14 DAY TRIAL // BioShock Infinite puts players in the shoes of Booker DeWitt, who needs to go to a floating city called Columbia to rescue a girl named Elizabeth.
Based on this short premise, you can imagine that the whole game would be a glorified escort mission in which you need to protect Elizabeth from enemies while exploring Columbia in order to find a way out.
As you can imagine, this triggered some annoying memories in many gamers who've gotten tired of escort or protection missions in other types of games, either due to the aggressive enemies or the stupid non-playable character you got paired up with.
In BioShock Infinite, however, developer Irrational Games managed to make Elizabeth a key part of gameplay, not only during regular exploration sequences but also in combat.
More specifically, when you start fighting with enemies, depending on your overall state, Elizabeth stays in cover and occasionally throws you precious resources like ammo, health, or salts for your vigor.
Elizabeth can also open tears into other dimensions and spawn different helpful things, from bits of cover to turrets, and even ammo or health caches, which can turn the tide of any battle.
When you aren't in combat, Elizabeth will continue to remain helpful, as she can toss you money, she can spot different items like lockpicks, and actually use them to pick locks and open different rooms filled with different rewards.
Sure, there are some moments when she might get you stuck in a tiny room because she's blocking the door but those are few and far between, as she'll give you space to move around.
While lots of NPCs can be helpful in different games, Elizabeth's methods feel natural and, after getting used to receiving help from her in combat, it's going to be hard to adjust back to fighting alone or with squadmates in other first-person shooters.