Bioshock Infinite was released in 2013 and follows the story of a dude called Booker DeWitt as he travels to Columbia, the city in the sky, where he is tasked with saving a girl called Elizibeth from some evil bloke called Comstock. Elizibeth is no ordinary girl though as she has the power to open holes in space time so the two of them meet up and then go on a shooty, multi-dimensional journey to escape fantasy turbo-racist sky America.
As a game in it's own right, Bioshock Infinite isn't a bad game. The gunplay is just fine, the Vigors (formerly known as Plasmids) make a return and give a few extra options to things when fighting and also there are set places where Elizibeth can open some space time holes for you that grant you access to guns, robots to shoot for you, movement options or cover. By itself, Bioshock infinite is FINE, a good old turn off your brain and shoot bang the bad men until they go away and do it in the admittedly quite pretty backdrop of a sky city.
However Bioshock Infinite is not an original IP that we can judge entirely on its own merits, it's the third entry in a series and when you start to make those comparisons Bioshock Infinite becomes a incredibly dumbed down boredom-fest that is nothing more than a shell of what it once was. Bioshock 1 and 2 didn't quite have the depth to be called a full on "immersive sim" but there was still a quite cerebral element to play. For example you had lots of choices with what guns you used, you could carry all of them at once, pick a few to suit your play style for upgrading purposes and then attempt to tailor your approach to a situation based on that. For example, if you were the kind of guy that favored getting in there with a shotgun you might use the ice plasmid for your human foes and the electro bolt to disable mechanical ones and go apeshit in a group of enemies. If you prefered to be a bit more sneaky you might want to use the grenade launcher alt-ammo to lay down traps, equip plasmids that turn enemies on each other and try and avoid the fray. There were a lot of options for play style and there were a lot of chances for you to use the environment to your advantage. Another example might be that enemies were prone to running to a healing station in a level if they were low on health. If you werent good at hacking or couldn't be bothered (the mini game did kind of suck in Bio 1) then you'd have to drop what you were doing to go deal with the fleeing enemy. If you DID like hacking though, you could hack the healing station so that when an enemy tried to use it they would take damage instead, meaning that a fleeing foe is something you don't have to worry about during a heated shoot out.
These are just some very basic examples of stuff from previous games that you could do but Bioshock Infinite has NONE of that. You only get 2 guns at a time, so there's no emergent play style because you aren't using guns you like or guns that are good for a situation, you're using whatever is lying around so that you have ammo for it. The Vigors in this game are absolute dogshit and barely do anything most of the time. I only really used 2 vigors the entire game which was possesion and shock jockey. Possession was particularly broken because once upgraded it basically becomes a "delete a guy" button except before deletion he will fight for you. I got a whole bunch of things that all kind of did the same thing, boiling down to nothing more than "click to do thing, hold and release to drop a trap for that thing". Even the environmental stuff was bullshit because every area is just a shooting arena with a couple of rips in space time for you to abuse. I didn't have to think about if I wanted to use the gun turret rip in space time, I just did it because why the fuck would I NOT want a robot gun helping me save ammo? There's not even anything clever with the health system because they turned that into fucking Halo of all things. Get hit, lose a shield and then suck your thumb behind a wall until it comes back, rinse and repeat until the fight is over.
They had made TWO games, even more if you include the System Shock games that worked and were fun and cool and instead of building upon the ideas layed down in all those games, they ripped it all out so you could play Call of Duty: Wizard Edition. I'm not going to spoil anything in this review but clearly all the efforts at being "clever" went into the plot which involves time travel and multi-verse type bullshit but it's all just a bunch of pretentious nonsense and once you get to the end it's just as unsatisfying and the gameplay
If there's one thing I cannot stand its the dumbing down of games. If you want to make an original that's about a shooty person making heads explode then fine, do that, I'm sure it'll be a good time. What you shouldn't do is take a game series that already exists and is interesting and rip all of the interesting aspects of that series out to chase lowest common denominator bullshit. That just makes you an asshole
I finished it on hard, I might go back to check out the DLC chapters that were set in Rapture but I have no intention of ever playing the sorry excuse for a campaign ever again. Fuck this game
