PLAYER COMMENTS ABOUT BIOSHOCK INFINITE

* See also Rapture Bioshock Player Commentaries 
* See also Infinite_BS & Infinite Stupidity
* See also PLAYER_COMMENTS_ABOUT_BURIAL_AT_SEA
* See also Infinite_BS_Unlove
PLAYER_COMMENTS_ABOUT_BIOSHOCK_INFINITE_2 (Continuing)
PLAYER_COMMENTS_ABOUT_BIOSHOCK_INFINITE_3 (Continuing)
== COMMENTS FROM PLAYERS AND ONLINE REVIEWERS FOR BIOSHOCK INFINITE ==
( Ones you were NOT going to hear from Magazines and Paid Reviewers who the game company had Paid Advertisements with ).
 ***WARNING*** Fanbois may want to stick their heads in a bucket of sand, cuz there's ALOT of negative comments here. 
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Short and Sweet :
"The original BioShock was one of the best video games ever made. Biohock Infinite was an over-hyped, stripped down version of the original that betrayed its hardcore fans. Awful replay value."
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"Levine's "Vision" for Columbia ? You mean Rapture with a bad Coat of 1900 slapped over it ?"
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"I find the game's storyline a bit cringe-worthy, though not any more so than other in-universe hand-waving of authorial fuckups. ( BioShock Infinite's in-story explanation of why they made the same game in essentially the same setting again - because there's, like, alternate realities and some junk - was the worst ).
Bioshock Infinite had the same type of base setting and storyline as the previous Bioshock because it was a new installment in a popular franchise and staying on-brand.
Instead of just going with it as the usual sort of thing, they felt the need to "excuse it" by throwing in a bunch of clumsily overwritten mystical mumbo-jumbo about how "there's always a lighthouse, there's always a man". I found it excruciating. There's nothing worse than making excuses for your storyline: It is a couple degrees worse than lampshading something ridiculous by having a character squeak out It is like something out of a B-movie/bad TV show/comic book!
"
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"The lazy, pointless, and offensive "equivalence" narrative that opens the second half of the game." :
Fundamental weakness in the game's construction : BioShock Infinite is strewn with poorly-tuned and irrelevant mechanics. The inability to carry health supplies and the tiny peripheral areas make the classic scrounging mechanics feel useless. The strict two-weapon carry limit makes the game's menu of overlapping weapons and their multitude of upgrades seem at once overwhelming and irrelevant. The lockpicking system feels completely superfluous, in part because side areas are so small, and in part because the only locks that really matter don't require lockpicks.
Infinite's late-game combat zones tend to be large and open arenas with minimal cover and defilade. With enemies inserting and firing from all directions, battle becomes increasingly chaotic and lacks any narrative feel. Without interesting secondary antagonists or strong level design, combat feels directionless and perfunctory - an emotionless exercise in elimination, even when an evocative enemy does show up.
The industrialist Fink feels like a retread of ideas examined in Rapture. When Fink's downtrodden workers successfully revolt, they almost immediately become villainous. The game's attempt to establish an equivalence between angry laborers and the dehumanizing system of oppression that produced them is lazy and unmotivated. Worse, it unavoidably endorses the views of Columbia's racist elites, for apparently no better reason than to give Booker differently-colored enemies to shoot at.
Infinite gets bogged down in the quantum mumbo-jumbo it uses to explain itself, losing track of the details as it barrels onward through an ever-less-interesting landscape. The game's locations become less evocative of the Columbian way of life, and their design contributes to the combat's decline, particularly in the meaningless battles that conclude Columbia's story. Increasingly, the porous logic of Infinite's story doesn't hold up under examination, and the game undercuts its attempt at a neat, tidy ending by preceding that with a twenty-minute explanation why it doesn't work. 
Fuzzy-headed narrative and thematically irrelevant auxiliary mechanics make Infinite feel sloppy even when it is working. Combat increases in frequency and decreases in impact after the Hall of Heroes, so for most of its length the game sinks towards a deflated ending.
The closing scene, the impression it leaves is strong, but the emotional connection it trades on, however, has almost nothing to do with the game's actual play.
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"Recently we’ve all gotten the chance to photograph the corpse of Irrational Games itself, which closed its doors in the aftermath of Infinite’s perilous production and complicated reception. I’ve come to believe that in the histories we write about our world there are only two salient constants: There’s always a corpse, and there’s always a camera. "
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"The game is a disappointment. It was hyped so much that in the end it just shatters before succeeding in what it is attempting to do. BioShock 1 was a lot better than this. Despite what you'll read in all of the super glowing reviews, Infinite is a cop out because it basically just takes BioShock and puts it in the sky but with none of the things that made that game phenominal.
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"Plenty of sequences in this game were ridiculously violent and grotesque."
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"It all looks like just an excuse to have a flying big daddy in the flying city."
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Another Short But Sweet Comment :
"The plot itself is so fucking forced, contrived, over-extended, badly paced, and full of billions of holes ( that apologists and fans have no good answers for ), that it is impossible to really take seriously."
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"It is yet another case of devoting a massive amount of time/money/etc... almost purely to artwork when the gameplay itself stagnates and becomes yet another interactive cutscene."
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"The game moves away from the silent loner protagonist to some Pinkerton douchebag who has to babysit some mentally disturbed child with Super-Tits. The gunplay looks incredibly game-y and cheap, the jumping around on rail-lines just feels gimmicky and unnecessary, the strolling scenes where Elizabeth tells you some stupid story suggest a more linear, cutscene driven game. Finally the bloody brick road leads back to Rapture."
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Linear is "Linear" :
"Ironically, in the face of all this streamlining, they added needless and frustrating backtracking and getting lost to BioShock Infinite in the form of badly designed side missions."
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Another Player Comment :
In Infinite, instead of discussing things like Nationalism, Manifest Destiny, Imperialism, White-man's Burden, and similar issues of the time, they just simplified the Founders into nothing but some dumb and cartoonized version of religious zealots and shallowly portrayed bigots. They thereby eliminate most historical and fictional interest, and all realistic complications and shades of gray. Portraying two 'evil' sides does NOT create a gray issue. Portrayed is not an unfortunate situation of flawed groups of people, it is just an insane asylum of cardboard-cutout nuts. 
I cannot suspend my disbelief sufficiently when seeing such illogical situations and characters which I am supposed to be caring about. The previous BioShocks were interesting for the way they integrated details of culture, politics, technology and history, and discussed serious issues with some interesting theoretical ideas. 
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"BSI : a popamole shooter."
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"Levine in his 1900s fake America game setting missed out by not having his "Founders" in Columbia have human skin lampshades". 
"So many plot holes that they could have opened a cemetery"
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"In the end, all I can say is : At least Bioshock Infinite made most of its expenses back so it wont negatively impact other more successful game genres for Rockstar."
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"The exploration is somewhat illusory; some of the maps are big, but they're deeply non-interactive and you can't actually explore as much as you'd like to. We see all sorts of parts of the floating city off in the distance; we just can't visit any of them. Welcome to the city in the sky. So much to see and do, except you can't, because most of it is off limits. 
Even if we slow down and spend our time hunting for the various secrets, it is not particularly fulfilling. A big issue is those damn audio recordings—if you don't find them all, the story makes substantially less sense. Many of them are pretty dull, but plenty contain important snippets of information. So we have the worst of all worlds: in order to make sense of the story, we have to play a silly game of hide-and-seek, and in playing that game of hide-and-seek, we suck the life out of the story." It is immersion-breaking, and it is lazy. I'm playing an interactive audio-visual experience and the best you can do is make me listen to recordings? "
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A Cowardly portrayal of Racism and a Racist state 
"If BS:I could have you climbing out of being buried in a pit full of bodies, at least they could have had some meagerly realistic racialism scenes. That Stupid baseball bullshit scene ... a public stoning with festivities. Levine should be ashamed of himself."
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Levine might be trying to impart the player with the idea of "an illusion of choice" - an idea held by some people who are deluded into thinking there merely exists "an illusion of choice" in their real life. 
But for a GAME where players, who want to feel they have achieved something, to then push their noses into some staged "THERE IS NO FREE CHOICE IT IS ONLY AN ILLUSION" game experience is a cheat and swindle ( Levine, go do an 'indie' film if you want to try to be this clever ).
The early BioShocks had this to some extent, but it went into hyperdrive for BS:I
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"With the game obviously thrown together apparently after rewrite and rushed production, it begs the question of whether the delivered game constituted the original intent. Various interviews were given saying much more was intended, but is that just an alibi attempting to cover up the delivery of inferior work ?"
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"Normal people in a 1912 floating city throw money in the trash because why the hell not. It sort of takes the bite out of the social commentary to have a guy complaining about not getting paid enough to scrub floors when I fished $30 out of a dustbin not 5 feet away from him."
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Comment About Game Trailers :
It is Unfortunate, I think we've seen WAY too much in the trailers/interviews, and most of that potential has already been spoiled ( effectively, Infinite will be a 'sequel' to the Trailers ). Oh, there will be the game to play, and scenery to gawk at (for a while), but a huge chunk of the 'new' experience it might have been is gone.
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Something I noticed with the last several trailers : That many of your opponents are faceless ( in a 1910 version of a Starwars Stormtrooper outfit - canvas and armor suits with heads covered ) .
For the previous games, the Splicers most often were murderous mutants so were fair game, and in other games you have Aliens or Nazis to slaughter.
In Infinite, they were mostly 'normal people', some still WERE trying under orders to kill you, the invader, so were mandated to allow returning fire against. With THAT gunning down civilians aspect, they may have been attempting to minimize that, by further removing the opponents humanity. They spray alot of fire at you to make sure you know they are an enemy, and so making it OK to slaughter them in turn.
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Politics, the original extremist/contrived pretend 1900 'America', seems to have been expanded with the plot first changed to have a huge religious cult faction. The newest theme is something about 'Thought Experiments' tenuously connected to Quantum Physics. Unfortunately that in turn makes anything you see questionable to relate to anything real.
With all the conflicting content in the trailers, who knows what is actually to be in the game, besides alot of shooting. 
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" Irrational was a developer where there are a lot of great artists and sound designers, and Levine was obviously kind of a visionary (of a sort), but nobody there had any real critical capacity to ask questions about things, point out flaws and holes so they can be fixed, that sort of thing. I also get the sense that Levine, for all his prestige, really is not a very good designer outside of envisioning settings and characters. Infinite, to me, feels like an attempt to be intellectual and artistic but without any of the knowledge, talent or wit to really back it up. Every time it tries something interesting it is always brought down by more 'videogame shit.' "
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"I really loved the original atmosphere from the first 2 games, but didn't care for the atmosphere in infinite. I don't know if it was the setting, or the game mechanics, but infinite just didn't give me the "bioshock" vibe I had playing the first 2."
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"Contemporary anti-racism in art is a universal middlebrow supplement - It makes anything more socially esteemed and, at the least, wards off critics from kicking the tires before giving the ideological thumbs-up. The game would dig through a shitpile for a soggy corn kernel of respectability and video game critics want to dive face first in to help."
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"The same failure to integrate narrative and gameplay that plagued BioShock, as BioShock made money so they copied the formula. It was another generic shooter that happened to be set in a cool environment, nothing more."
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"The game suffers from arbitrary shooting syndrome "
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"I find this "Vigors" thing really ... out of place. In B1 Plasmids was legit because it is linked to the plot, but in B:I it is just forcing it on you. What? You just fucking DRINK it and you'll be able to cast mind control and fireballs? And they're even giving these drinks for free in fairs? "
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"Really, you could kill off Booker by just getting a bottle of rat poison, sticking a fancy name on it, and putting it on display in front of him."
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Jebus Save us all. This game looks shit. Did they really fool retards with blooming and blurring this shit all over? It is fucking hideous. You can't even turn it off in the option menu. I think they were aware that after shutting this graphics shit down this game would look worse than Oblivion. Low res everywhere, shit copy-pasted models everywhere.
The first hour they force us to passively walk through the corridor they called "a city", where you can't interact with shit, only see few posters and you grab all the money and apples you can find. Apparently, noble citizens (with such fancy names like "MALE CITIZEN 1", "FEMALE CITIZEN 2", "POLICEMAN 1") don't give a fuck you're robbing their shop in front of them. Stealing all the money, searching in trashbins, bumping all the time into people doesn't seem to interest them. It seems they rehashed BioShock storyline and setting all the way, with tasty "social commentary" that causes hipsters and popamole crowds to get wet at this title, just to show that they dig into "2deep4u" stuff. 
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"I wasn't impressed with BioShock Infinite. Gorgeous visuals yes, but just too twee and the gameplay left me cold. Give the claustrophobic, chill-inducing interior and the maniacal screams of splicers in Rapture anyday."
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"It walks aimlessly through many themes and it fails to deliver on anything. They try to hide mediocrity by throwing mountains of shiney polished shit towards the player and it works for a while. But then the shit starts to pile and soon the emptiness of the game design is apparent. The game fails to deliver on its potential. So much money was wasted for this."
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"The game capitalize on cretinous cliches : segregated society, all religious people are nuts, capitalism is exploitation ... blablabla. This game is crafted for wannabe hipsters infused with inculture and emotional confusion."
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"If you could have flown about on steam powered wings it might have been a truly visionary game. To climb on and soar among the towers of that floating city. Instead you got another ordinary shooter game, couched in dyslexic technobabble, with levels of endlessly repetitive massshooting sprees, and some soppy storyline wedged in-between."
(( They couldn't do any decent '3D' movement in their FloatyShit(tm) world because they cannot handle the Player freedom it would require, and require far more detailed props which the Player might see/interact-with close up. ))
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"In the end no transgression from the invisible corridor is allowed. Not even the trendy multi-colored endings. There is only one ending for an infinite number of universes. Levine fails to comprehend his own work. A hack with too much publicity."
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"I've just replayed the entire series from start to finish and Infinite seemed like a completely different franchise. I found the game lacked direction at times and a lot of the game consisted of walking around. Stunning visuals but there was hardly enough action. Unlike the previous 2 games where there was action in every corridor. I have not played a game like Bioshock since its creation."
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The Proposed Infinite game was really about what mighta been with racism and americanism.
Morphed. All that interview explanations ( latter parts of the promotional campaign they spent millions on ) about "real" science stuff that was to be in the game which was really just salesman rubbish.
(( Faux (fake) america, science, religion, technology, history, social understanding ... Really just a regurgitated 'pretty' wrapper for a mediocre game, produced overbudget and overtime, and a mishmosh of pretentious ideas and bad interpretations. ))
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Statement : "Ken Levine may have some talent in story writing" 
Comment : "When and where was this ? I'm a big fan of BioShock ( not Infinite, because it was straight garbage on every level ), but the first game is about a cartoon 1920s gangster who lives in an underwater city and wants to kill a guy who skimmed Atlas Shrugged and thought it was cool, and he does this by pretending to be a cartoon Irishman and arranging for a typical video game protagonist to run through town. It has okay moment-to-moment writing, and incredibly good environmental design and atmosphere, but the actual narrative of the game's dumb as hell. "
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The story... BioShock was about a city underneath the ocean but that was at least somewhat believable. You might be able to believe in that, but a city floating in the clouds? My first gut reaction to that was the same one I'm having now despite the fact that I convinced myself otherwise. I told myself that I probably would like it just as much as bioshock 1 even though its setting is beyond stupid but I was wrong. The game is just not believable. There are several plot holes and inconsistencies that ruin the experience.
And Elizabeth... I knew all along that a permanent NPC tagging along the entire game would ruin it and she does. She never shuts up and she gets in the way when you're trying to run somewhere. I don't care if she has hundreds of lines of dialogue because she points out obvious crap and I don't care about her. I feel like I want infinite to be about me and my exciting adventure in the floating city, but instead it is about this annoying character's feelings all the way through. Her behavior is disgustingly predictable. First she likes you, then she goes through an omg I hate you phase, and spazes out and knocks your character out (because you're too stupid to handle yourself even though you're capable of slaughtering 500 enemies...)
I really don't understand why are people so overwhelmed by this game. Not even the graphics are that stellar. It is such a clever ruse, all that bloom, fog and light shafts are well placed to cover poor models and textures in general. Next thing is horrible collision zones, at first it was not a big deal but it became more and more annoying.
I bought this game mainly for the story and characters, but it is not good, and are mix up of several clichés with several ups and downs. The enemy AI is quite poor and you will see big number of enemies stucked in some obstacle. There is also that unpleasant fact that this game embrace only checkpoint saves. Also difficulty is pretty low i cannot even imagine how easier the game could get on lower difficulties.
There are no amazing villains like Andrew Ryan or Fontaine, or Shodan. No. Instead you're supposed to fear and respect an old dude with a beard. Oh and he's a racist. Wow, let's just hit all of the stereotypical bad guy traits on the checklist. So yeah, if he's that generic and he's supposed to be the antagonist, yawn-o-rama.
This thing is just an easy copy paste of bioshock with a much weaker generic story in the sky instead of under the water. It is not believable, it is not interesting, scary or heart wrenching, it is just boring. And that is the worst sin a game can commit.
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 "The Sound Of Bullshitt" -lyrics 
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CONTINE ON PLAYER_COMMENTS_ABOUT_BIOSHOCK_INFINITE_2
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