Yes, there are a few too many sequences where you basically ‘hold forward’ as crazy shit happens all around you, or even seizes control for action-scene moments where you really should’ve been in control yourself, and in my Immersive-Sim soul I too prefer the more systems-driven play of the earlier Bioshocks, but a lot of this is pretty inoffensive FPS design by today’s standards. Now, to be clear, I’m one of those immersive sim enthusiasts and chat about the weird genre all the time, but I do think that can come with its fair share of snobbery. Granted, it ticks the ‘Bioshock’ boxes of critiquing American utopianism in an absurdly imaginative setting, but it’s clearly a far more linear, scripted and ‘stagey’ game, which has led to a fair bit of pushback from Immersive Sim enthusiasts who loved Bioshock for its lineage in System Shock. I’d rank Infinite up there with Dishonored, released just a few months prior, as one of the games to lead FPS games into the modern era.īioshock Infinite’s greatest curse is probably being a Bioshock game. Having last played Bioshock in 2014, I thought its combat would’ve aged worse than it has, but not only blow that of its predecessors out of the water (and, uhhh, into the sky?) crucially, it anticipates the more mobile, stylised FPS gunplay of subsequent shooters like Wolfenstein: The New Order, DOOM, and the whole indie Boomer Shooter scene that’s still *ahem* booming today.īioshock Infinite has been derisively described as a ‘theme park,’ but man what a lavish theme park it is.Ĭertainly, for the kind of balls-to-the-wall wave-based combat it offers, Infinite would’ve benefitted from some kind of strafe-dash maneuver, as well as a sliding crouch-dodge to make grabbing those guns feel a bit slicker, but it already does so many things that back in 2013 untethered FPS combat from the horizontal plane that the genre had been stuck on since the days of Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena. Seriously, did Rick and Morty adventure’s in the multiverse ever come under this kind of scrutiny? I’ve been playing the game myself these past couple of weeks, so, as something of a counterpoint to our Elijah’s sizzling critique of the game, I’d like to make a staunch defence of Bioshock Infinite, which remains a gods-damned blast to play, with a fun forward-driving story that’s much easier to enjoy if you a) just stop comparing it to Bioshock, and b) play it without Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time open next to you so that you can unpick its pulpy take on multiverse theory.
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