I have a bone to pick with Bioshock: Infinite, I think it's hugely overrated and gets way more praise than it deserves. After recently playing through the entire Bioshock franchise on PC, I can confidently say this game is the weakest in the series.
We'll start with the good, because there is some. Columbia is beautiful, the setting starts off compelling, there's a recipe for something good here. There's auto-saving too, which is great if you don't know what a quick-save is. Sky-hooks are fun, at least for a little while. There's plasmids, or vigors if you want to insist they're different. You can eat food straight from the trash while Elizabeth yaps about how much she loves Paris. You can be certain you'll never miss what's going on in the story as every single character including Booker loves to loudly narrate every single inner thought to the player.
Now onto what I don't like, if it wasn't obvious there's a *lot*. First and foremost: This is NOT an immersive sim, its a bog-standard 2013 cover/shield shooter. Yep, you have the Halo shield, can only carry two weapons. Plasmids were dumbed down to a kindergarten level, and fun imaginative weapon upgrades have been turned into "25% more damage." Manual saving is gone, now you only get auto-saves and you have to deal with it. The DLC loads you up with free upgrades right at the start of the game that feels like cheating if you take them, not to mention the "golden gun" upgrades that look awful and make your weapons stronger for some reason.
I think what irritates me most of all is how the open landscapes and enemy design lead to some of the most boring shooter gameplay I've experienced in a long time. The world is big and open, which sounds great on paper except all of the enemies are some variation of "guy with a gun" that shoots you with hitscan from far away as soon as they see you and chips your shield and health down. There is no way to avoid damage in this game outside of cover, which there is often very little of. You don't get to play aggressively or move around a lot because as soon as your shield goes down you're stuck sucking your thumb behind a wall waiting for the shield to recharge. I wouldn't say its hard, but its annoying and aggravating. You are actively punished if you want to do anything fun or creative, your only options for creating breathing room are plasmids. The skyhook is there too, I suppose you can use that but don't think you aren't going to get shot up in the process. Coming to this game after Bioshock 2 is just so jarring.
Now for the story and writing, in one word: yikes. Everything completely falls apart about half-way through the game when it starts to really cram the multiverse nonsense down your throat that its been dangling in front of you since the start of the game. The "choices" the game pretends to present you with are meaningless, and then it has the audacity to smugly pretend that "the illusion of choice is the point!" Really thought provoking, now if only Booker would stop reading every street sign out loud and boorishly expressing how I should feel about everything happening in front of me. There's no better way to describe this game's story than "head up its own ass" or better yet, "insists upon itself."
I don't get it. The voice acting and dialogue is frequently groan-inducing, the story treats you like a child who has never read a book before, and the gameplay is exactly what you come to expect of a game from the 2012 era. Everything in this game feels half-baked, rushed out the door, and infinitely mediocre.
EDIT: I finished the DLC and my opinion remains unchanged. It has all of the same problems with the original game. I will hand it to Burial at Sea part 2, they tried something different and it was novel for a little while but it still had plenty of issues to go around.
