Bioshock Infinite is an ambitious, gorgeous, carefully crafted game, certainly, but it is still a linear cinematic hallway shooter with everything that entails. Upon completing it, I can't shake the notion that its intent would have been better served by operating within almost any other plausible framework than the one it actually uses.
At the onset, the player is thrust -- on more than one level -- into an exciting and wonderful place, but there is already some sense of awkwardness before the combat inevitably takes hold. The citizens of Columbia make eye contact with you and track your movements, from carefully realized stationary positions, mostly without ever communicating with you. They're equal parts wax museum specimen and carnival ride prop.
When the non-violent layer is stripped away after the initial hour, the rest of the game is spent with the city's forces running at you in endless waves. There are brief respites, but, again, despite sometimes being surrounded by civilians who stare and track you, your communication is mostly limited to back and forth quips with Elizabeth as you wander past.
Murdering the entire population of Columbia is touched upon by her, briefly, when you neutralize an entire room of people in self defense shortly after the two of you meet, and then later in the game when she briefly reflects upon everything that the two of you have accomplished -- mass slaughter in the service of self-preservation, mainly -- but so little emphasis is placed on tackling these elements overall that it can undermine the narrative's intent. Evoking a desire to protect her? She's feeding you ammo and medkits so that the you can more effectively murder everyone in your path, while she remains entirely invulnerable herself. Portraying Columbia as a fully realized city, despite its impressive backstory and scope and thousands of details? Good luck with that, when it boils down to a series of kill hallways. Those notes aren't hit.
Therein lies the problem, then. The storytelling is always going to be constrained by any attempts to appropriately tackle what the player is actually spending most of his time doing in a cinematic hallway shooter, unless it's Call of Duty or Battlefield's implicit understanding of, "hey, it's war, that's the point." So, on one hand we can welcome a departure from the military shooter premise, but on the other hand it leads to a new set of problems with pairing a believable narrative with the primary interaction consisting of walking forward for 10 hours murdering hundreds of people to a hand-wave and a shrug, surrounded by a pretty backdrop.
Of course, cinematic hallway shooters remain popular and it's a safe approach to funnel 200 million dollars into. Let's set aside the financial realities for a moment, though. It seems that Bioshock Infinite's intent would have been far more successful with a different gameplay framework entirely. Let the citizens of Columbia be more than eerie props and let combat be something other than a foregone conclusion. Bring the character development more front and center instead of continuing to shoehorn System Shock 2's audio logs into a far more cinematic style of game. Let us explore this beautiful fantasy city properly beyond sifting through thousands of trash bins and bookshelves for homogeneous loot in between walking forward and killing everything on sight.
Bioshock Infinite's narrative successes set it apart from the typical AAA release, but I'm left more frustrated than satisfied. We get a peek at what the bombastic cinematic carnival ride can be, paired with an overwhelming majority runtime of awkwardly paired Call of Duty shooter.
It's an appropriate swan song for this console generation, perhaps. Now let's do more.
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