I have not read this thread, nor do I intend to but here are my impressions after having played the game : What a shame.
It does start out great. I will remember the first hour the most fondly ; it was spent looking at stuff in Columbia, the posteres, the newspapers headlines, listening to people talk. The art was indeed beautiful and I hoped the game would stay like that for the whole duration of the game. Hell, I een had read messages in a forum calling it "Not a FPS" "exploration based". Surely I was wrong about this being merely a corridor shooter !
Everything turned sour after the first gunfight. Goodness me, I am not sure what went wrong with the fighting mechanics but it felt incredibly off . The pacing was too fast, ennemies appear out of nowhere because of that rail system, everything is bloomy and you can hardly see, sometimes they shoot at you at an incredible distance, the handyman is incredibly annoying and that damn ghost near the end...
The game is great when it's not shooting at things. Sadly, it's half the game. This is a game that is actually more enjoyable in the easy mode because the only thing worth it is the ride ; see the environments, enjoy the story, it's the only thing that counts. The mindless violence distracts you of the actual beauty that the artists of Irrational have created.
The main fundamental flaw of the game is its own genre : Columbia and the story of Elizabeth and Booker shouldn't have been a FPS. It should have been either a first person adventure game or a RPG. Maybe something akin to Deus Ex. It should have focused more on exploration, dialog, and story. It should have known how to slow down the space of the action a bit more often ; it should have taken time to add depth to a story and a universe that was begging for it.
Instead, they went the easy way ; they focused on the action, they focused on the part that sucked and ignored the part that was actually good.
This is what is wrong with Mainstream high budget games. What irrationnal did was sadly the only way for them to break even financially ; because everyone is a fucking moron and they needed the CoD crowd appeal, so you can even hardly blame for this.
Once again, I do blame the players and their lack of education. Bioshock Infinite is a good game, even though the gameplay sucks and the plot is predictable, it is quite a good game. Sadly, it could have been an awesome game, a great game, a groundbreaking cult game. It won't be, because it was targeted at fucking morons.