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.