- Joined
- Jun 18, 2019
Bioshock Infinite, although I'm seeing more and more people realize it isn't as good as people once thought it was. It is an effective way to see if somebody likes the smell of their own farts, though, and it's amusing that people still get mad to this very day if you suggest it's a mediocre game with bad writing.
The gameplay is exceedingly average for a shooter, and so many mechanics are just tacked on. The game's version of plasmids from Bioshock 1 and 2 have so many overlaps in terms of what they can do (with many being either effectively grenades or stuns), the guns feel like peashooters, and the weapon upgrade system makes zero sense when you are forced to swap guns so often throughout the game (with some weapons completely disappearing about two or three hours after they're introduced). The hardest difficulty is also poorly paced and it has an insanely bad design decision to make it so enemies regenerate their health if you die on it but your ammo and supplies stay missing. The escort character you have also is such a non-factor in gameplay that they can't even get hurt, so they're essentially a walking supply locker. The only interesting mechanic, the ability to open rifts in reality, is also incredibly limited and is only used to make cover, summon ammo, or create a distraction, and you're often better off not even bothering. On the hardest difficulty, I completely avoided this mechanic in favor of sniping at the tanky enemies behind the cover that was already there.
The story is also bad. The characters would be interesting, but nobody acts like a human being. The player character treats hopping dimensions as a fix-all solution to everything, including things that it wouldn't feasibly fix. For instance, at one point they need to deliver machinery and they only realize they don't know how to move it after they already got there, so they hop dimensions just hoping it would fix it without so much as explaining what they expect. In another instance, you hop dimensions into a world where your character had died and it spurred a revolution, and the leader of said revolution wants to kill you just so you can continue being a martyr, despite them supposedly seeing you as an important visionary, all so the game's plot can keep moving forward. To finish, the ending is essentially a reset button ending so that nothing you did matters, and it goes above and beyond by implying that even the reset button didn't work as a twist at the end.
I did like riding around on the sky rails though. It's a shame they never do anything with it. They actually removed features surrounding it, as a matter of fact. Enemies used to be able to ride it in pre-release footage, which would at least make the shooting more dynamic, but they took it out for some reason, maybe because the enemies were doing something besides stand around and wait for you to shoot them. Now enemies just stand around and wait for you to shoot them, and watch you ride around on the sky rails while they're completely grounded save for maybe two scripted events.
The game isn't bad, it's just average. What makes it overrated is people saying the gameplay is amazing and the story is stunning and intellectual. The story is just bad and treats multiverse theory as magic rather than a scientific concept. Recently one of the writers posted on Reddit saying they didn't quite understand multiverse theory to begin with and likes using things that make them feel stupid in their writing, and it really shows. The whole game was a mess development-wise too, as the devs kept starting over to try newer and bigger ideas, eventually causing the publisher to crack down and force them to release what they have via deadline. This video is pretty enlightening for demonstrating what we could've gotten if not for executive meddling.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=muJYTeQlvC4
Bioshock Infinite is without a doubt the biggest disappointment in gaming to me.
It's not a bad game, just average, like you said, but I was so beyond hyped for it I was literally counting the days in the last few months before it's release.