Bioshock Infinite Final Thoughts

May 31, 2013 17:08

So, finished Bioshock today.  Almost exactly one month after logging my last achievement in it.  That time in between my earlier achievements and the final ones I shall earn for this title were filled with, in my opinion, far superior titles in Defiance and Rift.  Bioshock shows glimpses of the brilliance so prevalent in the father title but falls flat on a number of fronts.  I need its trade value to pick up a game that I hope will also be considerably more fun in Fuse, and I'm still deciding if I'll take in another game with it.  I would hate to lose WWE 13 but I can pick it up again later when the next title down the line is released, or simply get the newer title if it makes enough improvements.

So, I did like the ending to Infinite.  It got emotional -- not enough to make tears well up or anything like that, but to finally make me care about the characters.  But having to make it all the way to the end of a story before you finally sympathize with the main protagonists is simply far too long.  The few redeeming qualities the game possesses are not enough to forgive the downright boring, shallow, archaic game play you have to plod thru to reach the end.  I didn't finish this game until more than a month after buying it because I simply dreaded the thought of such lousy game play when so many other titles, I felt, deserved my attention more (the aforementioned Defiance and Rift, as well as Dead Island Riptide, spring to mind).  I even felt more inclined to revisit Rapture in BioShock 2 than I did to continue in Infinite.  But I pressed on, and I don't regret that I did.  I hate not seeing the endings to games and Infinite's ending was worth seeing.

My list of grievances, though, is a laundry list of things that I never thought I'd find in a BioShock title, given the excellent first two in the series.  The weapons were bland, boring and lacked variety.  This is a huge pitfall for any FPS hoping to be successful.  Several guns are flat-out aesthetically ugly.  Standard in their use.  Uninspired.  And the rarer, more powerful versions of regular guns are only slightly tweaked re-skins of the original.  The vigors, plasmids, whatever you want to call them are largely taken from the previous titles and most lack the overall usefulness of previous iterations.  There's a million loot-able containers to rummage thru, the contents of which are all largely useless as well.  Mostly cash and health / mana pickups is all they equate to, which could've simply been eliminated by having both regenerate naturally over time instead of digging in trashcans and cash registers scavenging for tiny slivers of health items.

There's a litany of other things I didn't like but frankly I'm tiring of writing about and wasting any more time with this game.  I'll likely put up my thoughts on Fuse after playing it for a while, which virtually no one will read.  But that's ok.  I guess I keep posting here because it's therapeutic.
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