There are plenty on the Internet, better writers than I am, better gamers than I am, who remarked how Bioshock Infinite's political commentary aged badly, while being pretty bad to begin with. I won't go against them - saying the oppressed's violent revolution is just as bad as the oppressor's violent repression is, in today's lingo, "pretty fucking sus" - and I won't go too in depth either. I will, instead, go straight for the take:

Bioshock Infinite's gameplay aged even worse than its politics. The game itself thinks so little about the person holding the controller, it can't trust them on anything. Can't be trusted to aim a ball. Can't be trusted to protect a companion. Can't be trusted to map their way through. Can't be trusted to even fuck up, for death is largely inconsequential. In that sense, it is a product of its time in the truest sense of the term: Bioshock Infinite took all the wrong lessons from the past, and the future it envisioned was rejected by the developers who came after.

Even the act of shooting and moving does not work: the best way to enjoy the game is to barely interact with it in the first place. That means sniper rifle and handgun combo (in case enemies get too close), and every arena resumes itself as finding a good place and killing the faceless horde before they can get even near you. Everything else is simply not enjoyable.

I recommend you do not play this game.

I realize sticking another fork in this thing is like pressing the target on the clown dunk tank with your hand, but honestly? I'm not interested in how agreeable or not its politics are (I majored in media studies; if I threw out everything with regressive politics, I'd like maybe a hundredth of what I do).

Instead I have to wonder, as a game in the most stripped-down sense, what the hell there is to like here? Guns that feel like spitball shooters? Vertical elements that make zero sense in the context of the setting and add nothing to the level design? Level design itself comprised of shooting galleries where the AI makes a beeline for the most opportune spot to get swiss cheese'd? Powers that are completely interchangeable and serve no practical utility in combat whatsoever? An upgrade system that makes no sense? Awkward melee combat that feels like hitting a balloon? An AI companion that alternates between facilitating half-baked gameplay gimmicks and appearing from a pocket dimension during firefights to play the game for you? Character models that look like plastic Christmas lawn ornaments? A world where every area feels like a pre-set-up amusement park attraction? What? What's here? What was there to praise in the first place even before the question of politics came into play?

A good core gameplay loop mired by a series of terrible writing decisions. The first 15% is pretty fun, pretty solid. Setting up a lot of good ideas and being a decent enough edition to the bioshock franchise. Then it starts to slowly decline until the piss-poor ending. Terrible fuax-intellectual "What if the poor people were evil too" story beats, some weird statements about race and capital S "Society". Then there are the DLCs, which I believe is what was the final blow that killed the Bioshock series. A completely unnecessary and unfortunate collage of half baked ideas. I could only recommend this if you're absolutely determined to experience the whole of the bioshock series. Otherwise you're better off looking at the concept art and making up a game in your head, it would be leagues more satisfying than the real thing.

I liked this so much when it dropped, recently replayed it and ended up extremely soured on it. Most of Bioshock's, and by extension System Shock's, DNA is gone and replaced with a narrative that's too tame and gameplay too simple. There are some great things here, the anachronistic music, the world design, Songbird's design, but a lot of it ends up mired in social commentary the game doesn't have the balls to really dig into. All that said I'd play another game in Columbia, maybe one far more decayed and mired in conflict like Rapture was, but I'm chalking this one down as one of the biggest disappoints of its generation.

This game is a disappointing mess at best and a complete failure at worst. I won't go into full detail as to why. But after i loved the first Bioshock and even the 2nd was decent with what followed to be some of the greatest expansions, Levine messed up big time with the 3rd title.
The writing is a pretentious mess and the story is all over the place, if it was more fast paced i would have declared it a trainwreck. Characterization the feels so lackluster and uninspiring gameplay which is the opposite of what the first Bioshock did.
Its a mess of a game, and one of the most overrated games ever made.

The racism allegory in the first half of the game is handled super awkwardly, to the point of being actually racist, and the second part of the game with its quantum mechanics is confusing not because it's intelligent but because it's obtuse. Furthermore, that whole ordeal regarding quantum mechanics and time travel directly conflict with the game's earlier message and intention, making the final product extremely uneven and thematically inconsistent. The twist is also poorly explained and executed.

This is a game that attempted to be shocking and unconventional, yet as shown by the widespread adoration given to it by the mainstream gaming press (undeservingly), it clearly failed. Compare the reception this game had to actually shocking games like Pathologic, and it's clear that in spite of its lofty ambitions to become a part of true art, it's just another piece of soulless, corporate, bland mass-market kitsch. With bad writing and storytelling to boot.

In fact, the story is so horrendous that the (admittedly very fun) gameplay would itself make a better game if it didn't come packaged with any story at all. I could see this game be a decent time-waster if it was just the shooting gameplay with none of the awful story bundled in, but given the prerogative towards enjoying the gameplay is waddling through hours of murky word vomit, the only sensible use for this game is to serve as fuel for the nearest dumpster bin.

Overall Rating: 1/5 (Dumpster Fire)