TitaniumDragon 7

Bioshock Infinite is a decent game which suffers from pacing and gameplay issues. The story is decent enough, but a let down compared to the Bioshock Infinite is a decent game which suffers from pacing and gameplay issues. The story is decent enough, but a let down compared to the first game, and not nearly as clever in its commentary about the world or video games. The best part of the game is your sidekick, Elizabeth, who is a sidekick done right and uses a very clever mechanic to make herself useful and meaningful, but the game itself failed to make itself dynamic enough for her to be used to her full potential.



The story of the original Bioshock is what really made the game special. Unfortunately, this game's story is not up to the level of the first game's story; you don't feel the same drive onward, and, unfortunately, because of the first game's twist, it is more obvious that there is going to be a twist in this one, which somewhat bothered me as I saw the twist coming from the very start of the game.

Unlike in the previous games, in Bioshock Infinite, your character, Booker DeWitt, has both a name and a personality. Booker speaks up throughout the game, talking to the various NPCs, and especially to his sidekick, Elizabeth.

The best and worst part of the game is the various transitions between realities; not only do you draw things between worlds, but you actually travel between worlds at various points in the game, to realities where things played out differently, including (eventually) a reality wherein Booker died after coming to the city.

The problem, ultimately, is that the game never really delivers on the story; it is alright, but it isn't spectacular, and the world-skipping, while a neat idea, never really ends up having the punch that it should, as well as making it so that what we did earlier didn't really matter in that particular world (or maybe it did - who knows?). The whole "dead in one world, alive in another" thing is never really properly explored or followed up on, even though it was built up in significance, and the end result is that while it advanced the plot it really failed to make the game awesome.



The ultimate weakness of this game lies in its gameplay. Bioshock Infinite is every bit the sequel to the previous Bioshock games, and this isn't a good thing - the gameplay is very similar to what it was in previous games, and while the enemy variety is a bit better in this game, there's nothing quite as exciting as some of the Big Daddy fights were in the first game. The Handymen are alright replacements for them, and make for reasonable enough fights, and your first fight against the various new types of enemies is neat enough, but as with the previous games, the lack of real bosses hurts the game a bit.

The normal soldiers who are running around in most of the game are not terribly difficult or interesting enemies to fight, and while some of the battlefields are very interesting and dynamic and make good use of Elizabeth's powers, many of the fights are the opposite - very static things where you just hide behind cover and shoot the enemies, gradually grinding your way through the group without changing what you had summoned into the fight with Elizabeth at all. Elizabeth's powers are really neat, but without a reason to run around during the fight (something some of the special enemies provided at times, especially the handymen, as well as some of the more interesting environmental setups) they often didn't end up very interesting as they just were a piece of whatever I summoned in at the start to help me, rather than something I brought in mid-fight to swing things in my favor.

The actual weapons in the game were very standard for a FPS, with the usual assortment of weapons, and unfortunately the upgrades system really encouraged you to try and stick to as few weapons as possible so that you could make the most use out of your upgrades - this is one of the major flaws of upgrade systems, in that they actually frequently reduce the variety of gameplay by encouraging you to not use a variety of weapons. Some of the weapons were also vastly better than others, and by the end of the game you pretty much had your pick of which weapon to use most of the time, rather than giving you a scavenging feel.

The vigors are supposed to help mix things up from the usual FPS point of view, and it is nice to have weird weapons in a game, but ultimately I only ended up using a small number of the vigors - really, the only good ones were the ones which temporarily incapacitated foes, including the one that gave me a free ally for a bit, and as a result I pretty much only used three vigors through most of the game. They also didn't fit into the world at all thematically.

All in all, the gameplay didn't really match the ambiance the story seemed to be trying to create, and the gameplay was too slow for the game itself - the game would have been better if it had avoided making you run around looking for change all the time. … Expand