First of all, I have to say that I'm possibly the worst guy to give a new Bioshock game to. I had so much ludicrously fevered anticipation for the first Bioshock that actually paid off, that even the beautifully made sequel and its Minerva's Den DLC couldn't even come close. Infinite perhaps had impossible things to live up to for me.

I couldn't stop myself playing it. I literally sat down for a single sitting, 10 hours, one big beautiful generous session. When I stopped (actually the game bluescreened on me after the credits, which made me laugh), the sun was back up and the prospect of a workday was patently insane. I spent the rest of the day thinking about the game, its conclusion, and I got the gnawing sensation that while I'd certainly been dazzled, something was amiss.

I think Bioshock Infinite is an absolutely fantastic game. But it doesn't come close to the first Bioshock for me. The following post is going to be

spoilery

for both Bioshock and Infinite, though I'll try to keep the latter in vague terms. You've been warned.

The puzzle story (SPOILERS)

The bland weaponry

So, taken as a pure video game, Infinite is a game about shooting men and women in the face. Besides the fantastic melee combat, none of the guns on offer felt much fun to use besides the carbine. I wound up playing the entire game using practically nothing but the carbine. I didn't upgrade any of the other weapons, because I didn't want to use them. The mid-to-long range nature of the majority of the shooting made the carbine the absolute obvious choice for me, scoring headshots from across the map, and, again like the previous games in the series, utterly useless iron sights are on offer. I never had a reason to use them, and I don't understand why the game has them.

It doesn't help that the vigors, the plasmid powers in Infinite, are just as obvious. There were several plasmids I saw little use for whatsoever, amounting to a cool effect that looked great the first time and then never had a reason to be there. Next to the Carbine, I spent the majority of the game using possession to deal with turrets and undertow to blow everyone else off ledges or yank them up close to casually shoot them in the head.

Perhaps I made a mistake, playing the game on medium difficulty? Could be. But the combat felt undercooked. Except for the few cases where skylines were involved.

Too few skylines

The single most fun mechanic in the game, for me, has to be the skylines. They are exhilarating to ride, satisfying to jump to and from, and it seemed like there were maybe 5 times during the game they were a real part of combat. They were always fun when they were around, but there were nowhere near enough of those times.

No vertigo

This is a city of skyscrapers and rollercoasters in the sky, yet the world is so cloudy and close you practically never get a sense of actual height or vertigo. You get to look UP at a lot of grand things but almost never down along them. It's a huge mistake. While Bioshock banked on the inherent oppression of the deep ocean, Infinite should have reveled in the precarious lethality of the high heavens. Instead it uses its scale to make even bigger golden statues and that's sort of it.

Sidequest design

I don't think it's a good idea, when your game is an almost entirely linear corridor, to have "side quests" that task you with backtracking most of the area you just went through. When you enter an area and find a locked chest, and then find the key for it just as you're about to leave, someone's asleep at their job.

Elizabeth not knowing when to shut up

This is a tiny thing, but it really happened way too often. I loved the dialog between Elizabeth and Booker. But I also loved finding the audio logs. So often I'd pick one up, hit the key to listen to it, and Elizabeth would immediately drone on over it about something. It made me miss both what Elizabeth said and what the log said, and I wound up simply not caring that much about the logs after a while. I really wish the script could afford itself to pause when my ears were clearly elsewhere.

So then...

I think Infinite is the kind of game that is almost too good for its own.. good. Everything it does well it does so exceedingly well, so friction free, that when moments of friction do show up they are disproportionately jarring. Contrasting with Bioshock, I'm left with the impression that Bioshock took me to a place, while Infinite wants to discuss what place is, and it just didn't tickle the same fancy. It didn't go far enough, yet it went too far. It wasn't "for me" so much.

But hell. 10 hours of engrossing shooting of heads from across the most lavishly beautiful horizons I've seen in a first person shooter for years is still about as good a deal as you're going to find. Anyone would be a fool not to play it.