An analysis of why Bioshock Infinite is incredibly overrated.

[surpriselol]

First of all let me begin by saying this game is good, but not great. It has a lot of polish that makes it seem good. Passable graphics, well designed mechanics, standard but enjoyable weapons and powers, excellent voice acting and interesting locales.

But if you dig just a little bit under the surface of this game, it falls apart. First of all, this is barely what I'd call a 'game'. It's more of an interactive story, much like the early Metal Gears (especially Metal Gear Solid 2) which are more story than game. Yes, there are guns and stealth and other 'game mechanics' but the fact is that those things are just there to primarily support the story of the game, not enhance fundamental gameplay. And this is the case with Bioshock. Yeah, there are enemies. Yeah, there are guns and vigors. But they feel forced and the vigors seem unnecessary relics of past Bioshocks. Why do the vigors exist in this world? There is no logic for them to be here. They make the world seem more unbelievable than add to the believability of an early 'colonial' floating city (already initially a difficult thing to sell). Even the enemies and weapons just seem kind of pointless; supporting roles in a game lead by a brash, overzealous story, which leads me to my next point.

One of the things modern video game script writers absolutely do not understand is subtlety. I think a lot of the time they struggle with implementing a story that works in tandem with the action in a way that will not only enhance the action, but reinforce it. One of the big problems with Infinite is that it bashes you over the head repeatedly with its anti-right wing, anti-colonialisation message to the point of comedy. There are valuable messages to be had here, but they're not terribly new in Western society, nor are they subtle in any conceivable way. Quite the opposite. At every possible opportunity this game is just pounding you with its 'this is good, this is bad' message and after about 5-6 hrs of playing this game I am totally sick of it. You know what? I GET IT IRRATIONAL GAMES. RACISM IS BAD. SEGREGATION IS BAD. WHITE SUPREMACY AND EUROCENTRISM IS BAD. Yes, we all know. If there was more to the overarching story than that it might be interesting but for the love of God I GET IT. Which brings me to my next point.

Booker and Elizabeth have a good relationship and this is a really good aspect of the game, but why in the world can she open tears? Was this added purely to add a cool factor to the game? Because honestly this doesn't add to the believability of this world, at all. First of all, if she hated being trapped in a tower for her entire life (and everyone would) then hey, guess what? YOU CAN OPEN A TEAR AND ESCAPE YOU KNOW. The fact she is still 'trapped' in that tower at her age is 100% baloney. I know that you can try to justify the story and explain it with reason in ways like 'maybe she just never found a tear she wanted to escape through' or 'maybe she was afraid to leave' but I just don't buy that at all.

Edit: After finishing the game I understand why she couldn't open any tear she wanted but it does not explain why she couldn't escape through one of the tears she *could* open. Somewhere in the tedious first half of the game she mentions she doesn't want to escape because of 'family' yet she has no family and talks endlessly about escaping. Towards the end she says she'd rather die than go back to the tower. None of this makes any sense.

And unfortunately it's all a little too hard to swallow for me. Columbia looks nice and it has interesting and well-designed locations, but the combat is average FPS fare. Gone are the days of laying traps with your plasmids and mini-turrets and preparing to fight a Big Daddy or hordes of splicers while you protect a little sister. Gone (most importantly) is the time and thought you'd put into these areas of combat and the choice that came with overcoming those obstacles. This doesn't exist in Infinite. One of the best things about the combat in earlier Bioshocks is completely absent here. You can put 0 thought into what you're doing and still easily come out ahead. Shoot things, use a vigor every now and then and you're done. And this is exacerbated by the fact that this game is too easy.

I am not a big FPS person. I don't play Call of Duty games or Battlefield, but I do enjoy 'themed' FPS, I guess you could say. I played the original Doom as a young teen, and Quake, and enjoyed both of those games and their sequels immensely. I enjoy FPS games that don't attempt to be straight up 'realistic world' shooters and that's purely an issue of subjective taste, but it's also the reason why I enjoyed the first two Bioshocks a lot. Having said all of that, I'd say I'm 'decent' at FPS games. Par for the course, not instantly headshotting from outside draw-distance by any means, but I'm decent.

I'm currently playing this game on Hard, and I have no idea why it's called Hard. For me, there is absolutely nothing 'hard' about this difficulty setting. Enemies die quickly, Crows and other advanced enemies really aren't that hard to dispose of, and ammo and currency is plentiful. Infinite on Hard is actually a substantial amount easier than Bioshock 2 on Normal. Which is a direct result of being overly obsessed with story-telling and not with gameplay. This unfortunately, leads me to my next point.

Like I said, I'm 5-6 hours into this game and I'm bored. The world isn't believable for me; there's no strategy in the combat (or at least, nothing at all relative to previous Bioshock games); I'm incredibly sick and tired of being slapped in the face with the overarching, brazen themes of the story and most of all: it's too easy. I'm bored with the story and the game (if you can call it that) itself. I'm bored with the combat. I'm bored with the seemingly pointless journys to ironically interestingly designed locations to be given one more piece of story and not an interesting, intelligently designed area of combat.

Will I finish the game? Sure. Will I care? Not at all.

[Yakama Joe]

nevermind

[kalcijs]

Manopla eredeti hozzászólása:

the title should be "An analysis of why I and a minority think Bioshock Infinite is incredibly overrated."

What minority are you talking about? There are many other threads like this on internet and game critic sites/blogs! You just wanna play ignorant! Take your time and read different reviews and notice that mostly mediocre score reviews have good analysis about the game! 10/10 kids just write "best game ever" and that's it!

[Dave Lister]

Yeah. I stopped reading when you said the game has passable graphics. Clearly you know nothing.

[Tusken GA]

Caelinus eredeti hozzászólása:

surpriselol eredeti hozzászólása:

No, my opinion doesn't make the game overrated, nor does your opinion make the game appropriately rated. I don't see the point in your post.

That is the point of my post. However this: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/bioshock-infinite

That does mean the game was appropriately rated. (The critic score, the user score is worthless due to mitigating circumstances.)

You opinion is in the minority by far, and therefore for the average person the game will be great. So it is appropriately rated. It is all statistics and metrics.

Welp, there went your argument.

You may not have noticed, but critical reviews have come under quite a bit of fire lately, and rightfully so. The credibility of these sources has been called into question by members of these sources themselves. Remember the Geoff Keighley Mountain Dew Controversy? How about the Free PS3 Giveaway Publicity stunt at the GMA's a while back?[beefjack.com]

How about the way the entire industry handled the ME3 controversy? That one is going to be a stain on the medium's history for years; it's perfect textbook material in the inevitable Video Game History course.

Citing professional reviews isn't just a fallacy; it's incredibly silly given the obvious state of the things.

[Caelinus]

Tuskan GA eredeti hozzászólása:

Caelinus eredeti hozzászólása:

That is the point of my post. However this: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/bioshock-infinite

That does mean the game was appropriately rated. (The critic score, the user score is worthless due to mitigating circumstances.)

You opinion is in the minority by far, and therefore for the average person the game will be great. So it is appropriately rated. It is all statistics and metrics.

Welp, there went your argument.

You may not have noticed, but critical reviews have come under quite a bit of fire lately, and rightfully so. The credibility of these sources has been called into question by members of these sources themselves. Remember the Geoff Keighley Mountain Dew Controversy? How about the Free PS3 Giveaway Publicity stunt at the GMA's a while back?[beefjack.com]

How about the way the entire industry handled the ME3 controversy? That one is going to be a stain on the medium's history for years; it's perfect textbook material in the inevitable Video Game History course.

Citing professional reviews isn't just a fallacy; it's incredibly silly given the obvious state of the things.

So *every* critic is obviously on the big game companies payroll.

When 100% of critics have a positive reaction to a game, it tends to be a good reason to accept said game as being good. Even if 50% of game reviewers are corrupt, that still means 100% of the non corrupt reviewers liked it.

Don't jump onto that bandwagon, even sites like RPS who are obviously not on any ones payroll either really liked the game (the Wot I thought) or thought it was a masterpiece (the article about a girl.)

Not everyone is corrupt, so don't accuse the entire industry of being so, because that IS a fallacy. There is nothing wrong with my argument.

[Stranger]

I'd say forget about it, these people are set in their ways and aren't looking for anyone to talk them out of it, that or just trolls.

[Zognar]

Just to point out that if 50% are corrupt, the remaining 50% are being truthful. This would end with 50% reliable reviews and a 50% valid overall score. Who would then go by such a system?
And "incredibly" overrated just means it's hard/impossible to validate it's overall general rating, with the general inclination that it has been rated too high, not that its rating was way off. So I agree with "incredibly" and leave the rest up to opinion.

[Tusken GA]

Caelinus eredeti hozzászólása:

Tuskan GA eredeti hozzászólása:

Welp, there went your argument.

You may not have noticed, but critical reviews have come under quite a bit of fire lately, and rightfully so. The credibility of these sources has been called into question by members of these sources themselves. Remember the Geoff Keighley Mountain Dew Controversy? How about the Free PS3 Giveaway Publicity stunt at the GMA's a while back?[beefjack.com]

How about the way the entire industry handled the ME3 controversy? That one is going to be a stain on the medium's history for years; it's perfect textbook material in the inevitable Video Game History course.

Citing professional reviews isn't just a fallacy; it's incredibly silly given the obvious state of the things.

So *every* critic is obviously on the big game companies payroll.

When 100% of critics have a positive reaction to a game, it tends to be a good reason to accept said game as being good. Even if 50% of game reviewers are corrupt, that still means 100% of the non corrupt reviewers liked it.

Don't jump onto that bandwagon, even sites like RPS who are obviously not on any ones payroll either really liked the game (the Wot I thought) or thought it was a masterpiece (the article about a girl.)

Not everyone is corrupt, so don't accuse the entire industry of being so, because that IS a fallacy. There is nothing wrong with my argument.

You based your argument on an aggregation of the industry. The 95 on metacritic.

How many 10 out of 10s came from corrupt publications? How do you think those affected the aggregate?

You dismissed the user review score because it conflicted with the professional review score but if even 20% of the publications were corrupt and gave the game a 10 out of 10 because they were paid to, the average score couldn't be trusted. It would be slanted by the corruption to say something that was not true.

Publications like RPS generally do good reviews but they are just one site and the review is just one person's opinion.

Because underneath all the corruption, there is a complete lack of critical thinking that is in fact pervasive of the entire industry. Exceptions exist, but almost the entire media suffers from it.

They believe that a review is just an opinion, which is factually inaccurate, and they review games based on this false assumption.

I don't trust the professional review SCORES anymore simply because of this fact. They don't average it, even though they could. They don't base their resulting score on anything concrete, even though they could. Their criticisms and praise aren't generally balanced, even though it should be.

The score itself is meaningless in a lot of ways because of this.

That's not even mentioning the overall trend of pushing to the top. Mass Effect 3 got 75 perfect scores and even fans that didn't mind the ending admit that isn't accurate. Tons of games are considered failures if they don't get a perfect score, which absolutely breaks the scoring system.

[Dreakon13]

Claiming this as an "analysis" of the game makes it sound like it isn't simply your opinion. This is where you lost me, unfortunately...

[GRUK]

Interesting.. lot of thought put in that surpriselol - I have to agree with you on a few of those points, but I guess at the end of the day, its down to the player.. what you want from a game. Everyone is different so you'll always get 'theres not enough shooting' to 'too much shooting'.

I see it as a evolution in gaming, its an immersion into a gaming world that we havent seen before in such detail. Let me back that up.. Tomb Raider (new one) - that tried.. but failed.. way too much watching and scripted button mashing. (still a good game tho)..

Here you have a full world, mostly not replicated - which console games do a lot to conserve memory, you might have to travel back and forth a bit.. but for most of it - your working your way through a new world.. that sorta makes sense. (for a floaty world!) - take a look at dishonored.. they tried.. but it still feels like small disjointed levels, not a mega-city. (again.. still a great game)

Take a look at the animations around you, they rarely repeat.. just about every person has a slighty different look and action. Assassins creed looks nice, till you take a good hard look and realise that the same cycle is being played out all along the street.

Distance.. for once its a game you can where you've been and where you are going, usually game programmers try to hide that as it involves too much processing power. (yes.. probably just a bitmap - but it helps keep the world in focus.

The AI, ok the bad guys arent too clever.. but Liz.. just watch her react to her surroundings, including animations - very clever, not seen it done to this degree before.

Sounds.. just take your time, listen to all the sounds and music that is playing in the background.. lot of thought been put into the blend, so much going on, just to make it a believable world. (Maybe I just like guessing the 80's tunes in the rips!)

Finally the graphics.. stunning!, I'm not playing this game in a hurry and just following the arrows, I'm walking about and finding the optional missions - just enjoying the artwork and design these guys have put into it.

For me it is a bit samey with the shooting.. but if thats what it takes for me to get further in the game, then thats what I'll do. End of the day.. shootem games are getting stale, there's not really too much more they can do with them, you pull out a gun - you shoot the guy.. and repeat.. This game at least tries to give you some extra options.

All-in-all.. for me - this game is a winner.. just my opinion! ;)

[GRUK]

Ohh.. just for the record - I always go with the metacritic user score.. average 8.9 from 2000+ gamers is good for me! ;)

[Rockhead Gaz]

I actually don't put much stock in numbers assigned to the worth of a game, critically, but generally, things like metacritic tend to give a pretty fair indication of the general consensus. The one problem I do see with them, is that often, a user review won't be a balanced account of a game. A lot of the time, they're either gushing with praise or lashing out poison, and nothing in between.

[Bite]

Rockhead Gaz eredeti hozzászólása:

I actually don't put much stock in numbers assigned to the worth of a game, critically, but generally, things like metacritic tend to give a pretty fair indication of the general consensus. The one problem I do see with them, is that often, a user review won't be a balanced account of a game. A lot of the time, they're either gushing with praise or lashing out poison, and nothing in between.

It's also common to see people go about like "I would give it an 7 or 8 out of 10, but since everyone is giving it a 10 I'm gonna give it a 1" I've seriously seen that on a few user reviews at Metacritic.

[Rockhead Gaz]

Bite eredeti hozzászólása:

Rockhead Gaz eredeti hozzászólása:

I actually don't put much stock in numbers assigned to the worth of a game, critically, but generally, things like metacritic tend to give a pretty fair indication of the general consensus. The one problem I do see with them, is that often, a user review won't be a balanced account of a game. A lot of the time, they're either gushing with praise or lashing out poison, and nothing in between.

It's also common to see people go about like "I would give it an 7 or 8 out of 10, but since everyone is giving it a 10 I'm gonna give it a 1" I've seriously seen that on a few user reviews at Metacritic.

Agreed. It's not uncommon for people to want to follow trends. The only real way for a person to form an opinion about anything is by experiencing it for themselves, and having the willingness to stick by their opinions.

[Just Gilbert]

I think the vigors is the same kind of technology as plasmids in bioshock 1. The whole idea of tares to other dimensions make such phenomena believable.