“Why do people say “grow some balls”? Balls are weak and sensitive. If you wanna be tough, grow a ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°). Those things can take a pounding.”

bioshock infinite

wow did i say bioshock infinite is one of the best games ever i’m sorry that was when i was 25% through the game, you know, during the period when it was consistent

i’m not getting all of the hype over this game, especially the reviews like adam sessler’s where half of it was him flaunting the “atmosphere” that only lasted for the first hour of gameplay and then was never revived.

i can’t comprehend how boring the combat is, no seriously it is quite possibly the most monotonous thing in any videogame i have played in recent months. after about an hour or two it literally just a pain to even get through, or at least that’s how it was on hard mode when i played it

speaking of hard mode, this game is screaming artificial difficulty. i’m not saying it should come up with a new difficult mechanic or something, but jesus christ, they didn’t even try to make it truly difficult. the only difference is that your guns are nerfed to hell and back and do 20x times less damage than normal, and the enemies all have extremely higher amounts of health for no reason other than to just bore you to death. the reviving system is way too easy on the player because you can pretty much die as many times as you want with like 20 coins taken away each time (money is excessive in this game). the ammo is way too cheap, making you never have to worry about running out of ammo.

back to the combat, it is complemented (in a bad way) with the horrible enemies and lack of enemy variants that this game offers. the basic soldier aka 99% of the enemies you kill are stupid and hide in the worst hiding spots ever during battle. not to mention there is a long and boring battle every 5 minutes. but don’t worry, there are a good 4ish more enemy types, including the diverse appearances of:

guy made of birds with a coffin strapped to his back (zealot)
heavy guy with explosives
very heavy guy who explodes and barely damages you (firemen)
very very heavy guy who is actually not difficult at all but rather a massive annoyance who takes way too long to kill (handymen)

another part of the combat are the vigors, which are just renamed plasmids from the first two bioshocks. these serve absolutely no purpose in columbia and are there for no reason at all. they have horrible placement in the game, especially the last three which are all bunched near each other. the problem with that is that by the time you reach them, you’re already accustomed to the older vigors and will probably find it difficult to adapt to the newer ones. also, possession (the first vigor) is a great transition into the inconsistency of this game.

this game suffers from inconsistency on so many levels. to start, the first vigor, possession, is required to proceed through the first area. you need to use it on a vending machine to take control of it and have it give you tickets into the next place. you use it in the middle of a huge crowd and nobody cares at all. however, if you use it at all in any other place (keep in mind this is the most harmless of all of the vigors), the people around you will freak out and a battle will start, and i’ve already explained the monotony of the battles… also, like i was saying earlier about how the atmosphere is ditched after the first hour, that’s another prime example. you barely ever focus on the atmosphere because it’s either extremely vague and unlike the beginning, or it’s uninteresting (as if there was any atmosphere anyway, you see the same themes of racism and bad government throughout the entire game and nothing else). all of the propaganda that you see around the town in the beginning is almost completely gone, with the exception being a few posters hanging around and some protests.

there are a lot of poor design choices, too. the possession in public thing and vigor placements are good examples of this. but there are a lot more. for instance, there is no self-saving option; it is all auto saved. this would usually be a good thing, except the checkpoints are at least 10 minutes away from each other, and you only get to those checkpoints if you continue to the next objective. this is horrible in a game that encourages exploration and is littered with secrets and collectibles, because if you wander off of the objective path to explore and need to leave but don’t get to the next objective, at least 15+ minutes of exploration is gone, and you need to do it again. also, sometimes you can steal from people and start a battle with it, and sometimes you can completely take everything from a person and it won’t matter. i say sometimes because the steal-able items are in random places, and for a game where the looting consists of mashing the F key on everything that blinks, this is just annoying and unnecessary. also, the food/item system has a useless feature in which some items will increase health but will also decrease salts (stuff needed to use vigors), and some items will decrease health but increase salts. as said before, if i’m mashing F on everything, why would i pay attention to which specific item i’m picking up? it’s just pointless and shouldn’t be there.

the story is probably my favorite part of this game, despite a pretty predictable plot twist in the middle of it. i’m not going to go into detail because of spoilers, but there’s one part of the story/gameplay that i felt was absolutely useless and took away from the experience entirely. lady comstock. oh my god this character and boss battle is so stupid and useless and annoying and everything is wrong with it.basically, in a game that centers around multi-universe travel and social hardships, they decided that one of the very few boss battles should be a god damn ghost. it completely ruins any serious attitude toward the plot and removes you from the experience because of how laughably out of place it is. her battles are also extremely long (again, at least on hard mode) and boring. by the way, i said battles. as in you have to fight the same boring and endless boss three times. it is a horrible design choice and it seriously made me want to stop playing the game.

by the time i finished the third battle with her, i didn’t even want to play anymore. the only i reason i did finish it was because i heard that the ending was good and because i wanted to watch reviews without worrying about spoilers. oh, and because i realized that i could skip the boring battles by changing the difficulty to easy and killing everyone in one shot, allowing me to rush to the end.

the ending was actually really good in my opinion and surprised me. it basically makes you realize that most of the things during the game were foreshadowing the twist at the end. if only they could have handled the mid-game plot twist the same way.

all in all, i liked this game, but calling it game of the year is a huge overstatement. to me, it was just above average. nothing very special.

6.5/10