So after my brother had a gander at the game (twice), I decided I was going to kick him off the couch and sink a few hours into the game myself.
My thoughts at the moment are that I'm not really seeing the magic right now. I'm sure as time goes on things will change; to me the game feels like a real
marathon, the subject material seems simple enough, but I find myself unable to play it for hours like I did for Tomb Raider. I can appreciate many things about Infinite - the sound direction and music is phenomenal and the setting warms my cockles a lot more than Rapture did all those years back. Elizabeth, as many people have said time and time again, is a shining example of great character design and expression. She matches the cartoonish and outlandish world of Columbia excellently with her Pixar-like facial expression and slightly exaggerated physical expression, conveys emotions excellently with an excellent voice actor to back it all up. For me her A.I is indeed great, she doesn't get in the way, gives health and salt regen and ammunition on occasion, etc., but I attribute that less to the developers being brilliant masterminds and more to them being
not stupid. So the game warps her behind me most of the time whenever combat happens and doesn't put her in my way when I'm trying to aim down the sights? That's cool, I guess. Okay.
In other words, I enjoy it but I'm not sufficiently wowed by it to gush as much as other people have. Which I suppose could summarise most of my feelings about the game!
I don't care much for Booker. Throughout the whole thing there feels like a whole lot of cryptic bullshit being thrown at me without any explanation for exactly what or why my player character is being accused of everything. Some of it can be easily attributed to the gobbledygook religious extremism of Columbia, others pertain specifically to Booker's backstory that either he
conveniently forgets (Huh? A.D? I SUDDENLY NOTICED THIS THING ON MY HAND WHAT THUH.) or the game just won't tell us (at times where many characters involved seem to
already know) for the purposes of structured narrative expression. I don't mind the intent behind the mystery, per se - a lot of it does help to drive me on to continue playing the game - but just once I would appreciate having the game straight up explain a point of backstory to me when some plot point is addressed, without having to slog through several hours of heavily prosaic conversation. You know, just for a change in pace.
tl;dr, I had a lot of "what the fuck are you talking about? What the fuck do you mean? Does anyone in this fucking place give a straight answer to anything?"
As an aside, there were some voxophones here and there that I feel would have been better used incorporated directly into the story, but I'm not enough of an expert on game design to say how exactly that could be implemented. Just opinions (as is most of this post, for that matter)
The backtracking and exploration of Infinite's world is much more enjoyable than most other games that do it, but I still think that Infinite has some gosh-darn pacing issues. There's a sense of wonderment going between A to B but personally there are some sections (especially early on in the game) where I felt like skipping most of the world and just reaching my objective. But then given this game's habit of dumping fairly important enlightening plot details in miscellaneous
bits located in innocuous corners of the level I go nuts just wasting ages walking around and looking in corners to figure out what exactly the fuck is going on in this place. So it's partially to do with me being a dum dum, but also partly due to there just being long stretches of empty space from A to B probably designed to hold just the right amount of distance for Booker and Elizabeth to have a conversation starting from A and finishing just at the end of B. And then there's just sections of walking around and establishing the world (and its corresponding dimensions). Maybe Irrational just had so much they were really, really enthusiastic on showing to the player so they just had to fit it in somehow, and I enjoy the tangible sense of bigness that some other open-ish games (Deus Ex: HR especially comes to mind) might be lacking in, but I felt that for such a linear game as Infinite the amount of embellishment and the "look at this! Over there, clouds! and those political and religious undertones!" was a tad too self-indulgent for my tastes.
Not much to say about the combat for me, it was alright but (especially compared to the original Bioshock's) nothing exceptional as a first-person shooter.
I don't like being a grump with petty gripes and I hate to be a debbie downer on the thread, but you know. I wanted to get as hype as other people and I just didn't, unfortunately. It's still a great game, though.
