So how good is Bioshock:Infinite really ?(Spoiler free)

[furiousseraph]

The setting and environment were what did it for me. A lot of people talk about the story and characters. The biggest thing that got my attention was the environment. If you grew up in the rural Midwest, you would still likely see buildings the same style as the ones in the game, although some in better shape than others. But getting to see full storefronts that looked as nice as the real ones probably did 100 years ago was awesome. Seeing items packed in wood boxes, some that you can find at garage sales nowadays, lots of glass work and each item looking as though someone in the game hand crafted it was fantastic. Then science fiction stuff is added later was ok. It all looked like machinery that would have been built in that era.

I would recommend it for the immersion in more a work of historical fiction based 5 generations ago.

 

[Drummodino]

It was great. The only problem I had with it was it was only around 10 hours long. But everything from the characters, setting, story, voice acting, gameplay and visuals were fantastic.

I find it very hard to judge what my favorite game of this year is because I've played games from previous years recently that were better but I'd say it's up there with The Last of Us as my current GOTY.

 

[Clowndoe]

Yay, rant time!

Where to begin? First off, the health system completely ruined the game. The shield they give you is too small, especially at the start, and the unflinching bullet sponge enemies mean that on a higher difficulty you'll be stuck to cover far too long conserving your armor to have fun. Health itself is also a problem, since kits are so hard to find and you often need them in the middle of a fight I often found myself running around like an asshole spamming F at the ground hoping for a pick-up. Elizabeth's scavenging is useful but is also random and felt contrived to make her useful. While we're on the subject Elizabeth's a nice character but she's not especially deep. I do like her animations and personality, those are kind of nice, but overall she's more of a plot device than a character.

Also, the guns are lame, and you can only carry two at a time. That's not a problem in and of itself, for example I don't mind that Call of Duty does it, but it doesn't work in Infinite. You spend money to upgrade them, but in the end you take the ones that have ammo in the particular section you're in, so it's a crap-shoot. Also, the vigors are poorly explained and with a few exceptions all fall into the "crowd-control with damage" category, with a lot of overlap to boot.

Spoiler: Plot-related complaints

Speaking of which, the plot's fine, but it kind of falls apart at the end. My main gripes being the grand-father paradox (if you're being drowned before having a child, then who's drowning you?). There's also the fact that the reason you're being drowned is to stop Comstock from winning in any of the dimensions, but if there are infinite of them, as the title suggests, then doesn't he win somewhere anyway? Isn't there a universe where Booker doesn't want to go back in time to drown himself? Or did the universe only start splitting itself after the baptism? No, that doesn't work, because there are the Lutece are sometimes a boy and sometimes girl, I forget If there are infinite universes, shouldn't there be infinite Elizabeth that happen to try to jump into your universe at the same time?

The world they created is great, but I have a few gripes with it as well. Like how we hate Comstock for being racist but having racism be entirely shown in black guys cleaning up, some racist carnival amusements, and that part at the beginning where you throw the baseball at the interracial couple. New tangent, why did we have to decide that through A and D anyway? Couldn't they just equip you with a baseball "weapon" and have you aim and click at whoever you want? They don't even let you throw it anyway so what's the problem? Are we too stupid to know we can throw it at the evil guy in the top hat?

That was fun. 7 garbage hot-dogs out of 10, a fate worse than death.

 

[Naeras]

I didn't bother playing through the whole thing. The characters, setting and story seemed interesting, but the gameplay didn't grab me enough for me to play the whole thing.

 

[King Billi]

Yay, rant time!

Ahem.

The OP specifically requested no spoilers! He only wants opinions.

 

[Evonisia]

Well personally:
I found none of the characters to be likeable (especially Elizabeth). Besides Elizabeth they're too exaggerated, Booker is a cynical 40 something guy, Comstock is just a racist arsehole, all the black characters are just overplaying the theme of rebellion like they're in a Star Wars movie, the twins just come off as pretentious (though they stand head and shoulders over everyone else) and the rest of the characters don't even warrant a mention. Elizabeth can't decide a tone to stick with, going madly from happy to angry to cynical to crazy at the blink of an eye.
The health system is crap and there was no reason to drop the conservation of health packs.
Elizabeth is essentially an "I Win" button who gives you infinite (heh) amounts of health, ammo and money.
Gameplay as a whole is dumbed down right down to a two weapon slot system, looting has about a mile reach and there is maybe 1 or 2 RPG elements, and get this, it's somehow easier than both BioShock 1 and 2! And disclaimer, I don't care about 1999 mode, normal is the difficulty for which a game should be judged. Vigors are also just an "I win" or "I stunlock and win" spell button and they're boring.
The story is just irritating and it is definitely not as good as people make it out to be. Or maybe it is and I just didn't pick up every single voxophone to notice it. You'll also spend like 2 hours of gameplay just walking about waiting for the story sections to end.

I haven't really gone into detail, but as a whole is an overhyped, boring, pretentious waste of time which doesn't capture the spirit of BioShock 1 or 2 despite ripping them off as often as it can get away with. It's not worth it's weight in pennies.

 

[Mikeyfell]

So when Bioshock Infinite first came out it received rave reviews from everybody including Adam Sessler who is one of my favourite video game critics but since i had a backlog of games i held off from buying it and avoided every kind of potential spoilers and discussions.
But after recently reading Gamespot's controversial second take on the game and also watching TotalBiscuit's review i am very curious to know what are your honest opinions about this game ?Do you still feel that this game is as great as most critics make it out to be or has the launch hype worn off or did you never liked the game to begin with ?
I have not yet played the game its currently downloading from Steam so before i play i want to hear what you all think of the game and please avoid any and every major spoilers for others like me who have not yet played the game.

As a general rule of thumb a "good game" is never as good as the critics say it is.

Bioshock Infinite, Last of Us and GTA 5 are all victims of score inflation.

Infinite is a good game, If review scores meant anything I'd say it deserves a 7.5/10 (But 7.5 is the worst score ever so I don't even know anymore?)

The first half is amazing, and if they kept up that level of quality in the second half it would have been the masterpiece everyone thought it was. No spoilers but the second half of the game was... not as good as the first half.
Mechanically it's pretty good, the inventory system was bollocks, it should have been like every other "Shock" game where you got to carry around all your weapons (or at least a full compliment with one machine gun, one pistol, one shotgun/or rifle and one heavy weapon)
Being able to only carry two weapons at a time was bad because the weapon layout was bad.
Plus the weapon upgrade system was crap. You'd spend all your cash on upgrading a weapon you'd never see again. So you'd either carry around an empty gun for ever or just eat the cost of the upgrades and move on to something else. (Thank god for the money glitch...)
But the plasmids were all fun and jumping around on sky hooks rocked balls so I'm willing to forgive the shitty gun fighting mechanics.

The amount the game expected you to rely on Elizabeth was... up to taste. I liked it, but it was frustrating when you're running around in circles yelling "GIVE ME HEALTH *****!" and then she through you salt... and then you died.
But using her rifts and having her give you ammo and health (When it worked) was awesome.

 

[Xirema]

I'm in a little too late to stop anyone accusing the game of being pretentious, but let me put it this way: The game is NOT pretentious, and if you think it is, then you don't know the meaning of pretentious.

It is quite self-serious, but self-serious != pretentious.

I disagree that the underlying themes of the story (racism, xenophobia, classism, religious zealotry) were shallow and artificial, but I will concede that I would have wanted them expanded upon and integrated further into the story, as they do have quite a tendency to be more "window dressing" than I'd have liked.

The story itself is fantastic. There's a real heart and soul to the relationship between Booker and Elizabeth, and while the side characters weren't developed as much as I would have desired, you tend to forget about them pretty quickly once the story moves past them.

The ending could have been framed better (it's a shame that the whole ten minute scene is basically non-interactive) but it conveys exactly as much information as we need to wrap up the story in the shortest span of time possible, and comes with some stunning revelations about who Booker is, who Elizabeth is, and why they matter so much.

The Aesthetics are the main unambiguous good of the game, with fantastic visuals of Columbia, and uncanny-yet-catchy anachronistic period music.

The gameplay is the main sticking point, and it's the aspect that most people get wrong, whether they liked it or not.

To put it simply, I agree a lot with Extra Credits, in that Bioshock Infinite's story outgrew its gameplay mechanics. Vigors make no sense: they hand out--freely!--a vigor that lets you control machines (and later people!); a vigor whose ONLY purpose could possibly be to mess with the well-established order of Columbia. A vigor handed out not 10 feet from an automated ticket-taker, the possession of which allows further access into the city! There's a thousand other ways that vigors stick out; this is only one of them.

I'm aware Jim Sterling had a video relatively recently (his episode spoofing Ludonarrative Dissonance) where he suggested that people unfairly criticized Bioshock Infinite's violence. You can reference that to see where I'm coming from in saying that no, they did NOT unfairly criticize Infinite's violence, they probably just couldn't properly articulate the real problems. There's a handful of specific moments where, yes, the extreme violence in Infinite was used to great narrative effect. But almost none of those moments occurred during actual combat. During combat, the violence rather invariably distracts from and undermines the narrative.

I'm not going to comment on the quality of the actual shooting mechanics, as I'm not a fan of the FPS genre and have no expertise on the subject.

This is about to get very long so here's the wrap-up: The Narrative+Story+Aesthetics are great, but everything about the gameplay works to undermine these otherwise fantastic elements. I'd still overall recommend the game solely for its story and themes, but it's not a 10/10 game

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I have not yet played the game its currently downloading from Steam so before i play i want to hear what you all think of the game and please avoid any and every major spoilers for others like me who have not yet played the game.

In terms of story, thematic content, characterization and overall presentation the game runs circles around the majority of the industry, including it's esteemed predecessor. In terms of its shooting mechanics, it's every bit as bland and unremarkable as the original Bioshock. It's a humdrum turkey shoot with some exotic backdrops. If game mechanics are your thing, it will disappoint on those grounds.

Why is it so harshly criticized in some corners?

1. It is something of a badge of honor for some game critics to "keep it real" by going against popular consensus. That is not to say the criticisms the game received for its game play were unwarranted, but they became something of a rabid focus for the game's detractors. Had the game not been awash in a sea of gushing praise, this would not have been the case. To wit, see TB's recent "The Wolf Among Us" review, in which he (correctly) hand waves the game's light to non-existent game play in light of its strong story telling and narrative.

2. Some incredibly tiresome people continue to beat the "It's not a real game if it doesn't have X" drum, and Bioshock Infinite fails to meet their ludicrously nebulous criteria for what constitutes "a real game".

3. Other people like to fixate on the mechanical intricacies of a plot, versus it's emotional/thematic impact. These are the people you will see harshly criticizing the game's story, calling it "pretentious" without actually understanding the word or even establishing an argument to support it, or gobbling on about how the writers fundamentally misunderstand the nature of quantum mechanics...having apparently expected rigorous scientific realism from the game featuring time travel and a city in the clouds. While this kind of aggressively wearying pedantry cannot necessarily be called illegitimate, you must yourself determine if these are the sorts of people you would choose to have a conversation with at parties and decide from there how much weight to give their respective criticisms.

Personally, I wish there were more games like Bioshock Infinite, although I wouldn't want every game to be like Bioshock Infinite, because I like a wide variety of games, and Bioshock Infinite does not universally excel in all aspects of game design. This terrible flaw...that it is not all things to all people...is why you will find a long lineup of aspiring forum critics veritably frothing at the mouth to tell you how it was "The Wurst Game Evar", barely capable of controlling their ardent wrath and savage mirth at its bottomless failings.

If you are capable of understanding that different games have different strengths, and are capable of, say, enjoying one game for it's strong game play and average story and another for the inverse, then you will most likely find much to love about Bioshock Infinite, and much to roll your eyes about when reading manifestos about how it's a blight on the industry.

 

[senordesol]

The atmosphere -particularly before the game proper begins- is absolutely fantastic. Not a grey/brown affair here.

The story: eh, it's not bad. It doesn't really work if you think about it too much, but it's entertaining at least and a few of the twists and plot elements are above par for most games.

The combat: More inventive than CoD, but sadly squanders a lot of its potential. The sky-rails, for instance, are not used to the extent they could be. The idea of trading fire across floating 'islands' really doesn't come into its own, and each enemy can be trusted to keel over if pumped with enough lead. I would up not using my vigors that much as it was simply more efficacious to use my guns (and the game seemed quite distressed by that).

Gameplay variety: Nearly non-existent. 99% of your problems are solved by gunfire. You'll have to chase Elizabeth down in a couple instances. There's a poorly done stealth system in the 3rd act. And you get a really neat ability in the climax.

Characters: Honestly, there's only three 'characters' in BS:I (with all others being 'there' but rather incidental): Elizabeth and the Luteces. Elizabeth is sympathetic, but a bit milktoast. The Luteces...have to just be seen for yourself - they're great.

I recommend, but wouldn't frown if it was a bargain buy.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

milktoast

Milquetoast.

Not trying to be a grammar nazi, but rather trying to spare you any repeat incidences of this rather hilarious misspelling. Thank you for the chuckle though. =D

 

[tzimize]

-snippety-

It is a bit over-hyped tbh. The original Bioshock was better hands down. At least storywise. The variety is a bit better in Infinity, and the start is just stellar. The things in the original Bioshock (hypos etc) made more sense, not so much in Infinity. They just took their previous idea and re-used it. Not very impressive. The ending of Infinity is cool...but I think it tries to be a bit more mindblowing than it actually is, and doesnt make complete sense.

Is it a bad game? Hell no. Is it as good as people make it out to be? Not really, but its pretty damn close. You'll enjoy it, no doubt.

 

[JazzJack2]

or gobbling on about how the writers fundamentally misunderstand the nature of quantum mechanics...having apparently expected rigorous scientific realism from the game featuring time travel and a city in the clouds.

I don't think anyone cares that the Designers didn't understand QM from a scientific perspective it's that they clearly didn't understand how to use it from a literary perspective either, they complete fail to engage with the very interesting implications the Multiverse theory could have (I.e there are no real consequence to a persons actions or choices) and instead write them off with a shitty Deus Ex Machina about 'constants and variables'.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I don't think anyone cares that the Designers didn't understand QM from a scientific perspective it's that they clearly didn't understand how to use it from a literary perspective either, they complete fail to engage with the very interesting implications the Multiverse theory could have (I.e there are no real consequence to a persons actions or choices) and instead write them off with a shitty Deus Ex Machina about 'constants and variables'.

That's because the game is not about Quantum Mechanics. It's a magic realism hand-wave they wrote in as a fluff explanation for Elizabeth's powers and the fact Columbia even exists.

They also do not qualify as "Deus Ex Machina", as they are an omnipresent minor plot element from the beginning of the game. The Catalyst is an example of Deus Ex Machina. "Constants and Variables" are not. You may not LIKE how they were written in, but that is not the definition of Deus Ex Machina.

 

[JazzJack2]

That's because the game is not about Quantum Mechanics. It's a magic realism hand-wave they wrote in as a fluff explanation for Elizabeth's powers and the fact Columbia even exists.

I know it's not about Quantum physics (which is why I said people shouldn't begrudge it for lack of science) but the game's idea of a Multiverse take clear inspiration from real life interpretations of QM.

They also do not qualify as "Deus Ex Machina", as they are an omnipresent minor plot element from the beginning of the game. The Catalyst is an example of Deus Ex Machina. "Constants and Variables" are not. You may not LIKE how they were written in, but that is not the definition of Deus Ex Machina.

Debatable really, yes it does make some attempt to establish this idea of constants and variables early on but given that it establishes no precedent for why something is constant or why something is variable (bar what the designers would find convenient) I don't think it's incorrect to call its usage as a 'solution' to a major plot hole as a deus ex machina.

 

[Hero of Lime]

It's good, but just this year alone a lot of games have come out that I would prefer to call my game of the year. The last hour of the game was kinda boring, and while I liked the combat, it's not the best. The story is pretty crazy, but I'll refrain from saying why.

It was over hyped a bit by the games media, it didn't live up to the lofty expectations they set it up to be. Still a good game like I said, just don't expect it to be the greatest thing of all time.

 

[Robert Marrs]

Its a good game in its own right but for me it did not really feel like a bioshock game. I can't quite put my finger on it but I don't feel like I am playing a bioshock game. The two weapon limit was very disappointing. Pretty much constant action ruined my desire to really explore the world which is not really a bad thing because, unlike rapture, columbia feels hollow. All style and no substance. So if have never played a bioshock game you will probably love it and if you have played bioshock before just be prepared for a different kind of game.