By the time I saw BioShock Infinite E3 was already two days old. Everyone on the show floor had their favorite game, but it seemed that everyone on the show floor who had seen the latest from developer Irrational Games had decided that BioShock Infinite, undoubtedly, was their favorite game. I didn’t have an appointment with 2K, but I nevertheless managed to work my way into a closed-doors demonstration of BioShock Infinite. Maybe I was infected with the hype bleeding out from the collective games press or possibly I have too much admiration for the folks at Irrational, but I’m a believer. BioShock Infinite ran the best hands-off demo on the E3 floor.
The vertical slice of content placed Elizabeth under the watch of former Pinkerton Booker DeWhitt. The how and why weren’t important as ample information on DeWhitt, Elizabeth and the floating city of Colombia are featured on a dozen corners of the internet. What sold the demo was the specific interaction between the characters. Elizabeth is on the run from Songbird, a nefarious mechanical presence assigned to watch over Elizabeth for the last decade. Both DeWhitt and Elizabeth begin the demo by horsing around with some old United States propaganda, but soon turn deathly serious when discussing the proposition of Songbird’s return. Elizabeth takes DeWhitt’s hands, places them over her neck, and implies that’s the fate she’d wish to suffer if Songbird comes for her.
The mood lightened for a bit as they walked outside of their building, but quickly turned sour when Elizabeth discovered a dead horse. Shocked and saddened by the end of its life, she tried to engage her rather vague and unstable space-time powers to rescue the creature. DeWhitt warns her not to try it, and with good reason considering what happened; time folded improperly and wiped the screen from Columbia as we knew it and placed the characters in a random back alley from the early 80’s. Completely with cheesy synth music and a Star Wars marquee on a movie theater, something had apparently gone horribly wrong. It only lasted a few seconds and the characters (sans the horse) made it back, but the spectacle was incredible.
That spectacle, in fact, is almost normal. The game was technically competent, humming along at high frame rate on PC hardware, but the art direction is the star of the show. I couldn’t tell you the last time I played a game and went outside the lines to absorb the scenery. Sure, I’ve messed around in plenty of open worlds, but that fulfilled a desire to experiment with mechanics, not fill in the blanks to the narrative. With BioShock Infinite’s Colombia, I immediately desired to explore and know every single plot of land that dotted the city in the sky. It pained me that I had no control over the demo because I was begging to see what was off to the left or down the street DeWhitt passed right by. Columbia is a rich, beautiful, and vibrant world – one that absolutely begs for exploration.
Hell broke loose (again) soon after the horse incident. A mailman of some sort was about to be executed by the Vox Populi, a resistance group, and DeWhitt stepped in to save his life. This understandably upset the Vox Populi, which resulted in a massive gun battle. Certain measures were standard; DeWhitt was either armed or found varying degrees of pistols, machine guns, and rocket launchers to dispatch his foes. At one point he tried to shoot down a zeppelin, but arguably more impressive were his trips through the sky.
I have no idea what these “sky tracks” were called (Metroid Prime: Corruption’s Sky Town comes to mind) but their implementation was consistently awesome. DeWhitt has a spinning device that allows him to hook onto these tracks and ride them around like a roller coaster. Ostensibly the tracks exist to provide quick and easy transportation to various parts of Columbia, but in practice DeWhitt used them to evade foes and jump all over the place. It was all incredibly fast, and watching DeWhitt try and reach a destination while flying down sky tracks and returning fire with what remained of the Vox Populi was exhilarating, to say the least.
Eventually DeWhitt won the battle, but without room to breathe he was already in trouble again. Songbird arrived out of nowhere, grabbed DeWhitt, and beginning pummeling him to death. Elizabeth intervened and offered herself and her custody as a sacrifice to save the life of DeWhitt. It was ironic, considering she had earlier instructed DeWhitt to kill her if Songbird ever came for her. Songbird obliged and flew Elizabeth away. Demo over.
BioShock Infinite arrives in 2012, and you can bet we’ll be counting down the days until its eventual release.
