Skyd you not
TLDR: Game is awesome, but not as impressive as the original Bioshock.
Please excuse each paragraph not seamlessly leading onto the next, as there are quite a few points to cover.
Story
Bioshock Infinite's world has so much potential to be as interesting, and perhaps even more so than Rapture, the underwater city from the first entry in the series.
I remember years ago people were discussing how great it would be to be able to explore a Bioshock world inhabited by normal characters. Well now you can as Infinite provides players a few glorious moments where there are normal non-hostile characters inhabiting the world. This helps to convince you that the environment in the context of the narrative had a purpose other than for you to run around shooting hostiles. Even the linearity is explained by having segments of the city/state join/dock together.
The story itself is quite impressive once you beat the game, and you may not even understand the ending. Replaying the game you will notice many 'obvious' hints towards key parts of the story.
Unfortunately the collectible audio diaries are not very much interesting. The main antagonist's monologues speak dribble that will not hold your attention, unlike the monologues of the antagonist of the original game. In addition to this the audio diaries are often interrupted by whatever you happen to be doing, so you had better made sure nobody is coming into a room after you and that you are standing perfectly still until the recording is over (luckily you can replay the audio diaries if you care).
It is admirable that the game takes a look at past (and current) issues such as racism and xenophobia. Not many games (none that I can recall) have risked tackling the harsh truths of such a controversial subject.
All of the main characters are important to the story and are mostly well thought out even if their audio diaries suck. Nothing really to say here but you will enjoy their roles in the story.
Gameplay
Elizabeth, the character that accompanies you throughout the entire game is refreshingly useful. She will throw supplies to you frequently throughout the game. She is a bit predictable, you can go to a vending machine, not buy anything, and she will instantly toss you a few coins. Luckily Elizabeth can fend for herself and doesn't get in the way.
The powers (vigors, previously named plasmids) are terrible. The animations that play when you discover a new one are uninteresting. The powers are often useless. You will need to collect 'salts' to use these powers. You will run out of power as soon as you use it. You can't just play through the whole game having fun constantly using different powers like you would have in the original.
The shooting needs no mention.
The sky-lines (whatever they are called), where you ride rails through the sky are a lot of fun. It is a lot of fun fighting the 'handyman' character and traversing the battleground from above and below, taking out enemies as you go, hopping on and off. This is the key feature of the game and does not disappoint.
Big Negative (personally anyway)
In the gameplay video demos that were unveiled in the year/s leading up to the launch of the game there were incredibly exciting scenes. Both in terms of gameplay and narrative. They are not present in the final game. I bought this game wanting to play cool scenes like the ones in the video demos. So either they were to hard for the developer's to pull off, or they were pulled because they wanted to keep the game 'fresh.'
This was such a disappointment for me, because the replacement scenes were not even half as interesting. That's a whole star gone, just like that.
An example of the 'cool scene gone,' is when in the game you get a tonic that gives you a power that involves crows. It happens in a very small room. Just to introduce you to a type of enemy so you can learn how to defeat them. Whereas, in the game demoed before release, you would get this from some crazy character, have missiles shot at your location, could snipe those characters from a distance, and then had to proceed onto the sky-line thing taking out aerial enemies and switching lines before you end up unannounced at a bar that wants to kill you.
The world was also far too drab. The colour palette gets all too serious to make certain scenes more 'epic,' yet these boring colours are used through most of the game. The colourful world was much more interesting. I understand the drab colours also help explain that a war/conflict has occurred in the environment, but they are just so similar to every other game's lame colour palette.
Conclusion
Buy the damn game. It's good. It's better than everything else 1/2 2013. Just don't go in expecting it to blow your mind.
Side-note
Might be cool to have some kind of alternate game accessible from the menu without the wonderful story (the story is great). Because as much as the story makes a Bioshock game, I also want to just go play in giant colourful battlefields full of sky-lines and other madness.
