So the top two games on my backlog I've wanted to get through this year are The Last of Us and Bioshock Infinite. But for some reason, I could never get very into BI and ended up spending most of my time with TLOU (32 hours and 1 second actually!). No question that TLOU is my GOTY... and it may have ruined me for some other games now. I'm trying to get back into Infinite, but there's something about the color palette and the setting that just feels like it's a colorful HDR cartoon fantasy land and I might as well be shooting rainbows at unicorns or something. It's even weirder when you hear Troy Baker as Booker who doesn't sound all that different from Joel. First person vs third person control is a big change too. I should note that years ago I never finished the original BioShock but I don't remember why, I just lost interest I guess. I actually think the idea of a nutty cult living in a cloud city is pretty awesome and I still remember Rapture as breathtaking and haunting, but I almost would rather go play through TLOU again on hard or something. What's wrong with me, does anyone have some advice? I think I'm going to have to go on to another game on my backlog, maybe Tomb Raider? or see if some solid Dark Souls action will make me run back to the rainbows and unicorns... :)

I played through Infinite never seeing a rainbow or unicorn, or shooting one at anyone.

It was really good.

I lost interest in Infinite as well after lets say 8 hours or so. I even was close to the end but I just did not want to play it anymore for a while and then totally forgot about it. And I also do not know why. Maybe because I normally do not play much FPS or the constantly kind of boring combat. But yeah after playing the Last of Us it is really hard to play something else for a while. It is just too good.

Tomb Raider is a really nice game. Especially the first hour is really good and interesting. After that it becomes more an Uncharted but it is still fun to play and the new things you will get should kept you motivated for a while.

@drzing: Might be the FPS vs TPS thing. I have a hard time getting interested in any FPS games at this point, but if the perspective shifts to third-person, I find myself more intrigued. No clue why.

Also, I think you're crazy if you think Joel and Booker sound alike.

Troy Baker's pretty much Nolen North. He was even Kanji in Persona 4. Get used to his voice.

Also, Infinite's different from The Last of Us. I compared the setting to the crappy setting from Bioshock 1, which was all dark corridors. Compared to Rapture, Infinite's setting was beautiful.

Weird, I played through Infinite in one sitting because I was so enthralled by it but I had to force myself to keep playing The Last of Us after it kept throwing pointless huge long enemy encounter after enemy encounter at me. TLOU was such a huge bummer to me since I loved the intro, Gustavo Santaolalla was on board, the characters were interesting...but man, Naughty Dog is one of the weirdest companies in their apparent inability to craft consistent, well-paced combat scenarios. I had the same problem near the end of Uncharted 2 and throughout much of Uncharted 3. I just wish I could love those games more than I do.

Also, it may be worth noting that I generally hate first-person shooters and love third-person action games. So this surprises me just as much as anyone, but I really liked Infinite even when it became a little overbearing in the combat at times.

@mormonwarrior: If you play on the harder difficulties it solves all those issues. I'm on survivor right now, about to go retrieve Ellie from the ranch, I doubt I've killed more than 40 enemies. You spend 90% of the games hiding and flanking and running that when the game forces combat it is thrilling and intense.

The Last of Us was made to be played on survivor but it would obviously be unappealing to the masses.

I'm kind of baffled by the "help" bit. You said yourself you liked Last of Us so much is has retroactively diminished your enjoyment of other games, which is bonkers but if that's how it is nothing people say here will change that.

No, I started on Hard and played through about a third of the game that way and just found the enemy AI to be too inconsistent and janky to really make the stealth and everything work right. I had to turn it down just to not get angry at the game every time I played it. For every satisfying and thrilling combat scenario there were two or three that I just couldn't stand and felt like they derailed the pace of the game. Again, I was super disappointed and wanted to love it more.

Also, I have beaten Dark Souls many times and have all the achievements, so I'm not afraid of difficulty level if the game really works well.

The more I think about it the dumber this thread gets

Bioshock Infinite is garish, which works for an adventure game but doesn't work for an FPS; coincidentally it would've been way better without the combat.

I just started and finished Tomb Raider the other day and can say that if you want more dark and gloomy that's the game for you. It's pretty much torture porn for the first half and raging inferno the second. IDK what platform you are playing on, but PC has a terrible memory leak issue and the game will crashed like every half an hour to hour at some sections. Took me about 7 hours to beat and that was me not going out of my way to hunt down anything. I didn't speed run it or anything, but I skipped optional side tombs as I found the puzzles boring.

I found Bioshock infinite to be a pretty boring game, so I think that's all it is. It's front and end loaded with a lot of story and then to make the game longer it feels like they threw in about 3-4 hours in the middle of the most tedious and pointless combat you can imagine. My guess is you are in that section. Just skim through an LP on youtube to get the story bits and move on. Or if you got an afternoon just power through it. It's not a very long game.

I... I think Bioshock Infinite might be my GOTY. That ending, the Luteces, Columbia, the gunplay and skyhooks, the style.

It's that weird case of the more I think about it the more I like it.

There is so much wrong in this part...

@crusader8463: Tomb Raider is like a 12-15 hour game so basically you did speedrun it; though not in the traditional sense, both it and Infinite benefit from the player being interested in exploring the environment and if you just ignore all of that then either one will seem lesser for it; though obviously Tomb Raider destroys Infinite on the gameplay front.

I really liked the aesthetic of Infinite, it felt like a trip to Disneyland going horribly wrong. Along with TLOU they top my list of the best games of the year. I'm not much of a FPS player, but I found it very easy to play. After completing it I immediately went back and played it a couple more times for achievements. My intention was to do this with TLOU too, but I never did. It doesn't have the same ease of play. Maybe because of the stress of horror combat and the heavy weight of the story. While BI has a simple, but fun and flexible combat system and a world I love revisiting.

If you're not feeling Infinite, there's not much I can say. I hope you continue playing it. If your fear is that it's too bright and cheery, it certainly gets darker. A great strength of that game is the subversion of this city that's bright and shiny on the surface, but is deeply flawed within.

As others have said if you feel this way there's probably not much we can do to help you change you mind. Bioshock Infinite is my GOTY pretty easily. I played The Last of Us and I do enjoy it, but I'm not able to love it the way many people do. I wish I could. The world is incredible and the story is incredibly intriguing. The interactions between Joel and Ellie are great as well; however, I found the gameplay to be something I had to trudge through rather than something to be enjoyed. I generally tried to stealth through everything while killing anything that got in my way. The problem with that is that what seemed to trigger enemies spotting you would change on a regular basis. For some reason I could kill an enemy one time fine, but the next doing the exact same thing would alert an enemy that had no business noticing me. Perhaps I was just missing something. The checkpointing also felt a bit off when it came to battle scenarios to me as well. In the end I truly wish I had enjoyed playing the game more because everything around it is some of the best and fully realized world building that's been in any game ever.

By no stretch of the imagination does Bioshock Infinite have amazing gameplay, but I did enjoy playing through the combat scenarios throughout the entire game. The combat was fun if not necessarily great. Very rarely did I feel like I just wanted a fight to be over so I could move on. A few times here and there, but mostly I had fun with it. Especially when I was able to use the skyhook in combat as that was extremely satisfying. Meanwhile, I find the story and world of Infinite to be fascinating. I was enthralled and drawn forward the entire time. I explored every nook and cranny and found every audio log on my first playthrough. I wanted to get every ounce I could out of that world. Then there's Elizabeth. Elizabeth is one of my favorite video game characters of this generation. Ellie and Joel both are too actually. Elizabeth was a character that I truly enjoyed journeying through the game with. She added life to the interactions in the world that I feel few games manage.

Overall, I absolutely understand how people could find deep faults in Bioshock Infinite, and perhaps not enjoy it as much as I did but it really is a fantastic game. The Last of Us was incredible and the amount people love it is certainly understandable. So it that type of game is your preference I suppose it can't be helped. This has gotten rather long winded.

I say drop Infinite for a week or two. I mean it's a game worth playing but it isn't amazing. Also, don't worry about Tomb Raider it is kinda butt cheeks.

I changed the proper nouns in your post so that it makes more sense now.

@fredchuckdave: I got like an 80% completion on the game so I don't see how that was a speedrun, but whatevers. I just didn't find the tomb puzzles interesting so after the first three I stopped, and most of the collectibles are pretty obviously on the main path of the game and don't require much hunting around for. Especially once you get the perk that reveals it all. I just didn't find their audio log equivalents interesting to read or sit and listen to so I skipped past them when they popped. If I had of it probably would have added an hour or two to the game right there. Plus I had already seen the early cutscenes thanks to the QL on the site so I skipped them which was about another half an hour to an hour. So if you add that up that's closer to your time range.

I just think I blew through the combat quicker then most people. Based on videos I have watched of people playing it seems most hide around cover and jump around the maps but I never felt a need to. I was able to just stand there with my bow and headshot guys and take them out. The monster closet enemy spawning meant I could just sit there taking them out one after another as they spawned and jumped in the same spot as the guy I just one shotted. So combat scenes that I watched take 10-15 min for others were over for me in several minutes.

@drzing: i feel the same, i can't finish infinite because the world is not a place i want to spend time - it reminds me of musicals, it's just too fabricated, and choreographed, and fancified, and it doesn't help that the game shuffles you back and forth through the same funneled areas, I'm never convinced that these are places that people inhabit, they just seem like bare-faced game levels, which are uninteresting gameplay-wise, more often than not i end up hiding behind a pillar and picking dudes off until they stop shooting at me from irritatingly random directions.

It is an HDR cartoon fantasy, that's the point. It's taking a bunch of extremes, pushing them to the absolute limit, and contrasting them with cartoony design .

The bioshock games have always come across to me like moving, interactive political cartoons with a bunch of insane sci fi stuff thrown in. I, personally, love the contrast between the cartoonish character design and extreme violence, and the the contrast between the cartoonish design and the overall tone/theme/setting

With that said, The Last of Us is all around better than infinite. Infinites gameplay is too dumbed down; they should have just made it a better playing bioshock that iterated on gameplay elements rather than remove them.

I remember my time with Bioshock Infinite. I tried to like it, I honestly did, just as I played through and thoroughly loved the first Bioshock. It was such a letdown in every way. The terrible combat, the plot hole filled story that's written by a 10 year old, the mechanics, boring levels, predictable and easy enemies, the hideous color palette, and the laughable vigors and guns. That's just my opinion, I know most of you love it.

I'd imagine that being really, really good with a mouse could make Tomb Raider a breeze. Unfortunately, I'm not, so I found myself behind cover, jumping around, etc, and I found it a ton of fun to just play.

Isn't that last sentence pushing your opinion on everyone else just a little bit? "This game is crap, the only reason everyone loved it is because it had a big name and a lot of money behind it. But that's just my opinion!"

Are you seriously following me around? Look, I already explained why I don't like it in the above post, like you asked in the other thread. Now you're just nitpicking. Fine, I edited my first post. That way you can just see what I meant, and not the other things.

@missacre: No, I'm not following you, I just happened to see your post in this thread and I'm like "wait a minute, that's totally fucking hypocritical, should probably call her out on that". That's not nitpicking.

Way to dodge the issue there. I already explained my side, and you chose to ignore it and call me a hypocrite. Please don't talk to me again. I seriously wish this site had a block function.

Different strokes. I thought the story and setting were very well done in Last of Us. The gameplay I found extremely middling to borderline frustrating. Same thing for Bioshock though, but that wasn't a huge shocker (hah pun!) as I didn't enjoy the combat in Bioshock 1 or 2 and not much has changed in Infinite. As a matter of fact, Burial at Sea perfectly encompassed everything I dislike about the combat in that series. Last of Us was a bad stealth game, a very average third person shooter and an extremely light weight platformer.

Well what I'm getting at is that if you don't like it you just don't like it. No way could you convince me to spend 30+ hours playing The Last of Us, yet I've spent over 80 hours playing Grand Theft Auto Online for reasons completely unknown to me - but I keep booting it up and playing.

Haha that's hilarious....I actually didn't really like the first BioShock either so it's that much more shocking to me. My trouble though is that Infinite never painted itself as not being full of tons of combat, but supposedly The Last of Us was supposed to make each encounter really matter...but even on Hard it felt way, way too video gamey and like a more violent Uncharted.

@crusader8463: Personally I died like once or twice in the whole game (to QTEs), but I still took my time and enjoyed the scenery and so on; pretty sure it wound up being longer than Uncharted 2 for me. The easiest way to kill enemies is to kneecap them with the pistol then context kill.

I'm just saying I had no problem with enemy AI in The Last of Us, it's all consistant and the game warns you with a sound que if you're about tot blow cover.

I liked my time in Last of Us, and enjoyed Infinite, but wont play Infinite again. If the PS3 worked I could go back to Last of Us, I would call it the most fun game of the year. It tells its story without all the preachy talk of Infinite. Its a quite game.

Really? That 10 year old must have some vocabulary. The average 10 year old wouldn't be able to spell a third of he words in the script.

I'm sure a 10 year old would be able to spell "tears" and "Booker." "Comstock" might be a little harder, but I'm sure he'd be able to manage just fine.

Well...I had numerous and constant problems with the AI in The Last of Us on all difficulty levels, so I don't really know what to say. My biggest and most constant, particular gripe was how one isolated zombie would spot me, I'd take him out before he had a chance to make any noise, and yet all hell would break loose and every zombie in the place somehow knew exactly where I was at all times until I either died and restarted or killed all of them. It made no sense and completely broke my immersion in the game early on, remaining a constant annoyance throughout. That's just one example. The human enemies had a lot of their own issues too. It was quite comical in the last areas of the game, actually, because I would get all the enemies to see me, pigeonhole them into a tight corridor, and just light them up with the flamethrower. I just couldn't take the gameplay seriously at that point since it was so broken and absurd. Don't get me started with the busted checkpoints and how it would mess up your inventory most of the time.

Basically, I've never been satisfied with stealth in games. It feels overly lenient at times in ways I can't predict, and then strangely stringent in unrealistic ways that break the suspension of disbelief. I can't ever figure out the rules and what is and isn't acceptable. Possibly the only game I've played that wasn't bad at it was Mark of the Ninja, but I've only played the first level so far and 2D games are much easier to design for in that regard.

@mormonwarrior: If a zombie sees you then he makes a call-out noise, additionally in the process of killing him you'll alert the other zombies anyway since there's only one way to kill things silently. In general with the Last of Us or most stealth games you have to plan out what you're going to do, chances are a zombie will see you at some point so have a contingency plan.

@fredchuckdave: But I'd interrupt him before he could make a sound. It ruined my immersion because my footsteps were louder than the sound of killing the thing, and yet because they're computer controlled enemies the game automatically knows where you are. It just reminded me constantly that I was playing a video game when the story, characters, and visuals were pulling me in. It was such a dichotomy that it became a really unpleasant experience for me overall. If they made a "Director's Cut" of it with far less combat, focusing on the intense scenes with Ellie or particularly story-relevant encounters, I'd probably love the game 100%. It was one of those cases where less would have been much, much more and the actual amount of content detracted from the experience.

Where's your proof?

I had to keep a friend on skype to play through Infinite. The ending was cool and all, but it was not worth the bullshit gameplay.

Where's YOUR proof?

I liked Infinite better, but I think the Last of Us is a more important game and may deserve more GOTY awards.

I never understood why TLoU is so highly rated. The story is one of those "Get from point A to point B, then a twist or something else mindblowing at B". The characters and basically all of the interactions were great, they really were, but the story itself was just lacking IMO. The combat is extremely repetetive and dull, just like any Naughty Dogs game, and tends to become a drag fairly early on in the game. As many has pointed out, the stealth is really not that good either. The upgrade/leveling system is OK, I wouldn't say it's bad, but I don't think it's big and immersive enough to be really good either. Myself, as you can probably guess from complaints, did not enjoy TLoU too much. It was OK, I don't regret playing it, but I could never play it again. I really get why so many people like it, the interactions are in my opinion the best one I've ever experienced in a game, and the world is amazing and intriguing. What I don't get is why it's so highly RATED. As of the online, the fact that basically nobody mentions it is proof enough. It's not bad, it's not great and it makes basically no impact and gets heavily outweight by the singleplayer.

I personally loved Infinite, WAY more than TLoU, but I can also see why many would claim that it's overrated. Even though it's my GOTY, I can clarely see that it has it's fair shair of flaws. What I can say is that if you tried to play it and didn't likte it, I don't think you will suddenly start to like it after a while. The game doesn't change that much throughout, even though the combat scenarios will differ in what skills you have, the surroundings and skyhooks. I guess you CAN try to powerhouse your way into the game just so you can experience and MAYBE fall in love with it like some others, but no game is worth playing if you dislike it. My opinion, all of it, of course.

While I definitely don't share your tastes, BI isn't such a good game that you should play it if you aren't enjoying yourself. There are two good parts of Bioshock Infinite: the beginning and the end. So if the beginning didn't grab you, I don't see the point in playing on.

The Last of Us and Bioshock Infinite coming out at the same time is really similar to how No Country for Old Men and There will be Blood came out the same year. Both of them are the best of the year and I have a really hard time choosing between them, one day I'll like one more than the other and then the next day I'll think it's the other way around. Thematically they're both similar to those films too.

I'm currently playing The Last of Us again on ng+ and I think it has some of the best, most visceral, combat in any game I've ever played. It's extremely satisfying and rewarding. It's all about executing snap judgements effectively and knowing how to maintain the upper hand. The ammunition and melee weapons/bottles & bricks are just scarce enough to make the entire game feel like you are just prepared enough to handle yourself. All of its mechanics fit so perfectly within the zombie genre and make the game constantly tense.