Bioshock Infinite is a poor game. I may have had a few words to say about it back in the main thread for it......
I'm not entirely sure what went wrong with this game, did Ken Levine just disappear up his own bumhole? Was something else at play? Whatever the case, it just flat out wasn't very good. At all.
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Thinking about it, the principal issue with the game is that not only is the combat bad, the combat is almost unceasing and generally speaking the primary focus of what you're doing - even down to enemies that respawn behind you after you've poked your head into a cupboard, shit like that.
I honestly think it would have been a much better game with far less combat, and instead far more exploration, exposition, character development, and so on.
For all intents and purposes it's an FPS game with high concepts and fancy ideas, but it fucks up royally in not making the FPS stuff very good. When you inwardly groan upon facing the next tedious round of mediocre combat in a small artificially limited arena against drab waves of identikit enemies with shit weapons, something has gone wrong.
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In the interests of fairness I should say that it does get better for the second half, and the final third of the game is, in the main, pretty good - but by christ you have to wade through a lot of shit to get to it.
The story does play out well, and the setpieces toward the end are truly dramatic, although the return to Rapture is underwhelming and underused IMO, but just 'being there' again is fantastic. As I posted earlier, I 100% 'spoiled' the game by reading the Wiki plot article for the game upfront, and I honestly think it makes the game a lot BETTER if you know where it's going and why it's going there - in fact without that drive to see the story play out I doubt I'd have even finished it.
I absolutely can't forgive the save system (or lack of it), there were a couple of bits I thought 'Oh I'd rather like to do that again and try something different', but I couldn't, there were a couple of bits where I knew I'd kind of fluked my way through rather than performed well, that I wanted to try again, but I couldn't.
There was one bit where I triggered a significant event at the same time that my daughter started crying upstairs, by the time I got back downstairs it'd all played out and autosaved again, so I missed the whole fucking thing. Thanks, Ken. (IIRC it wouldn't let me pause 'cause it was already in 'autoplay' mode.)
For more detailed criticisms Ian's post here mostly nails it - viewtopic.php?p=758807#p758807
However, combat wise, the lame combo I found that was basically a 'win game' button with vigors/gear was the charge and set things on fire move. I can't remember the exact set up but it was the Charge Vigor, with a Hat piece of gear that had a 70% chance to set enemies on fire, another piece of gear that had a chance to spread the flames to other enemies, and the other pieces of gear complimented this approach (more speed, or extra stuns, and charge uses less salts, or something).
Anyway, once I'd latched onto this setup the game became borderline ridiculous, especially with all the extra salts and shields and health I had, to the extent that I could simply fucking ram into enemies (and large groups of them at that) almost with impunity. Yeah a couple of things are immune to charge but I had a maxed out shotgun that made short work of even the toughest foes.
The combat in the game was basically a bit crap from start to finish, never satisfying, frequently annoying, and then totally trivial once I'd sorted out the build outlined above - it reminded me a bit of WoW where players would latch onto a massively overpowered character build and Blizzard would have to balance the game to get rid of it, except here of course no such thing has or will happen.
I also had multiple problems with dialogue overlapping, as Ian mentioned, to the extent that characters would be talking over each other or background dialogue would take precedence over important story details, even subtitles didn't help 'cause the subs would frequently pick the 'wrong' thing to show subs for.
The guns were all mostly crap and because you can't afford to upgrade everything once you've pimped out a couple of guns you're effectively knobbling yourself if you use anything else.
TBH I've kind of forgotten a lot of the details of stuff I didn't like about this game 'cause I finished it a couple of months ago and have felt absolutely no desire whatsoever to return to it in any way, shape or form. I bought the Season Pass so I suppose I'm duty bound to at least give the DLC a try when it comes around, but unlike with Dishonored where as soon as I finished the campaign I bought the Knife of Dunwall DLC and dived straight into it - it'll be a genuine effort to install and play the Bioshock Infinite DLC. (Unless it's a lot better than the main game was.)
Final bitch? Booker and Elizabeth aren't very good characters, Elizabeth for all the fuss that was made about her is frequently little more than a clichéd useless damsel in distress who happens to be very good at finding guns and ammunition up her skirt and also flipping coins at you RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF REALLY IMPORTANT OTHER STUFF THAT'S HAPPENING. Booker I never connected with at all, he'd have worked better as a silent protagonist like Corvo in Dishonored, except then he wouldn't have been able to do the various pieces of dreary exposition he was lumbered with throughout the game.
I'd peg it at maybe 6/10, and it'd be a lot less than that but for the final third of the game which I did enjoy. Massively worse than Dishonored which is a straight 9/10 (that only drops down from a 10/10 because it goes off the boil a little bit towards the end).
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