Bioshock Infinite
I don't see this game as a perfect score. It is above average, but far from a masterpiece. In many ways this game feels dumbed down, despite the upgrade from UE2 to UE3 (Unreal Engine). It retained some concepts from the previous Bioshock, but at the same time there are many things that I criticize about the third Bioshock game.
The floating city of Columbia is clearly not possible with UE2. The upgrade to UE3 was overdue. I don't know if they adopted PBR (Physically Based Rendering) but wood, stone, marble, metal. Each surface is way more realistic when compared to the older Bioshock. The environment art was great. It's a combination of neoclassic and US colonial period which is super clean. The soundtrack and the jingles are all good. The voice acting is good of the characters is good.
The good side about the gameplay is that the game is easier to grasp. They made the upgrades and skills easier to understand. I guess this must be a decision that came from above, because the game it's pretty clear that Bioshock Infinite is more accessible than the previous games. Not everyone liked the camera thing to gain passive upgrades and they've completed abandoned it for this game. They also removed the moral choice of having to save children or harvest them. The game is much more straight forward now by not forcing the player to have to do some calculations to decide whether to kill or to spare to develop your character.
In a way, the moral choice from the previous game is still there, the concept is part of the plot because it deals with parallel universes. In one universe the character makes a choice, in another the same character didn't. The same concept seen in justice league's multiverse for example. Except that in Bioshock Infinite you don't get to choose anything, as the choice has already been made by the time the game begins. There is just one ending.
Apart from some plot points where Elizabeth is absent and you play without her next to you, everywhere else she is giving you free ammo, potions or coins. She has a good IA because she never blocks your way and she is immune to damage so you don't have to worry about her losing life in any way. The minigames were removed in favor of lock picking tools. Now Elizabeth spends the tools to pick locks and it's much more convenient this way than to play puzzle minigames which would often be bugged with no solution. Or forced you to replay many times to get it right.
Now for the negative side, I guess that the development of this game was very troubled and they must've faced stalls and other problems. According to some news they've cut off a lot of content. The plot deals with parallel universes and even tries to connect Columbia and Rapture by means of interdimensional travel. They must have had a lot of trouble deciding what type of game they wanted to make, what mechanics to add and what story they wanted to tell.
The skills are so powerful that it's easy to distract enemies or stun them. I think this is a decision from some high position executive because it made the game much easier to beat when compared to the previous. The handymans are way easier to defeat than Big Daddies or Big Sisters.
The weapons in the previous Bioshock had different ammo types. In Infinite they removed different ammo types and this another point that many players criticized. It removed the feel of customization from the weapons. Due to the plot some weapons have an alternate counterpart belonging to the rebels. I've found many of the weapons redundant and I ended up ignoring many of them.
The environment art seems to be worse than in Rapture. With the exception of the end, when things become darker, everywhere else is clean. In Rapture the leakages, pipes, rust, decaying state of the whole place, had its own charm. Plus, the levels had more opportunities to take advantage of the environment such as water to electrocute enemies. In Columbia there are some splashes of fuel to use the fire skill, but they feel out of place because the whole environment is clean and there aren't obvious sources for that fuel to be seen around.
In Rapture we had obstacles that required powers, such as melting the ice with fire. There is one location in Columbia that you are required to get the lightning skill to open a door, much like in the beginning of Bioshock 1. However, I felt that the environments were shallower in Infinite with much less interaction than in the previous games. This is one reason for me to like Burial at Sea more than Infinite. The return to Rapture also brought back a lot of interactivity that was absent in Columbia's environments.
What happened to the horror? Most of the game takes place in clean and bright environments with no corpses around. It's only near the end that suddenly the game shifts to a darker atmosphere, including a sub-boss that is a ghost. This sudden shift in game's tone must be a sign of a troubled development. The previous Bioshock had the security cameras for increased tension. In the final part of Infinite there is a new type of enemy that mimics the security cameras from before. Why the abrupt change near the end? Speaking of which, the villain is killed in some anti-climatic moment and the last battle is a large scale battle to protect some exposed core. Why would the core be exposed on the outside of the flying machine?
The skylines are cool, but along the dimensional rifts that Elizabeth can open, called tears in the game, this Bioshock has clearly leaned towards action and abandoned the stealth and horror of the previous installments. Sometimes I felt that they could have done so much more with the tears, because all they do in the game is some gimmick to allow jumping and summoning some objects that alter the combat a bit. Maybe they wanted something more such as going through another dimension to reach hidden places, similar to the dark dimension in Wolfenstein 2009. Maybe they wanted bifurcations in the storyline that allowed for multiple timelines and multiple endings.
I've seen some people comparing Bioshock Infinite to Call of Duty. The comparison is right on the spot because this Bioshock is an action game with a heavy emphasis on cinematics and visual impact, much like Call of Duty. The shield with auto regen is clearly borrowed from the Halo series. I think that a lot of fans didn't like Bioshock Infinite because it dropped the horror, the customization and the enemies which were inhabitants of Rapture, driven mad and mutated by biochemicals. The soldiers in Bioshock Infinite are soldiers, much like Call of Duty. They don't have the lines from the previous games such as "Darling" or the same impact of splicers with a baby carriage for example.
It's a strictly linear game. Once you get past an area you cannot go back, much like in Bioshock 2. I don't know if they tried an open world game during the troubled development, but travelling back and forth between already visited areas would surely create a lot of problems. There is one thing that I disliked in the level design and I made this comment in my site. They placed keys and safes very far away from each other in opposite ends of the level. It's tiresome to travel back and forth because once you clean up an area, no more enemies show up and nothing new happens. It just forces a long journey.
To conclude, the world building is rich and extremely detailed. But it's the gameplay that felt lacking in depth.
