I think Infinite was a good game, but I also liked the first two. It did away with any real pretensions of being a survival horror game (or really horror at all) in favor of focusing largely on empathizing the bashing of the US right wing through a much more populated and story driven environment. It comes across in more respects like an action-adventure movie, rather than a grimdark work of horror. That said it does rely on throwing out a bunch of weirdness and some cool concepts but then using a cop out ending that tries to be profound but comes across as being really lazy and surprisingly exactly what you'd expect.
That sounds negative, but understand I can appreciate things I don't entirely agree with, and the game made me think a couple of times which is high praise. When it comes to endings that's always the hard part of a game, and I suppose it was okay overall, not quite the epic suck of say the "Mass Effect 3" ending or anything.
I'd rate it about a 7 out of 10 on a scale where I tend not to rate high for the sake of being uninsulting (a 5 being very average). It's a quality production, it mostly succeeds at what it set out to do, but isn't breaking much new ground compared to what some people think. The AI partner manages to not be annoying for once as well. At the end of the day your pretty much going to be walking down a linear path from battle setpiece to battle setpiece, albeit some of these "rooms" are pretty large and have a lot of little nooks to explore and details to admire. The much vaunted "reality tearing" is simply a fancy way of summoning things like turrets, but you don't have a whole lot of control since what you can summon is predetermined, meaning you don't get a lot of strategy to say decide where you want to put a turret or friendly robot, you just activate what's already there in the place it happens to be. If your fine with a fairly linear shooter that tells a story, and has some nice environments and backround details, you'll like this.
Speaking for myself, I think the original Bioshock was the best of the series, having the most balanced message behind it (though to be fair Infinite does try and balance things out a little towards the end as well), and the best overall presentation, especially seeing as it was pretty new at the time. It also did a better job than the other two games of causing me to manage resources and creating tension that way, because simply put Bioshock 2 and Infinite were so crawling with ammo and toys that I never really had any fear I was going to run out, the most they did was force me to occasionally change weapons, since scarce ammo for one type of weapon tends to simply mean ammo is about to become plentiful for another type.
I'll also say that I believe they are going in the wrong direction with the increased simplication going along with prettier environments and a more scripted storyline. I think what they need is to inject more "System Shock 2" (the spiritual predecessor to the current games) into the current games, giving you more options for character customization and making it more difficult to wind up with pretty much everything worth having so builds and strategies become more viable and people will wind up really coming up with very different playstyles.
