Bioshock Infinite. It's shit.
- 80% of enemies are hitscan
- Regenerating shields
- 2 weapon limit.
- Insufferably stupid SJW setting (muh racism) dominates the first half.
- Time travel/dimensional travel crap
+/- you travel with waifu bait most of the time
It's your standard CoD shooter with regenerating health most of the time. They try to add a bit of difficulty with melee enemies that rush you. It's honestly depressing and a bit disgusting being forced to kill endless hordes of what by all accounts are normal, everyday humans who are the city's police, especially when its a guy with a billy club charging across a WW1-level warzone. That kind of suicidal ridiculousness makes no sense. Splicers were mad ADAM-junkies. System shock had man/alien hybrids and mutants. Bioshock Infinite mostly just has normal dudes trying to stop you destroying their city. Most enemies are hitscan so you do the normal thing where you crouch and peek out only a degree at a time till you can see 1 enemy, head shot them, then get back into cover if you get hit. I played on "1999 difficulty", supposedly for the true epic gamers who have played System Shock 2, and Bioshock Infinite apparently thinks that System Shock 2 worked like this. There's not really any grenades or anything that regular enemies do to force you to stop this strategy, only a sprinkling of melee enemies who run straight at you and get mowed down. So hug that cover forever. Most of the difficulty comes from the fact that past mid range virtually everything gets doused in incredibly cinematic fog with lights shining on it and bloom and everything that makes it very hard to see enemies' heads (or enemies at all) whilst of course you can always get shot with perfect accuracy and have to use the directional damage indicators to pin down where the enemy is.
The stronger enemies are used fairly rarely. There's a guy in a fire mech suit. He doesn't do much different from normal enemies except with a lot more health and he'll make a suicidal rush at you and explode when near death. There's a Crow enemy who teleports and is overall trivial and rare to fight. There's a Mech that looks like George Washington with a minigun (pretty cool), but for the most part its just an ammo sink that doesn't really do much more damage or act much more threatening than a regular enemy. There's heavily armored guys with heavy weapons who are probably the biggest threat (they look a lot like regular enemies but have much more HP and its hard to hit their heads). And finally there's a giant guy in a bigger mech suit (handyman) who... is so rare I don't really know what all they do, but it hurts and they have a bunch of health to go through.
The vigors are mostly just renamed plasmids. Possession converts a weak enemy to your side for a time, after which they kill themselves. It has an AoE strike version that works pretty well. Fire is basically a grenade which is kind of weak, but it stuns and hard counters to crow guys. Crows are basically reskinned bees. Don't really find them that useful generally. Lightning can chain stun large groups, greatly increase the amount of damage you do to them, and is very cheap, an absolutely superb vigor. It works on everything except the handyman and will keep enemies still while you effortlessly headshot a group. Bull rush stuns and levitates enemies so I guess its kind of light lightning except worse. Charge is basically the Mass Effect 2 ability where you teleport infront of an enemy and recharge your shields, but its pretty suicidal to use. There's a vigor to push and pull enemies which is OK when you're on airships or near ledges.
Elizabeth is the waifu bait. She's completely invincible and runs around finding health and mana potions to throw at you, and helping you find money. You can't actually carry health or mana potions yourself now for some insane reason, so basically she is the one who seems to carry 1 or 2 with her most of the time and will graciously let you have one a few seconds after you are low (which sucks if you die in the meantime). It's... fine, I guess. I do like how she acts in non-combat scenarios, often running ahead a bit to look at something or sitting/leaning against something to take a break while you are looking around. They did take one of my advices for Bioshock 1 and made the entire upgrade system based around money, with vigors and weapon upgrades costing a very hefty amount, so exploration feels like something that is constantly rewarding. There's also a system where you find lockpicks that can later be used to open doors that generally hold great stuff like max shield/life/vigor bar upgrades or large cash payouts, which is neat.
The levels are almost entirely linear. You don't even get a map, presumably the linearity of the levels would be too embarassing to show the players. There is a lot of verticality along with skylines that you can ride along to get to places (and fire, but not use vigors from). Its more annoying than anything else though. The enemies are able to utilize the quick, evasive, flanking movement of riding along skylines much more than the player is because the AI is omnipotent and always knows where you are despite your cool maneuver while when an enemy flanks you you are notified of this fact by losing all your shields and half your health almost immediately. So combat tends to devolve into finding a corner of the map that can't be flanked or retreating to the entrance of an area to use it as a choke point. The special heavy enemies that break up this formula (crow guy, handyman) aren't really used in conjunction with regular enemies because it'd be suicidally difficulty running across open terrain to get away from them while under fire from regular enemies. I feel the game could have been much improved if this wasn't the case. Lower overall enemy damage a bit, especially hitscanners, allow players to stock up on health/mana like before, lower some enemy health amounts a bit so it doesn't take 30 crits from fully upgraded weapons to kill shocked enemies, and you can start throwing more of the big boss enemies into normal fights.
What good can I say about the setting? Uhh... the architecture looks nice and the first 15 minutes of the game give you hope that you're exploring something really cool. A city in the clouds built in the early 20th century around a religious founder where everything is clean and shiny and every resident is selected to be a moral and just person... and somehow everyone non-white is a slave and every white person is racist (except the main character and Elizabeth, despite the former being a rather horrible person with an awful backstory and the latter living in a cage her entire life with little human contact). The game should really have a "This is what SJWs actually believe" caption like South Park did when they spent several minutes going through Scientology beliefs (
https://vimeo.com/272691039). Just plaster that on the screen for the entire first half of the game. You even have to go through what is basically a museum of American racism at one point (Boxer Rebellion suppression was entirely justified btw). Naturally you end up being forced to join the communist resistance, led by a strong black female. But the communists become enemies about half way through at which point the setting becomes bland (an improvement, but its still bland). The Irish are also slaves because they needed white people for you to kill when the communists become enemies, because I guess the game doesn't want you to be able to kill non-whites?
Everything in the story is completely dependent on one character: A woman/man (depending on what your reference dimension is) who finds magic particles that can bridge dimensions and meets themselves as a man/woman in another dimension. Now, I'm sure those two fuck constantly, and bridging a dimension specifically to fuck the opposite sex version of you is a goal I can completely get behind, but then they basically create the whole city for the main villain (Comstock) and do all the work for him to make a perfect city among the clouds and advance all this technology so that they have personal shields, robots, etc. Then Comstock kills them and they become basically gods that can go anywhere and do anything, but decide specifically to select you to stop him because otherwise his evil plan will lead to New York being destroyed. These two characters make everything about the city feel unearned. Andrew Ryan was literally just a normal, rich dude who built Rapture to be his vision of a perfect city (the same way Elon Musk is just a rich dude who wants to go to space). Basically everything fantastical about Bioshock 1 was merely a consequence of the society. Comstock on the other hand was handed Columbia on a platter and neither him nor anyone basically did anything worthwhile except import slaves to... scrub floors? There's just no relevant usage for slavery in this society yet they do it anyone because US bad communism good. The whole setting is a disgrace to America and its creator should be shot for treason.
Oh well, back to the Bioshock 2 DLC.
