“POLICE! HANDS IN THE AIR!”

You get to hear that phrase a lot in SWAT 4. You and your squadmates will scream it several dozen times per mission. For once this isn’t because of a very limited number of stock responses a la the Elder Scrolls, and neither is it an amusing audio bug; instead, you want to be announcing your presence as loudly as possible when you enter a room. You want hostages to stay down, you want armed criminals to surrender, and most of all what you don’t want is to shoot a gunman without warning them first, because the SWAT series are the only games I’m aware of that have actual honest-to-god rules of engagement.

“POLICE! ON YOUR KNEES!”

SWAT 4 is a tactical shooter somewhat in the mould of Rainbow Six. It eschews Rainbow’s detailed planning elements for a contextual squad command system that mostly revolves around how and when to go through doors¹, but otherwise it’s very similar: both you and the criminals you’re trying to apprehend can be killed by a single bullet, your accuracy is terrible if you’re moving at any pace faster than a shuffling walk and takes several seconds to recover once you slow down, and the enemies have very fast reaction times. The time window between a bank robber raising his gun and a bank robber shooting you dead is probably no more than half a second long, and this can be very awkward because technically you’re not allowed to shoot someone unless they’re pointing their weapons at either you or a hostage.

“POLICE! DOWN ON THE FLOOR, NOW!”

This is the key difference between SWAT and Rainbow. In Rainbow you’re part of a military counter-terrorist team, and as long as the hostages all survive the mission nobody cares what happens to the terrorists – some terrorists will give up and surrender once they see you coming, but you’re never penalised for executing them on the spot. No matter how complex the tactical planning segment is, the rules once you actually get in mission are very simple: there are a bunch of bad guys, and your job is to kill them and not ask them any questions afterwards. In SWAT, however, you’re a police officer leading a squad of police officers, and your job is (at least ostensibly) to preserve life wherever possible. This rather unfortunately includes the heavily-armed criminals, and so busting into a room and popping a cap in a criminal’s skull before he has a chance to react is rather frowned upon by your superiors.

“POLICE! GET DOWN!”

As a result SWAT has a rather unique emphasis on not killing bad guys. At the end of every mission your performance is scored out of a hundred. Passing a mission on Normal requires a score of 50 or more. You get minor deductions for getting shot, or having your squadmates get shot, or not reporting injured hostages, or not policing weapons that the criminals have dropped, but these are only a few points each. Shoot an enemy who wasn’t immediately threatening either yourself or a hostage, though, and you get 5 points deducted from your score. If you kill them (and you almost always kill them given the lethality of SWAT’s weapons) the penalty balloons to 10 points.  You have enough latitude on Normal difficulty to accidentally kill a couple of people without following procedure, but on Veteran or Elite (which require 75 and 95 points to pass respectively) it amounts to an almost certain mission fail. And no matter what difficulty you’re on, if you just charge into a room shooting all and sundry you will fail the mission and have to do it all over again.

“POLICE! DROP YOUR WEAPONS!”

So you have to find a way to clear SWAT’s levels while following those restrictive rules of engagement: if an armed criminal is not directly threatening you you can’t shoot them. They don’t have any such qualms, unfortunately, and if you don’t tip the odds in your favour before they catch sight of you they’ll likely kill you stone cold dead before you have a chance to react.  You need to take a different approach to combat that usually involves intimidating an enemy into surrendering, and therefore SWAT has a very interesting emphasis on non-lethal shock-and-awe tactics. Say you’ve got your squad lined up outside a locked room. You check under the door with your magical opti-wand and discover that there’s two hostages and two terrorists inside with their guns pointed at the door. If you just pick the lock and walk on in your squad is going to get massacred because the squad AI operates under the same restrictions as you do; they won’t even have time to call out

“POLICE! DROP IT!”

before the terrorists gun them down. However, one of the things you can do before a mission is choose your squad’s equipment loadout, and each squad member has two weapon slots plus a whopping five slots for non-lethal tactical equipment such as flashbangs, CS gas grenades, pepper spray, breaching charges, door wedges (which are far more useful than they sound), and there’s also non-lethal weapon options like tasers and beanbag shotguns. The pre-mission briefing will give you some idea of what weapons and body armour the bad guys have which allows you to plan accordingly². In the scenario above they might have gas masks which would render the normally-reliable CS grenades useless, so you’d order your squad to breach the door (incidentally stunning anyone nearby), have them toss in a flashbang to stun and disorientate the room’s occupants, follow it up with a stinger grenade that fires out little rubber balls that further bruise bad guys without killing them, and then charge in screaming at the top of your lungs for them to put the guns down.

“You’re in my spot, sir.”

Alas, in practice it’s never quite as simple as this. First, flashbangs will only stun people who can see them – one of the reasons why CS grenades are a useful alternative is because they turn anyone in range into a choking, weeping mess regardless of whether they’re crouching behind cover or not – and so if there’s somebody hiding behind a piece of furniture or around a blind corner they won’t be affected by the bang. The room might still have somebody in it capable of shooting back. Second, CS grenades and flashbangs create an awful lot of smoke which impairs your vision and makes it difficult to distinguish between terrorist and hostage. Third, and most importantly, anyone who does get stunned by the flashbang is going to be stumbling around disoriented for a few seconds, but they’re not necessarily going to drop their guns – and remember, if they’re just holding them and not pointing them at anyone, you’re not allowed to shoot them. This is why you tend to give anyone who doesn’t immediately comply with the group of heavily armed men telling them to get down and drop their weapons a little bit of encouragement in the form of a 10,000 volt taser shot.

“GET DOWN, HANDS IN THE AIR!”

All of this takes place in the space of about four seconds, and it can be ridiculously confusing and intense as you try to figure out who has surrendered and who is still a threat. There was one encounter outside a bank vault where I’d thrown a flashbang down the stairs before confronting the robbers, except none of them would drop their guns. My SWAT teammates were screaming at the robbers to comply. The robbers were just screaming in general because they’d just been stunned and deafened. This standoff went on for a little while until one of them made the mistake of raising his assault rifle and was immediately gunned down. A second robber surrendered upon seeing his friend get dispatched by the firing squad, while the third scarpered back into the vault where he had two friends waiting; getting them out of there cost me most of the squad, and it was just a good thing it was the last area of the mission I had to clear.

“POLICE! HANDS ON YOUR HEAD!”

This sort of unpredictable baddie AI makes your job extremely difficult. When an enemy catches sight of your squad there’s a number of things they might do. They might start opening fire immediately. They might run away and hide to ambush you later. If you’re shouting for compliance, they might put their guns down. Then again, they might also pretend to put their guns down and then start shooting at the last second. Only one of these things authorises you to use lethal force (if they do the last one you’re probably dead unless an AI teammate took the hit for you).  Runners are a particular problem in SWAT, with enemies bolting into parts of the level you’ve already cleared and forcing you to clear them all over again; this is why the tactical door wedges (and I still can’t believe these are a real thing) are so useful, since they allow you to block off areas of the map and keep enemies contained. Still, nine times out of ten if you do your job right, approach a map slowly and methodically and grenade every single room you can reliably clear a level with only minor flesh wounds. There’s very few actual bullshit deaths in SWAT; if you get shot in the back it’s because you got lazy and didn’t check a corner, and if you get shot in the front it’s because you did something stupid like running into your own flashbang or forgetting to reload your taser. SWAT is a game about walking around a building very, very carefully punctuated by micro-moments of action as you storm a room, where your own incompetence is usually what kills you.

I like SWAT 4. It’s a refreshing change of pace from modern shooters which demands a cautious and methodical attitude at all times. You creep, you don’t run; you spend a minute or two getting everyone into position and scoping out a door before sending everyone through; and if all goes well you can finish a level without ever having fired your gun. Mechanically there are some limitations in that the SWAT engine is built to do room clearance really well and everything else really poorly, but the level designers have been really clever with their scenarios and succeed in keeping things fresh and interesting all the way through. The contextual squad commands work really well despite making it very difficult to do a coordinated assault on a room from two different entry points, and the squad AI is… well, I just started thinking of them as the police androids from Almost Human, since they’re terrifyingly good shots and never break the rules of engagement but have precisely zero individual initiative, happily twiddling their thumbs thirty feet down the corridor because you forgot to give the Fall In command while you charge into a room alone and get shot to pieces.  Unfortunately it’s rather hard to find these days since it’s not available on any digital distribution service, but if you can luck into a pre-owned copy – as I did — you’re in for something that’s quite unlike any other FPS I’ve played, and this alone makes it worth the hassle of acquiring it in the first place. An excellent game.

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SPOILER WARNING: Bioshock Infinite is a game that is best played when you have absolutely no idea what is going to happen when you do.  Unfortunately a critical appraisal of Bioshock Infinite is impossible without at least mentioning some of the general plot themes and elements, so while there’s not going to be any major plot spoilers of the OMG ELIZABETH IS YOUR FATHER variety I can’t review the game while avoiding talking about what’s actually in it. If you want to remain completely unspoiled, a potted summary of my opinion about Bioshock Infinite would be pretty similar to what I thought of Spec Ops — not the best of games, but absolutely worth playing through at least once.

These days I tend to jot down a few notes immediately after finishing a game. It’s helpful to get my thoughts in order when I have a complete impression of what it was like and that impression is at its freshest; later, when I come to write whatever I write about it, not everything in my notes will get mentioned but it will at least be floating around in the back of my mind before I put metaphorical pen to digital paper. At the top of those notes is usually the thing about the game that I found most striking and which usually sets the tone of whatever review I end up writing about it. As it happens, the very first thing I wrote about Bioshock Infinite – just above “In medias res story” and “Potatoes in the toilet” — is the following sentence:

“Bioshock Infinite is hurt by being an FPS.”

This is possibly not the most original thought, but it’s something which was painfully apparent throughout my time with it. Irrational Games have crafted something special here; the world of Bioshock Infinite is a surreal, dreamlike environment of flying cities and shifting dimensions where nothing is what it seems. It takes what we think we know about the period the game is set in (just after the turn of the 20^th century) and twists them in ways both obvious and subtle. You might be walking around a seaside boardwalk that’s ten thousand feet above ground level but there’s still something else wrong with the place that you can’t quite put your finger on, and after just a few minutes your overriding urge is to explore this strange new world and try to make sense of it all.

Except of course because this is an FPS your primary method of interaction with that world is to shoot its inhabitants in the face, and that’s pretty much all you can do. For all of Bioshock Infinite’s imagination the plot is presented to you through the decades old trope of scripted cutscenes within captive theatres, unfolding automatically once you hit a certain number of murder milestones; it doesn’t quite render the excellent world-building meaningless but it does do a great deal to hobble the game’s potential. Trying to tell this sort of story is distinctly at odds with the medium of a two-weapon ironsight shooter, and no matter how many extra gimmicks the game throws in (and there are a lot of them) it can’t ever expand its boundaries past the limitations inherent in the modern FPS genre.

Still, I have to review the game I’ve got, not the game I’d want, and as it stands Bioshock Infinite is far from terrible. It wastes no time with exposition or character backstory and simply thrusts you straight into the shoes of Booker DeWitt, a man on a mission to find and retrieve a certain girl – Elizabeth — to repay a debt he owes to an unknown party. Who that party is, who Elizabeth is and who Booker is are questions that occupy much of the game’s running time; this minimalist approach to exposition allows plenty of opportunity for shocking plot twists further along the line, just like the original Bioshock, but I’m honestly not sure whether I should be admiring the game for its willingness to experiment with narrative structure or hating it for deliberately leaving the player starved of information in an attempt to make itself seem cleverer than it actually is.  It’s difficult to tell if it’s good writing when this pseudo-amnesia setup is used as a sort of universal plothole wallpapering device; things might make sense to Booker but they don’t make sense to you, and there’s no way of knowing if this is intentional or not. While I certainly acknowledge it was far from pointless and there was a payoff it damn near drove me up the wall at times. As premises go I suspect this one is rather Marmite: some people will love it, others will hate it, and neither group is wrong, or right. But then that’s the risk you take when you screw with narrative structure, I suppose.

Anyway, in his search for Elizabeth Booker is quickly transported to the floating steampunk city of Columbia. Where Rapture’s underwater dystopia was themed along the lines of Randian objectivism with an art deco face, Columbia focuses on religious fanaticism entwined with monopolistic capitalism, and I have to say I found its approach far more effective. This is probably because Bioshock Infinite rejects one of the more irritating design decisions of the original game and actually lets you mingle with the inhabitants of Columbia from time to time. Listening to the conversations of the indoctrinated populace is undeniably creepy, and it also allows you to see the evils of this society first hand instead of simply relating them through a series of voice journals. Bioshock’s visit to Rapture was post-disaster and it was hard to get a handle on what life there was actually like during the city’s peak.  By contrast Columbia is still at the height of its power when Booker arrives and you get a good long look at how this civilization functions before everything – inevitably — goes straight to hell.

Booker’s arrival has been foretold by Columbia’s leader, the self-proclaimed Prophet, and Booker himself is soon discovered and hotly pursued by the city’s security forces. He finds Elizabeth easily enough and busts her out of the facility where she is being held, but it turns out that she’s a messianic figure to the population who will do anything to get her back. All this takes place in the first hour of play; the other seven are taken up by Booker and Elizabeth’s attempts to escape the city as it disintegrates around them. There’s plenty of weirdness later on in the game as both Booker and Elizabeth unravel their histories, but past that opening hour you’re thrust into a series of shooting galleries that are occasionally broken up by theme-park like segments where you get to stroll through the streets of Columbia and watch the city at work. While it is nice to get that opportunity, and it is undeniably effective as a scene-setter, Bioshock Infinite’s mechanical approach to showing you the city is a definite problem. These segments never quite escape the feeling that they are being staged for your benefit, especially since the majority of them are used in a strict formula that dictates you come back later when the civilian population has vanished into thin air and fight a bunch of bad guys. It’s not helped by the Unreal engine, either, which does a great job of rendering the fantastic environment of Columbia but then falls down completely when rendering actual people, giving them its trademark plasticky artificial sheen.

The sole exception to this rule is — rather unsurprisingly – Elizabeth. Since you spend most of the game in her company a vast amount of time and effort has gone into making her seem as lifelike as possible, and I’m happy to say it has (mostly) paid off.  Her animation and voice acting are top-notch, and while I’ve heard of crossed wires somewhere causing her to run into the player I’ve never seen it myself. Elizabeth has been made distinctly unobtrusive to the player, following you intelligently and even running ahead of you on occasion; this pathfinding magic is doubtless aided by some sneaky out-of-sight teleportation but I’m fine with that. She helps out during fights, occasionally throwing you health packs and ammo when you’re low on either, and she can also pick the locks of certain rooms hiding unspecified goodies¹. Baddies won’t shoot at her during combat, instead focusing all of their attention of you. Bioshock Infinite has deliberately excised every single one of the infuriating things about escort quests — which is a wise move since the entire game is basically one long escort quest — and so having Elizabeth along for the ride is nothing but a great boost to the gameplay.

And to be quite honest it’s a sorely needed one. If you take Elizabeth out of the mix there’s very little about Bioshock Infinite’s gameplay that hasn’t been done a hundred times before, and in many cases done better. It’s a distinctly average shooter, with the Vigors (Infinite’s version of Plasmids) doing little to spice things up since they’re so situational. The series’ ubiquitous vending machines and passive upgrades – this time in the form of magical clothing – are present and correct but aside from the shotgun² the weapons are a tragically uninspiring bunch: pistol, rifle, sniper rifle, machine gun, grenade launcher, blah blah blah. There are times when you’d be forgiven for thinking you were playing a not-particularly-good World War Two shooter from six or seven years back, since the weapons and enemies are basically identical. The so-called Heavy Hitter minibosses don’t help either thanks to being pitched too far towards the Really Fucking Irritating end of the spectrum; in order to put a Handyman down you have to fire off your entire stock of machine gun ammo, fire off your entire stock of carbine ammo, find a vending machine, buy some more and then repeat the process. Finally because this is Bioshock you can’t quicksave, but that’s okay because you can’t die either; you just respawn at the nearest checkpoint with your enemies slightly healed and everything else just as you left it.

The one genuinely fun addition the game makes to the FPS formula are the skylines. These are convoluted systems of aerial rails that make a circuit of combat zones; Booker can attach himself to them simply by looking up and jumping at them, and he’ll then proceed to hurtle around them at a terrifying pace providing the opportunity for driveby shotgunnings, flying kick dismounts and so on. The added mobility the skylines provide are key to breaking the monotony of the game’s combat – which usually involves creeping out of cover until you can see and headshot a single baddie, and then repeating for however many baddies are in the area – and is often necessary when fighting quick and tough enemies like Handymen. The nice thing about them is that they’re a two way street; your enemies can all use skylines as well, so if you use them to reach a seemingly-unassailable sniping perch you’ll often turn around while reloading to discover that they’ve simply followed you up there. They’re also a nice conceit for spawning new waves of bad guys – who will arrive by skyline instead of spilling out of a tiny closet en masse – as well as giving you the chance to do yet more sightseeing when you’re using them to move from one area to another.

I mentioned them in passing earlier, but the environment design in Infinite really is fantastic. I think this is at least partly because the start of the game opts for a Technicolor palette that isn’t usually seen outside of 1950s movies; the colours are strong and vibrant and leap right out of the screen. Just staring into the blue sky in the opening sequence is mesmirising, not to mention adding substantially to the game’s dreamlike quality, and exploring is – at least to start with –  kind of like playing a darker version of the Wizard of Oz[1.No, not that one.] where the cheerful tones just add to the sinister nature of the game. Unfortunately it can’t keep the stunning quality up all the way through and the end of the game gives way to slightly too many war-torn ruins, but I’d say that even without its story Bioshock Infinite would probably be worth picking up cheap for the gorgeous visual design of the levels alone, even if that visual design is inconsistent and the levels end up with a rather incoherent, disconnected feel overall. It’s just a shame that they’re mainly used as nothing more than a backdrop for a series of repetitive and bland gunfights, really.

I think I’ve said everything I can about Bioshock Infinite without starting to edge into major spoiler territory. As an FPS it is almost perfectly mediocre, breaking almost no new ground and resolutely playing it safe, and I have serious doubts as to the game’s replay value when so much of what you do in it is rinse-and-repeat shooting. Fortunately that’s not the only card the game has to play, and while the level of imagination it displays in creating its world and its story sits rather at odds with the monotony of the gunplay it’s still worth playing for those alone. I mean, I’ve been complaining for years that modern shooters tend to be rather dark (or brown), depressing and unoriginal affairs, so I feel a bit bad castigating Bioshock Infinite when it provides exactly what I’ve been looking for all this time, even if the world they’ve ended up building here is an awful fit for the FPS genre in general.  So I think I’ll give Bioshock Infinite a cautious thumbs up, if only in the hope that it’ll stimulate the creative glands of other developers who can maybe provide some decent gameplay to match. Play it for the sumptuous visuals. Play it for the omnipresent sense of wonder entwined with a constant uneasy feeling that something isn’t quite right.  Try to overlook the unfortunate interludes where you mechanistically shoot a bunch of dudes in the face. Enjoy Bioshock Infinite for its strengths, and ignore its weaknesses, and I think you’ll find it an experience well worth the asking price.

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