To explain how a game with such lofty credentials could be, in the playing of it, only plucky fun, and ultimately a failure for anyone with his brain turned on, a person sympathetic to its cause raises two arguments. Either, a) Irrational Games fell prey to the familiarity of its own genius. Or, b) BioShock was never a Franchise(TM).
Infinite is a fraudulent qualifier to the excellent BioShock name. Infinite is a powerful word, but BioShock: Infinite has none of the power of the original game. It's as if Irrational Games, in viewing its many conceptual ideas on the conference room table, and seeing that at least half of them were mistakes, and behind schedule, came up with a moniker that would tie together a bunch of anything. "It's not convoluted, not unbelievable, it's ... infinite."
With apologies to brain-dead fans of The Last of Us, BioShock was indeed the Citizen Kane of gaming. BioShock was an exercise in originality, an ode to mania and cleverness, down to the plot twist that happens in a way that Orson Welles himself would've approved. Like every other masterpiece, BioShock exclaimed an unbelievable idea--there is a working city under the Atlantic Ocean, and it's a secret--and every moment, won us over anyway.
Only the feral drive of industrialist Andrew Ryan could will a domed palace like Rapture into existence. His obsession with the city is a reason to believe in the concept of Rapture, which is obviously madness, as busted pipes, and a stir-crazy citizenry, prove. That Ryan fears losing control of the city he built is more plausibility, as anyone who appoints himself a Creator learns the hard way. Ryan's philosophy of limitless potential succeeds in the grandeur of the city's districts, unregulated by petty morality, but it also spawns dark, depraved experiments.
If you were author of such an inspired world, living with it for years of development, then enjoying years of accolades, you might take it for granted. You may even, after a few years, miss what made your achievement so uncommon. Being too close to greatness you've forgotten, it's one way to explain why BioShock: Infinite doesn't attempt to sell realism in its fantastical setting of a cloud city. What makes BioShock a franchise, if anything does, is the ability to turn the mechanic of shooting people into a mythical experience. Irrational Games knew, at one time, "the greatest aphrodisiac is between your ears." The explanations of Rapture, its work of world-building, it was to get you believing in make-believe, to hold your reason captive, so the run-of-the-mill video game aspects, fetch this, kill that, would feel special. It worked. BioShock makes your television a looking-glass. It's that good.
The inverse move from water to sky is hard to miss. We're ready for a good engineering story, to get our next utopia, Columbia, aloft. (Did anyone ask for BioShock: Infinite to so closely resemble the former game?)
Instead of world-building, BioShock: Infinite presents the reality of Columbia as a movie plot. Things just are. In a movie, there's an anti-hero. Villains. A damsel-in-distress. There's the audience, us, but with a controller.
And so, we stumble onto the concept of BioShock: Infinite, a concept we've seen before. It's a movie that you play.
This concept is as friendly to the original BioShock as a splicer is to a Little Sister, when Big Daddy's taking a leak. That Irrational Games would try to make a franchise out of two dissimilar games, with dissimilar mentalities, and even goals, is either proof that Irrational thinks so highly of itself that it could pull it off, or Irrational thinks so little of us not to notice. It isn't to say, BioShock: Infinite is a failure of a game. It's a dismal failure as a BioShock game.
For the record, BioShock was created in the model of a PC game, for fans of gaming. It was smart. Easy to understand but complex to master, it asked for your attention. It let you get lost. It wanted you to feel taxed, and so made playing mini-games a mandatory part of a hard-difficulty run, (for low prices and enemy bonuses). BioShock was fun. BioShock was work. BioShock was a quintessential video game--unfortunately now, old-school. (The first numbered sequel can be enjoyed for mimicking Irrational's vision, and also ignored here.)
Infinite has moved BioShock's "target audience" from PC gamers to today's console gamers, who either do want to play a movie with a controller, or are the victims of a great misunderstanding, for being fed these kinds of games. It's the trend, for impressive games with big budgets and great atmosphere, to simplify a game's "matrix of choices." You have fewer ways to fight. Fewer paths to explore. Fewer puzzles to solve. You're told what to do.
You'll find every one of these--to mimic its gauche use of religious terms-- sins committed in BioShock: Infinite. It would seem sacrilege to give Infinite the name of a grandaddy shooter with the pedigree of O.G. BioShock. It might be considered a betrayal for fans who loved the first game for being a game, and want the (true) sequel, by the original studio, to follow its own rules.
Name equity. Synergy. Franchise. Buzzwords forced the decision: add BioShock to the box. Given the high review scores for this watered-down sequel (not entirely sure it's a pun, so let's ignore it), many reviewers chose to move with the times, let Infinite be what it claimed to be. A few of us noticed. We reject the claim.
BioShock Infinite is a betrayal of the original, it's hard to argue. You merely choose to look the other way. However, BioShock: Infinite is a betrayal in ways that have nothing to do with it being a sequel. These betrayals include common sense, political fairness, racial sensitivity, and intelligent storytelling.
Common sense: In what way did a megalomanic like Comstock dupe his followers, besides "religion is like that?" The game itself suggests, "people are willing to kill for what they believe in," but offers nothing more concrete, to explain why cops and thugs charge Booker with the willfulness of a suicide squad, while he's throwing fireballs.
Political fairness: By centering the game around an exaggerated religion, the writer, as with any satire, seeks to commentate on extremism today, but goes wide of the mark, mocking broadly, without any news of his own. A satirist needs to know more than the script offers here, or it's caricature. The original BioShock set a higher bar.
Racial sensitivity: Clumsily repeating the prejudices of the past, as is done here many times in the name of satire, does not, in itself, make airing past hatreds necessary. Airing prejudices to show "narrative edginess" is in poor taste, and to seek connections to groups that exist today, vaguely, is not an argument against prejudice. It's foul.
Intelligent storytelling: Booker and Elizabeth are, truth be told, the freshest aspect of this wrongheaded game. However, his secret, her mystery, and their dialogue about it, feels pulled from a chapter on L.A. screenwriting: "A for Archetype." And where the story goes? Well, one person's metaphysics is another person's cheat. A cartoon character paints a window on a wall to exit a room. If the trick impresses you, remember, he's a cartoon character.
And so, you sit down to see Citizen Kane, Part II, and they put on a cartoon instead. How long can you stay mad? Sure, the cartoon characters embarrass themselves discussing history, religion, politics, and redemption. Still, they're having fun shooting each other, and they even let you in on it. It all looks pretty, too. You stay seated.