I'm not giving this a low rating to be contrarian or whatever. Genuinely think this is a bad video game.

It starts out really strong then immediately nosedives into a corridor shooter, and soon nosedives once again as the narrative pivots to just terrible territory.

Absolutely dreadful by the end.

𝘈𝘴𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯... 𝘈𝘴𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯... 5,000 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘵... 10,000 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘵... 15,000 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘵...

𝘏𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘭𝘶𝘫𝘢𝘩.

Não apenas uma mudança de ares em relação aos corredores claustrofóbicos de Rapture. Não apenas uma clara evolução em todos os aspectos de jogabilidade. BioShock Infinite é o ápice de seu gênero, franquia e um dos melhores jogos de sua geração.

Columbia, a cidade flutuante, é uma obra de arte. O sentimento movido pela complexidade e atmosfera de todos os ambientes é inigualável, pouquíssimos jogos conseguem realizar uma construção de universo tão convincente.

Complexidade esta que é o tempero especial da narrativa.

No controle do agente Booker DeWitt, enfrentamos diversas situações complexas. Diante de extremismos relacionados ao patriotismo americano e principalmente de cunhos religiosos, temos um objetivo central, que move nossa principal motivação: Uma missão de resgate.

Tal premissa não é necessariamente algo novo, mas não é segredo pra ninguém o quão difícil é a execução desses casos. Após o resgate, é comum que tais personagens venham a se tornar acompanhantes, ou melhor, companheiros, que por sua vez, podem acabar se tornando fardos, nada além de uma obrigação.

Mas ora só, em BioShock Infinite esse problema não só é despedaçado, como também eleva o conceito de resgate e companheirismo a outro patamar.

"𝘉𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘦𝘳, 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘧𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘎𝘰𝘥?"

"𝘕𝘰, 𝘐'𝘮 𝘢𝘧𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶."

Desde o primeiro contato visual, desde a primeira interação direta, é humanamente impossível não simpatizar com Elizabeth. A sensação de "obrigação" e o sentimento de dever de proteção existe, mas é orgânico, parte de nós mesmos.

Ao longo da campanha, a complexidade escala gradativamente, assim como o carinho pela misteriosa e apaixonante Elizabeth, e em nenhum momento, repito, em nenhum momento se torna maçante ou arrastado. A todo momento é instigante, a todo momento é empolgante, e tudo leva a um dos finais mais impactantes que eu já presenciei.

BioShock Infinite é uma aula de todos os principais aspectos que fazem videogames serem tão apaixonantes. Não só entra pra categoria de jogos que eu amo, mas também ficará para sempre em minha memória.

"𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦'𝘴 𝘢𝘭𝘸𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘢 𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘦. 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦'𝘴 𝘢𝘭𝘸𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘢 𝘮𝘢𝘯. 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦'𝘴 𝘢𝘭𝘸𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘢 𝘤𝘪𝘵𝘺."

In 2013, before such a thing as "media literacy" was in my repertoire, I played Bioshock Infinite. I walked into the game being excited from all the pre-release trailers and teasers and behind-the-scenes peeks - and the sad, sad reality is that most of what I had seen was not the game that I or anyone got, but sawdust on the floor, scraped from the rough surface of the featureless wooden plank that is now left.

I slogged through Bioshock Infinite. For 30 hours. I had my golden guns, and my pre-order bonuses, and I died against a ghost a bunch, and when it was over I woke up and felt nothing. In a last spark, started up the DLC I had also pre-ordered, and eventually quit, and didn't touch it again for 8 years.

Now here I am. I played about a third of the game as a refresher and- Now it's worse! This game is the most harrowing, violent dissociative psychosis I have ever played (barring Postal 2), hollow and subtly reprehensible. It is deeply disquieting to be in the body that plays this thing and was actively detrimental to my mental health.

I gave a small mercy-star on top of my desired half-star rating just for the art direction and for the poor, unfortunate souls that must have killed their careers trying to save this cluster car crash of a game. Do NOT play it. It was never good, and has only gotten worse.

Woof. From a design and gameplay standpoint, what we have here is a betrayal of nearly everything that was great about the first two Bioshock games. What makes this game truly execrable, though, is its politics, which only appear worse in the post-Trump nightmare zone that is the USA in 2021.

I admit to being befuddled by the praise this game received as a gameplay experience, because it seems to me that it’s a pale shadow of what came before. One really obvious change is that there are basically no longer any true immersive sim elements here. The first two Bioshocks were really only loosely connected to that tradition, but those connections were what made Rapture feel like an actual place. All of that’s gone here. Columbia looks great at first, sure, but we’re missing so much about how it actually functions as a city. Remember how the tonics you found in the first two Bioshocks actually helped flesh out the world and told you something about how people lived in Rapture (in addition to allowing for a multitude of builds)? Remember how the audio diaries told short stories about the areas you were exploring and actually were placed in logical spaces (in Infinite, by contrast, you will find recordings of Comstock discussing his evil plans in a drawer in someone’s random apartment)? Pretty much all of that is tossed out the window in this game, for reasons that I can’t begin to fathom. What we’re left with is simply an extended corridor shooter with bullet sponge enemies in a setting that looks cool but never feels alive and coherent in the same way Rapture did.

How did this happen? My honest guess, based on what came out about this game’s troubled development, is that the devs spent a chunk of their time building Columbia as a fully developed, immersive sim-style successor to Rapture, but then switched focus midway through to incorporate the many-worlds plot. If so, the end result is that neither element reaches its potential. I like Elizabeth well enough both as a character and as a gameplay feature, and some of the more mind-bending aspects of the alternate realities plot are admittedly rather clever. But on the other hand, there are a lot of things about the many-worlds aspect of the story that straight-up make zero sense (indeed, considering her vast powers, it seems like Elizabeth could’ve skipped Booker past a lot of this trouble).

All of these issues pale in comparison to the repulsive and cynical handling of the political issues in this game. This is a game that shamelessly exploits the historical trauma of minority groups in America for cheap shock value…and that’s just in the first 15 minutes. In a grotesque display of cynicism, this is a game which suggests that exploited minority groups suffering under the yoke of a cabal of racist ultra-nationalists would be just as bad as their oppressors if they were in power. Seriously, it’s mealy-mouthed, ‘both sides’ centrism at its very worst.

As an avid fan of the series, I had high expectations for Infinite. Alas, it completely falls flat for me, both as a sequel and on its own terms.

I liked the art design but didn't like much else in this game.

The art design of Columbia is great! Completely different from Bioshock 1 & 2 but it's very unique and holds up over a decade later. That's probably the only aspect of this game I really liked without complaints.

The gameplay is nothing like the previous Bioshock games, it can be described as an arena shooter in the same vein as Doom Eternal in terms of its combat, where It emphasizes movement and long distance combat in an enclosed space. I think it can be good on paper, but the elements that make up the combat drag down the whole system.

Combat feels like it doesn't take advantage of the new vigor system enough due to arenas being HUGE now. Medium and long range combat is much safer and reliable than getting up close with vigors and close range weapons like the shotgun or crank gun. Even when indoors it feels like you really don't have any defensive options besides cover until you get Return to Sender, which you only get in the 2nd half of the game. Build variety could've been really cool to encourage but since you're limited to only two weapons it's a huge risk to take something like the shotgun over the carbine.

While Bioshock 1 and Infinite have completely different designs, in 1 you had flexibility in what you specialize in; you could focus on shock + melee, or misdirect enemies with enrage or target dummy, etc, and there were enough weapon upgrade stations to drastically improve weapons you enjoy using. Infinite lets you upgrade weapons and vigors using a universal currency, which could've worked best in a game that prioritized resource management, which Infinite is definitely not. You end up with less opportunities for upgrades to both vigors and weapons unless you solely focus on one category. Gear in Infinite is a great example of the problems with simplifying the tonic system 1 had. It's harder to justify running a niche gear modifier when you only have 4 slots compared to the 18 you got in 1.

Skyhooks would seem like a good addition since they let you enhance your mobility and give you a new way to attack enemies, but how they function and their quirks really drag them down. Shooting while riding a skyline feels unviable since you just jerked around when you aren't at a full stop, though it was fun doing quick attacks using the volley gun or the RPG. Quick use of the skylines or freighthooks feels impossible since the camera will try to center(?) before you can freelook, which makes doing quick traversal or skyline strikes a pain.

The tear system is kinda cool but it feels like it doesn't add that much to the combat, since the most you can hope for is some cover or a new weapon when ammo runs low. Spawning companions is interesting since they have a more meaningful change to combat, taking some of the pressure off temporarily. Overall it doesn't do much to make combat more dynamic.

When you do use vigors it feels like their uses overlap, since crows, shock, and bucking bronco are all just different ways of damaging and stunning enemies. Patriots and handymen show how limiting the vigor system is since the only two vigors worth using on them is possession or shock jockey.

The enemies you have to fight with this combat system don't do it many favors as well. Enemy variety is pretty lacking, with only really 3 types of basic enemies you'll be fighting for most the game, and 2 of those you'll only see very rarely. Patriots are a pushover since you can just spam shock jockey and get behind them, handymen are similar since if you don't shock stun them you'll have to deal with the screenshake they induce that makes it impossible to aim (Why is there no option to disable combat screenshake?).

Generally I just didn't like the combat, it's elements either didn't mesh well together or made combat feel bad.

Story is just alright, it's a multiverse story before they became popular so it's not impossible to understand but they don't do the best job at explaining the rules of this world. Nothing remarkable really.

I wouldn't recommend this game unless you REALLY liked Bioshock 1 & 2 and are OK with it being a completely different take on the Bioshock design, flaws and all.

people like to throw around the word "pretentious" when talking about things that they don't like, but i don't think that they Actually know what it means. when we, as people, describe something as pretentious, we mean that it is attempting to peacock as though it is more intelligent or significant than it actually is.

well, buddy, look no further than this game for that definition. a game whose gameplay is worse in nearly every way than its predecessors, one that makes grand gesticulations towards the ideas of "racism" and "american exceptionalism" only to fall flat on its face every step of the way, and possessive of a "twist" so meaningless in the context of the plot that acts merely as a smokescreen to quickly make its escape as it hopes players will walk away unable to remember anything else about the game.

if there were a poll online for "The Most Pretentious Game of All Time", i would bet money on the collective reddit-esque hive mind of "gamers" choosing something like Braid. well Bioshock Infinite, you've got my vote, friendo!

Boy I really do love pushing up racist systematic oppression and fighting against tyranny as completely equivalent. It's especially more fun when I can shooty shooty bang bang the bad guys with my basic ass gunplay. Bruh it's so fucking deep you don't even know man let me grind this rail another time while agency actually doesn't matter to the major parties and everyone is right but wrong as we appeal to all of the broken promises we can for an 8 hour runtime.

I hear Burial at Sea is kinda neat but god forbid I spend another hour on this game.

I love it when you establish that a society is brutally racist and that black people are an underclass who live in abject poverty, and then having a black woman decide to fight against that society before having white characters (one of whom was at WOUNDED KNEEE), start moralising about how awful this woman is for wanting her freedom and then comparing her to the racist leader of the very city that oppresses her as "basically the same." This is such a normal thing to do and definitely not racist. I love it when your white character who literally did a genocide is given more moral complexity than the one black character who is a freedom fighter who just becomes willing to kill a child out of absolutely nowhere just so you can justify having another white character kill her. Also that character is both a daughter figure for the MC and also a love interest for the player because how else can men interact with women right.
This game isn't actually half a star, there are some okay parts and also some good parts, mainly the Lutece twins who are fantastic. Also that scene where songbird dies in rapture. The dlc gives Elizabeth actual autonomy which is nice and booker isn't even in the second chapter which is great.
Look the reason i hate this game so much is because the writers probably thought they were being politically progressive, dealing with themes of christian fundamentalism and the bloody history of America. They essentially start the game by giving you to throw a baseball at an interracial couple. The developers are screaming at you that this is going to be a serious game, and all that build up ends up them scolding the one black character in the story for daring to stand up to a society that hates her, all under the guise of some faux liberal progressivism. This ends up with a game thats political message that is completely soulless. The one conclusion you can draw is that fighting racism is just as bad as being racist, and if that isn't the most cowardly thing I've ever heard then I don't know what is. This is a game that thought it was being Apocalypse Now, and ended up being Rambo.

stupid fucking reactionary bullshit. edgy all-lives-matter writing that dares to ask "IS RACISM... BAD?????" because it clearly views 'reacting to racism with reasonable amounts of violence' as a villainous process that the oppressed should be punished for. Bioshock Infinite is aware that oppression is wrong, but it also thinks revolution is wrong, so it holds the centrist and racist view that people should shut the fuck up and keep getting oppressed because it's better than making a fuss. if Bioshock Infinite's absolutely rancid politics make you uncomfortable, don't worry, none of it fucking matters at the end, because it totally jumps the shark and stops having anything to say about oppression because the narrative banks on having shitty, pretentious time travel that makes absolutely no sense. so who even cares? who cares??? why get angry about things the developers clearly never cared about in the first place??

elizabeth and booker have a borderline incestuous relationship, and also elizabeth is a quirky and likable disney princess even though her ass has been locked in a tower for years and her only friend was a terrifying fucking steampunk robot bird thing (with a cool design admittedly) that essentially acted as her warden. she also has a superpower that can rip open portals to other dimensions and timelines, but don't worry, she's completely mentally okay, she's just a lil cheeky, a lil sassy. it sucks, too, because elizabeth is the only fucking character in this entire game that actually works even though her character template is fundamentally flawed. everyone else is either incoherent, a stereotype, or just monstrously annoying like Booker himself, so by comparison elizabeth, the bafflingly overpowered manic pixie dream girl, is a ray of golden fucking sunshine because she clears the bar of being okay as fuck

the gameplay is such a pathetic reduction of what made bioshock 1 & 2 so much fun it's not even funny. you can only hold two guns at a time, a simple but fundamentally damning problem that turns bioshock infinite into just another dime-a-dozen corner & corridor shooter that tries to cover up how shallow it is with even shallower setpieces involving explosions and rail-grinding and fuck this game is fucking garbage. the plasmids - SORRY, VIGORS - aren't even fun. why do vigors even exist??? what's the point? why does this fucking society in the clouds hand out vigors like they're candy even though they're systematically racist and wouldn't arming the vox populi with vigors make them more likely to gdsghsbgfuasdbgfaifasjofbae fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck

1/5 instead of 0.5 because at least elizabeth's hot and the gameplay is... functional, if boring, when it's at its best. total centrist horseshoe-theory dogshit. abysmal copaganda Elizabeth SFM Porn buzzword buzzword grrr fuck

Pathetic excuse for a "deep narrative" this game dares to spit on the face of the millions of people who have violently resisted colonial oppression, prejudice, and labor exploitation. I really think whoever wrote this pile of shit needs to go read some books instead of sitting in their posh apartment spitting on the poors and whining about how if we use violence we are just as bad as the bad guys.

At least the gameplay is passable and the world design is good. I just can't get over the writing, narrative, and worldbuilding.

Bioshock Infinite is a weird game to look back on almost ten years later. I guess a bit of forewarning: I gave this game three stars because I had fun playing it, and not because I think it's this intelligent masterpiece like everyone did in 2013. I had fun with it, and I'm not ashamed to admit that.

I believe the biggest issue people have with this nowadays is that it uses very real, touchy subject matter in a way that's less than ideal. And listen: I get that. But at the same time, I don't think it's as bad as it's been made out to be. (im dum) To me, it's more a case of two benefactors than the one maligned force of malevolence. One, Ken Levine is absolutely an "idea guy," and the games industry worships him because it wants to legitimize itself. I refuse to call him an auteur because, while that theory has SOME credibility, it's an increasingly archaic theory in an ever-changing world--and that's when it comes to film. When it comes to games, you can't "fix it in post" because "post" doesn't exist. You can tell your team of level designers what changes you might want to see in a certain area, but generally speaking, making games is a very iterative process that requires a lot of creative talent. At any moment in time, the supposed auteur can be proven wrong. If nobody is there to tell him "no," he'll probably spend several years developing an ambitious, open-ended game with complex moral choices that doesn't run on the current hardware it's targeting--which my gut tells me is exactly what happened in Infinite's case. If there's the feeling that something's missing here, it's because there is. Factions were supposed to be more fleshed out, and the world was going to be more active. The two-to-three moral choices that show up were supposed to be twelve to twenty, and their impact was slated to be massive. In the finished game, it doesn't matter what pin you make Elizabeth wear or who you decide to throw the baseball at. Either way, you'll need to pick up a gun and shoot at people. The second factor is that, while it took someone a long time to tell Levine to be more realistic with his ideas, you bet your ass somebody was probably on board to keep things from getting too controversial. The mantra of the AAA market isn't just to make the biggest games possible but also to appeal to the broadest demographic they can. Occasionally, there's a game that breaks this mold. But those games are the exception to a long-standing rule, which Bioshock Infinite proves. Bioshock Infinite clearly wants to say something about America but pulls so many of its punches it's almost like watching a boxing match played in reverse. Much of what it has to say is gestured at but never explored because saying any more than it does would offend someone. If there's the chance that portraying a character a certain way will turn a demographic away, they put a centrist spin on the matter and say, "well, but the other side's not too good, either." It's not offensive to me, nor is it disgusting: it's bland and willfully ignorant instead. The political takes in Bioshock Infinite are probably the same ones you heard all the time in 2016 and during the Trump presidency, which might explain why many have found this to have gotten more grating over time. In my personal opinion, it's annoying and absolutely takes away from the overall product. But it's never so much that you can't have mindless fun with this if that's what you're seeking. If the idea of a game that tackles real-world subject matter in that way is indefensible to you, I can see why you'd hate something like this.

As for that mindless fun, I found it to be pretty engaging. The combat in Bioshock Infinite isn't groundbreaking, and it won't change the way you look at games. But it's solid, has a few pretty cool ideas, and is enjoyable to play with from beginning to end. The highlight of the show here is the verticality some of the levels have. It's pretty limited, but using a skyline to jump onto a ship so you can blow up its turrets before hopping off to a hook somewhere else rarely gets old. It's a feature that could make for a more exciting game if embraced for more than combat and minor traversal. As it stands, though, its inclusion still leaves a lasting impression and gives levels that would otherwise feel pretty empty some much-needed weight. The mechanic of using tears in the fabric of time to spawn in support items is also neat, although it's hardly as groundbreaking as the game wants it to be. There's nothing forcing you to switch between tears, and the two-weapon limit means that you might never need to use some of what's offered because the rocket launcher Elizabeth is trying to give you doesn't have enough ammo for the current fight or because you already have a much better weapon in store. There are also obligatory weapon upgrades which feel more tacked on than necessary. I don't mind weapon upgrades when they're done well, but Infinite's roster of upgrades only offers stat increases. That's bad enough, but paired with the two-weapon limit, spending money to upgrade a weapon is useless because you'll probably be stuck in a section without that weapon or ammo for it further down the line. But all of these pale when compared to what REALLY kills this game's pace: there's just too much combat. I know that feels like a weird complaint about a first-person shooter, but bear with me: an essential aspect of pacing a good shooter is called "quiet time." Quiet time, as its name spells out, is giving the player enough time to process each individual combat section so they don't all blur together. Bioshock Infinite does have this, but it's very inconsistent with how its use is handled. Sometimes you're given ample time to process things, while other times, it feels like a rush from one set-piece to the next. While I certainly had fun with this game, very few of its levels stick out to me for this reason.

All-in-all, Bioshock Infinite is an okay time if you're not willing to think about anything that happens in it and just go along with the ride. Looking back on it in this way, it's still a transparently flawed title with what could charitably be described as a hellish development cycle (if the differences between pre-release footage and the final game are to be believed), and if you're not willing to forgive the game for that, I don't blame you.

Quick edit: Apparently, there's a MASSIVE Wikipedia page dedicated this game's development, and uhhh...

" 2K later hired Don Roy in March 2012, a former game producer from Sony and Microsoft. Roy found that there [was] no effective playable build of Infinite, and Irrational had outsourced so much of the content of the game but failed to have any process to bring that back into their internal production line that the content was effectively lost, leading to a lot of wasted costs and time. Roy stepped in to streamline the production processes and try to bring the game back on track."

Yeah, sometimes it's good to trust your gut.

Here's the link to that page if you're curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_BioShock_Infinite

this game is stupid and ontologically evil

The one word that comes to mind when I think of Bioshock Infinite is 'ambitious.' It is ambitious in it's story, it's departure from series convention, and the ideas the game presents to the player about the true identity of choices, predetermination and randomness, and to an extent, if you'll allow me to be a bit pretentious, metaphysics. And as interesting as I find the ponderings and ideas presented to the player in Bioshock Infinite, I can't help but feel that the game never truly commits to saying much of anything on these ideas. It merely presents them to the player before asking 'would that be fucked up or what' and disappearing for another half hour before doing the same thing. It's tiring, and in a game series that had a first entry so universally acclaimed and lauded for how well it's able to marry it's critiques of Randian Objectivism and real men like Andrew Ryan with it's narrative, characters and immersive environments, Bioshock Infinite feels like a game ashamed of where it came from. I can't help but look at so many aspects of this game as trying to modernize itself to fit the shell of so many different contemporary first person shooters; A recharging shield gauge, the two weapon carry limit, the homogenization of the game's Vigor powers.
Undeniably, there were some parts of the game that felt genuinely fun to play in, but it was never fun in the way that the two previous Bioshocks were, it was fun in the way that other shooters I already don't think to highly of can end up being by merit of their gameplay alone.

Bioshock Infinite trades the claustrophobic, dangerous and unsettling closed environments of the first two games in favor of much more open settings and scenarios that only felt like they truly gave me a chance to take in the beauty of Columbia when I had finished taking all the food and money off my enemies. The first two bioshocks (mainly the first) had a distinct horror vibe to them; you find yourself in a ruined civilization who's very placement in nature can end up killing you, scraping by to survive, often favoring smaller and purposefully low-scale enemy encounters that manage to really accentuate how 'personal' survival felt.

Bioshock Infinite is nothing fucking like that it my god, it is so much less interesting because of it. I honestly can't remember much of any environments from Infinite besides maybe the beach you end up landing in after meeting Elizabeth and the super-capitalist-wage-slave hellhole town before the game goes off the rails with the concept of Rifts, and I guess maybe half of the museum where the game expo dumps Booker's war history to you. Honestly, the biggest detail I remember from there was how loud some of the exhibits were. I had to turn down my tv volume to prevent myself from just locking up and staring at the screen for how much constant, nothing-at-all sound there was. There's an undeniable shift from the encounter design from previous games to be more about straight action, and you see a lot more environments that are designed to be big and open, with lots of room to move through since almost every damn encounter in this game is an arena fight. Nearing the end of the game after you witness the most racist character assassination I've ever seen in a video game, the game felt like a very well-dressed straight line of arena fights through arena fights and I got sick of it. In the old games, you used to be able to sneak around enemies, set up traps for them, and otherwise had more of a choice in how you engaged combat. In infinite, your only choice is to use your two identity-less guns and maybe your vigors, if you care about them at all, which I surprisingly found myself not caring about at all, despite having had gone into very heavy plasmid-centric builds in the previous two games. That was all because the tools the game gave me to engage with it's problems had a sense of identity and proper placement within your arsenal. Getting a new gun or plasmid was often a journey, and getting these new tools felt substantial and rewarding for progression. In Infinite, about halfway through the game you can start finding more of the same guns you already know, but know they're... red, and that makes them... better?

I often hear people complain about how this game lacks any sense of meaningful choices in the story where before, choice was a very central aspect to the series' identity, where you had to choose between harvesting and saving Little Sisters. Sure, it was a very simple choice, but it was a very meaningful one. Sometimes I see people say that this removal of choice was intentional, and aimed to serve as a critique of choice in video games and... I just don't buy it. I honestly, genuinely don't think Ken Levine is a smart enough person to have made such a horrible choice like that on purpose because the rest of the game really doesn't sell me on the fact that this was an intentional decision at all. No matter how I look at it, regardless what that lack of choice is meant to do within the fucked-up lemon of a vehicle for artistic expression that is Bioshock Infinite, choosing to have no choices in this game makes this a worse game in every single way.
I'm not going to act like all these issues didn't come out of left field though. This game had a troubled development, being delayed numerous times, and the end product we have today only really looks like a hollow shell of much of what we saw in promotional material, early gameplay footage and the undelivered promises from the developers. '
This game promised to be so much more than the previous Bioshock games, so much more open, more fast-paced, more cerebral, more explosive, more ambitious. And in the end, Bioshock Infinite was so much more than the games that came before it.
It was so much emptier.

Bioshock Infinite ainda é Bioshock?

A jogabilidade é a mais fraca da série. Calma, eu sei que evoluímos nos tirinhos, e na verticalidade do gameplay, mas não acho que seja uma grande evolução, essa verticalidade não expande a exploração como em Dishonored é só um disfarce pra linearidade do jogo. A sensação de atirar com as armas é melhor, mas perdemos variedade e diferenciação, nesse quesito, Bioshock 1 e 2 ainda são melhores.

Os Vigores (basicamente os plasmids), são muito inferiores aos outros jogos da franquia. Tem muita opção, mas a grande maioria causa o mesmo efeito, atordoamento ou dano. Nos vigores perdemos também as características imersivas que tínhamos no primeiro jogo: usar elementos em reação com o ambiente, abrir caminhos com os poderes, etc.

A história é o que há de mais "Bioshock" aqui. Mas o jogo começa com um potencial absurdo (inclusive as primeiras horas são maravilhosas), a história parece andar para um caminho interessante e desanda completamente no meio do jogo, quando iguala a Vox Populi (organização revolucionária de pessoas oprimidas pela sua raça, que são LITERALMENTE ESCRAVIZADOS) aos fascistas, racistas e cristãos fundamentalistas de Columbia. Ainda em relação a história, nos outros Bioshock as escolhas geralmente importavam, em Infinite temos poucos momentos de escolha, e quando temos não fazem grande diferença.

Resumindo, é um bom jogo de ação, mas não é um bom Bioshock.

Espero que o Ken Levine não estrague tudo em Judas...

Going into BioShock Infinite, the only thing I really knew about it was how it was very different from the first two games and also much more polarizing. I had a general attitude of "How bad could it be?" when I first booted this game up, and I had no idea that I was going to play a complete mess of a game that falls flat on its face with almost everything it sets out to accomplish. Before I get into all of that, though, I will give credit where credit is due and talk about how great and detailed the setting is. Not only is Columbia gorgeous to look at, but the floating city's steampunk elements mesh pretty well with the 1912 setting. That was the only thing about BioShock Infinite that I actually liked, though, as I found the rest of the game to be dull in terms of gameplay and frustrating in terms of plot.

In BioShock, the player pretty much had to use weapons and plasmids together in order to stand a chance against Rapture's Splicers and Big Daddies, and this was expanded on in BioShock 2 by placing a greater emphasis on mixing and matching genes in order to let the player experiment to see what worked and what didn't. Pretty much all of that was thrown out here in BioShock Infinite, because even with the occasional puddle of water or oil showing up in some of the game’s levels, the best strategy in every encounter is to just shoot the enemies. The guns do feel slightly better than they did in the other two games, but rendering plasmids (or vigors, as this game calls them) useless through the effectiveness of standing in one place and gunning everyone down made the gameplay loop of BioShock Infinite feel easier and more boring as it went along. The only vigor that I got any use out of was Return to Sender, and that was unlocked at the very end of the game, so you might as well never bother to upgrade or even use your vigors up to that point.

On top of the gameplay feeling much less engaging than the first two BioShock games, BioShock Infinite was a complete disaster from a storytelling perspective. The most egregiously stupid point that this game tries to make would be its attempts at making slavery and segregation seem double-sided, and that concept should be self-explanatory in how ignorant and irresponsible it is. Everything that the story tried to do involving timelines and "tears" just ends up making it feel even more bloated and incompetently told than it already was, and that especially includes the moronic ending that essentially exists to make Ken Levine feel really smart. I had zero fun with BioShock Infinite, and I find it really funny how the only real legacy that this game has would be how its fanmade porn apparently caused breakthroughs in 3D animation.

So I played this ages ago when it first came out and even then I remember thinking, "Why is this game a shooter and not an adventure game where you have to like sneak into the engine room of creepy-ass racist Laputa and throw a wrench in the works?"

Now in 2022 with post-Disco-Elysium-glasses, and with half of the stuff in Columbia basically happening in real life, it's pretty easy to see how much cooler this game could have been if it wasn't dead set on being another stubbly-man-shoot-thing simulator, except it still probably would've kind of sucked, because the writers are weird liberal centrists who don't actually understand any of the themes they are writing about. Ah well. The setting had potential is what I'm trying to say. And building a relationship with Elizabeth (or any other character) could have worked so much better in a less pew-pew-centric genre. Unfortunately in this cursed timeline we are stuck with White Man Go Blam Blam MCMXCIXVIII: Why Slave Revolt Is Bad, Actually. When we could have had an infinitely more horrifying and more compelling Exploring the Twisted Funhouse of American Fascism Simulator! Damn you quantum physics.

I think the nicest thing I can say about this game is that the shooting feels okay. It's nothing special but at least it doesn't feel actively bad. Unfortunately, that doesn't get it very far because I never felt that the plasmid abilities felt particularly good or fun or interesting so the combat ends up feeling like an overall let-down.

And then there's the writing. It's a steaming hot pile of racist centrist garbage. There's a single named black character and you kill her because apparently black people are just as bad as racist white people?? Absolute horseshoe theory nonsense. Total garbage. Centrism is bad for the brain, y'all.