More like Bioshock Infinitely Lame

Adapted from a series of posts I've made elsewhere.

Bioshock Infinite: I'm not impressed. Tried too hard to one up the look of its predecessors without properly capturing the spirit. The story is not extremely engaging, nor particularly thought provoking. It touches on themes of political ideology and sociology to justify the setting without exploring them with any depth or finesse--which could have been an improvement upon its forefathers' flimsy pedantic, black & white morality shortcomings. The gameplay is disgustingly linear (although to its credit they at least try to hide it) and is at best a cash-in on the series' iconic imagery and at worst a cash-in on generic actiony spectacle shooters.

I'm a pretty huge fan of the first Bioshock; I even liked the much-less-critically-successful sequel. I think what really killed Infinite for me was about halfway through the game when I realized I was basically playing Dishonored in a floating cloud city without the stealth mechanics. I kinda wish they'd given it a different name instead of Bioshock.

The game just didn't have any humanity: take the first Bioshock where even the average mook (not even taking into consideration that care was given to creating personalities for every archetype of splicer) was identifiable as a person who fell from various levels of grace into the mutated hell of plasmid overuse (plasmids, also note, were more than a gameplay mechanic and was quite central to the overarching plot). In Bioshock Infinite at every stage you're gunning down faceless zealots of various flavors, with virtually no distinguishing characteristics amongst them--the most egregious example being Cornelius Slate's soldiers, whom you have no reason to fight and have absolutely no reason to fight you other than that the Hall of Heroes apparently was in dire need of local adversaries.

Honestly, the most exciting part of the game for me was the brief moment in the ending sequence where you end up in Rapture (I was actually kind of hoping there'd be an even longer nod to the first game, maybe witnessing the plane crash before you enter the lighthouse).  And even that moment was partially spoiled by the cockblocky way the sequence conveniently puts down a recurring big bad which would have made an excellent boss fight somewhere instead of just getting tossed in the trash heap with the rest of the plot.

It's a cushy themepark ride; significantly more style than substance, content only to briefly amuse you with flashing lights until the ride commensurate to the ticket you paid for is over.