Great narrative and world aside, Infinite does the one thing I wanted from a Bioshock game - be fun to play.
The Rad
- Excellent narrative and atmosphere.
- Improved combat.
- Great visuals.
The Bad
- Occasionally poor frame rate.
- Checkpointing is a tad iffy in spots.
I'm glad that story isn't really a thing I cover in my game reviews, because Bioshock Infinite's ending is making my head hurt. I'll just say as with the previous Bioshock games, the narrative and world are the main reasons to give it a gander.
In previous Bioshocks though I don't feel like they backed that up with great gameplay. You can certainly find better shooters, but in terms of playability Infinite is leagues ahead of previous entries in the series.
Aside from just handling a lot better, the game is more generous with ammo distribution which turned out to be a pretty big issue in the other games for me. In those I'd often find myself going melee more often than not, but I barely had reason to whip out the Skyhook save for transportation purposes.
Also in previous games there was an awful lot of hacking mini-games and stuff which I feel kind of got in the way but there isn't anything like that here. Elizabeth handles all the lockpicking, if you've picks handy.
Hell Elizabeth handles pretty much everything. Need ammo? She'll get it. Salts? Sure. Health? Same deal. She's ostensibly finding this stuff in the environment, but I swear sometimes she's just pulling it from nowhere.
But then that's basically what she does with her tears, which she can use in combat situations for a variety of purposes. She can pull from the ether cover to hide behind, hooks for vertical mobility, assorted mechanical allies to help you lay the beat down on your foes and more.
That she's so helpful and that the enemy ignores her in combat situations prevents the game from feeling like a 12 hour fetch quest, which is a path I'm glad they didn't venture.
I'm playing on the 360 and i heard tell of poor textures and pretty crappy frame rate. And of course compared to the PC it's not gonna look as good or play as smoothly.
That being said I didn't find the textures to be too terrible and there was only one sequence in the game in which I experienced sub-par frame rate but that was over almost as soon as it came.
To say that at the end of the day Infinite is just more Bioshock would be selling it immensely short, especially since i didn't care for the previous entries a great deal. I came in here expecting it to be simply more Bioshock but find myself pleased that they finally manage to have a game worth playing to back up their excellent narrative.