The BioShock series, notable for the doomed libertarian dystopias into which the player is sent, took a startling turn in its latest outing, Bioshock Infinite. Taking place in a perversely patriotic theme-park echo of America, its spectacular world-building and storytelling generated critical acclaim, but its generic gameplay prompted second thoughts. Leigh Alexander puts it like so: “Infinite‘s is a sterile, mechanized system that could have been ripped from any other listless hyper-modern game like a bloody spine and grafted messily onto this vision, obscuring it. It doesn’t even do it well; I wouldn’t even say competently.“
