscape we have to navigate). We get to see the horrors of this radicalization, how it’s tied into the idealized past of America, how the people of Columbia despise Lincoln for freeing the slaves, and you end up fighting literal Klan members on occasion!
  • Finkton is also capitalist hell, echoing the evils of American history where business owners enriched themselves through extreme exploitation of their workers. We see the residents of Finkton barely clinging to life through long hours of work, no safety precautions, low pay, and worthless scrip currency (and this is on top of the racism they were enduring to boot). I love how the game visually represents this, with Finkton being dark, gloomy, and smog-ridden, while the rest of Columbia is bright and glamourous. Booker and Elizabeth both remark that the awful conditions of Finkton justify the actions of the domestic terrorist group, the Vox Populi. Under the leadership of Daisy Fitzroy, the Vox are attempting to break the shackles of oppression, which brings us to…
  • Unfortunately, the game completely fucks itself over by trying to “both sides” its politics, but it just does not work. Like, lets lay this out: the Vox are subject to institutionalized oppression and dehumanization on a social, political, and economic scale. Reform is not going to happen as long as Comstock lives, so violence is their only reasonable option to change this system. Again, Booker and Elizabeth both say that the Vox are justified, but when their revolution starts, suddenly Booker says “The only difference between Comstock and Fitzroy is how you spell the name”… uhhhhh no, that is a load of horseshit. Look, I get what they’re going for here: violence is bad and the leaders who use people to commit violence in the name of their movement are bad, but Fitzroy and Comstock are not equivalent in the slightest. Comstock is trying to create a white supremacist state to conquer the world and establish his notion of racial hierarchy. Fitzroy’s goals begin and end at violently rejecting and eradicating this hierarchy. The game tries to convince us that she and the Vox are bad because they scalp the Finkton bosses, kill Fink, attempt to kill his son, kill civilians in Columbia, and try to kill Booker (because him being alive undermines his role as a martyr for the revolution). Does this make them in any way equivalent to Comstock? No, and it’s not even close. While trying to kill Booker is just dumb, I don’t even care about them killing civilians here: the game opens by showing you that the citizens of Columbia participate in the racism against non-whites, so them getting caught up in this revolution isn’t even unjustified. Revolution is nasty business, no one wants to engage in it… but killing the hand that’s beating you does not make you just as bad as the people who were beating you down and insisting that you deserved it because their ideology said so.
• The Narrative – I’m also pretty mixed on the overall narrative of Bioshock Infinite. It’s interesting, fairly compelling, and unpredictable, but it suffers for the same reason that so many major media properties do these days: multiverse shit. Unfortunately, the concept of the multiverse is at the absolute core of Infinite, and while it presents some really interesting ideas and developments, the handling of it is just so transparently stupid at times.
  • About halfway through the game, you make a deal with Daisy Fitzroy to get some guns from a gunsmith in exchange for a means to escape the city… but, oh no, the gunsmith has been interrogated to death! So you hop into an alternate dimension where he’s still alive… but, oh no, his machines have been confiscated! So you have to hop to an alternate dimension where they weren’t confiscated… but, oh no, now the Vox have the guns and the revolution is underway! Meanwhile, this entire time, Booker and Elizabeth are just assuming that they still have made the same deal with Daisy in each new reality, despite the pretty substantial changes that happen each time they travel to a new world.
  • On top of this, the game establishes that dying in one dimension has consequences on alternate versions of yourself, causing you to absorb the memories of your various selves. This is can be especially problematic for you if you remember that you died in another reality, which can cause you to go insane. The game is very vague about how this works, but it seems to only occur when Elizabeth travels between dimensions. That said, there are infinite Elizabeths travelling between infinite dimensions, so shouldn’t people be inheriting the memories of their other selves all the time? Again, time travel/multiverse stories are kind of inherently complicated by these sorts of issues, and Infinite is absolutely no exception to it.
  • Perhaps my most sour note about the game though is that the entire ending revolves around a twist that comes out of nowhere and doesn’t make a lot of sense. So, it turns out that Booker is an alternate-universe version of the villain, Comstock. Comstock accidentally made himself infertile, but required a blood heir to his legacy as a part of his big plan to conquer the world. He make a deal with an alternate version of himself (Booker) to acquire his daughter. However, Booker ends up regretting the decision and makes a deal to travel to the other dimension and get her back. As you can imagine, this plays out with infinite Bookers and infinite Comstocks across the multiverse. That’s a pretty interesting idea, but the issue for me is that this universe-hopping causes Booker to… forget what happened and just make up a new reality for himself to justify why he’s trying to rescue Elizabeth? It’s unclear why this happens, but it honestly makes no sense within the established narrative and I believe that it’s the main reason why this ending was considered so confusing.
• Resources – While I do love Elizabeth as a companion, she’s is too helpful at times, which messes with the game’s resource economy. If you’re ever low on some resource (health, salts, ammo, or money), Elizabeth will almost immediately “find” exactly what you needed. When you realize that you’re rarely going to actually run out of a resource, it craters the game’s tension. As a result, I died maybe three or four times across my entire playthrough (on Normal difficulty), because I just never was in any actual danger. Similarly, I spent about 75% of my playtime with the goddamn hand cannon and shotgun. The game would just keep stocking me up with ammo, so why bother trying anything else?
• Burial at Sea – Episode II – I’m pretty mixed on this DLC. On the one hand, the gameplay is great: the stealth system they’ve put together here works surprisingly well in Infinite‘s engine. I also like the new plasmids it introduces and how the emphasis on stealth makes existing options more useful. What I’m much more iffy on is the narrative. It’s fine for the most part, but it is so reverent of the original Bioshock that it almost feels like bad fan fiction. Like, you’re telling me that the most important thing in the multiverse that Elizabeth can be getting up to is ensuring that the events of the first Bioshock play out…?

Hate

• COD-ification – I’ve got a bunch of issues with Bioshock Infinite, but nearly every one can be boiled down to “COD-ification”. This was the trend during the PS3/Xbox 360 era where developers would try to make their game “more like Call of Duty” to try to win some of their market share (this never worked).
  • First of all, the small things: you can’t dual-wield weapons and plasmids at the same time anymore (granted, this was only a thing in Bioshock 2, so it wasn’t guaranteed to return). You can’t carry extra healing items or salt, so every single encounter has to have a vending machine somewhere that you can run to in an emergency, or you loot the supplies you need off dead enemies, or you get topped up by Elizabeth. To compensate, the game also adds a shield/regenerating health system akin to Halo.
  • Infinite makes it so that you can only carry two guns at a time, which I can only speculate is because “that’s what Call of Duty players expect”. Like I said before, the game showers you with ammo, and you’ll still be able to collect ammo for the weapons you aren’t actively using, so it isn’t exactly disruptive… but goddamn is it kind of lame that you can easily play through the whole game with only one or two weapons if you really want to. It’s obviously not even a technical issue either, because you get access to all of your vigors at all times and there’s even a weapon wheel for them, so why not the guns too?! The only other reason I can think for why they did this was to make the sniper rifle and RPG more “special”, but I don’t think it is justified.
  • Then there’s the “gear” system, which replaces the gene-tonics from the previous games. You could equip up to eighteen gene tonics, which really let you customize your abilities to fit your preferred playstyle. They also helped you feel that you were progressing towards something with each new unlock, with most being rewards you spent your ADAM on. Gear, on the other hand, is limited to only four slots total (again, this is probably alluding to Call of Duty‘s perks system), and you have to find them at random in the overworld. Personally, I found most gear options to be underwhelming. I managed to find my ideal gear loadout near the start of the game, so everything I found thereafter was very disappointing.
  • The game also plays more like a conventional shooter. Vigors add some pretty interesting abilities, but they feel kind of superfluous. You can play through this whole game without using a single vigor and you won’t feel like you were putting yourself at much of a disadvantage for doing so. Vigors also feel less creative, with Murder of Crows being the most exotic of the bunch. Worst of all though, the ways that vigors interact with the environment is extremely limited compared to the previous two games. You will occasionally be able to use Elizabeth to spawn in a puddle or an oil slick that you can use a vigor on, but this is an extremely rare occurrence, and prevents you from being able to use the other options Elizabeth may have for you.
  • As for the moral choice system, Infinite has really dumbed this down as well. You get to make two choices in the entire game, and neither of them have any effect on how the narrative plays out. If you really want to stretch this category, Infinite does have a couple walking sim areas where you can get into optional combat scenarios if you commit theft. This doesn’t feel like much of a moral conundrum though, since there’s no real consequence. This does, kind of, play into the narrative, which suggests that the characters have far less free will it may seem, but it doesn’t make this any less disappointing.
  • The levels of Bioshock and Bioshock 2 were twisting and branding hub areas with lots of secrets and rewards you could find if you were thorough. You also really got to know these areas, as you often pass through certain locations multiple times over the course of the level. In Bioshock Infinite though, the levels are much more linear. You will rarely return to the same area more than once before moving onto the next level. Exploration also ends up feeling less rewarding due to this. I think that this also is why I don’t find Columbia as compelling as Rapture. Since these levels are so short and linear, you don’t really get a chance to get to know them before you’re rushed off to the next set-piece moment. More than anything else, this really seems to be the biggest change made in Infinite. It makes the game feel like it’s an atmospheric FPS instead of an immersive sim.
• Burial at Sea: Episode I – I was pretty excited to try out Burial at Sea, because I always found the DLC’s noir aesthetic to be super appealing in its return to Rapture. Unfortunately, this first episode was very disappointing. Like, imagine if Bioshock Infinite suddenly cut to the ending cutscene right after you meet Elizabeth: that’s basically how this DLC plays out. You’ve got the same sort of gameplay, exploration rewards, and upgrade systems as the main game, but it ends so abruptly that you barely even get to use them. Another thing I really don’t like about Episode I is that your resources are extremely scarce. It’s the opposite problem from the main game: I was running out of ammo constantly, your shield feels like it breaks after one or two bullets, and Elizabeth is a lot more conservative about giving you items. This makes the game much more difficult, which is exciting at times, but not having the resources you need to deal with this game’s challenges is frustrating more often than not. What made this truly terrible though is that I could not pick up weapons off fallen enemies. I hated the carbine, but I got stuck with it for most of the playthrough, because I could not switch it with any other weapon. You get one chance to pick up a weapon the first time you encounter it, and then it’s gone forever. Maybe this was a bug on my end, because I do not understand this decision if it was intentional. Regardless, even if it is a bug and you don’t encounter it in your own playthrough, Episode I feels far too insubstantial to be truly compelling.

All-in-all, I like Bioshock Infinite, but it is nowhere near the classic that the original game was. It has a few glaring flaws which hold it back from true greatness. That said, I don’t think it deserves the soured reputation it holds today, and I think it deserves a reappraisal, especially considering how relevant parts of it are in today’s political climate. It’s a game that deserves to be enjoyed for what it is, rather than what it is not.