Infinitely Disappointing

You know what's funny to me about Bioshock Infinite...

Before I played it, I'd had the ending spoiled to me by /v/, except that I'd misinterpreted the spoilers and concocted an astoundingly better alternative story that never was.

See, I knew that Comstock was Booker but I'd somehow taken that to mean that Booker went through the events of Bioshock Infinite, then there was a big reveal or some climactic event towards the end after which Booker has a drastic change in character and then travels back in time to set things right in his own way in the new persona of Comstock. There were even small things that pointed to this possibility in the game--like how Comstock knew to be on the lookout for someone with AD on their hand.

I was so excited to reach the ending to see what dramatic reveal was going to be what set the plot of the game in motion. It wasn't until Booker killed Comstock that I realized this was the ending I was going to get. Then all the bullshit scenes that make negative sense like in the OP image was the shit cherry on top of the cake.

I literally couldn't believe the game thought it was "deep story" to insult my intelligence by implying the events of the game that just happened--that tells you there are infinite parallel universes--is dumb enough to insist it could erase all of them with something as simple and dumb as drowning one particular instance of Booker.

What a joke.

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.