seems like it wants very badly to be more than it is. Makes gestures at grander ideas but never fully explores them, and instead sits in the "comfortable" space of shooting guys when it could more fully embrace its immersive sim inspirations. When it makes a good aesthetic choice, it does it very well, however, and the core gameplay loop, while perhaps uninspired, is relatively fun.
EDIT: Giving this one an extra half-star for being boldly ugly. Always gotta appreciate a game that goes out of its way to look messed up and weird.

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 really wish i enjoyed this game as much as everyone else does (or people said i would).

for a game described to me as "metroidvania with precision platforming meets Dark Souls," it really comes out feeling like less than a sum of those parts. in terms of the world design and exploration, the game is great at matching the joy of breaking into every tiny crevasse to find secrets and lore that Dark Souls does. the characters and lightly revealed lore that's steeped in mystery is great. the platforming is serviceable, but whenever the game decides to flip the switch to try and turn into Super Meat Boy (sometimes quite literally with buzzsaws) it feels very disjointed and out of place.

the combat (mainly by way of the bosses) by comparison feels like a chore. even by the end of the game when i had gotten a lot better at maneuvering in fights, most of the boss fights were not engaging or challenging beyond "hope you get the good pattern that allows you to heal". in addition to this, why not be more generous with benches in regards to boss placements?

it's small decisions like this that continued to baffle me as time went on. you get more movement options as the game unfolds, but trekking between areas connected by stags still feels arduous enough to dissuade me from wanting to explore more. i enjoy the lore of the stags, but would fast travelling between benches break the game so much to prevent it from being included?

it's things like this that makes me feel like the game is bloated. this may be a problem of playing the game now that there's 4 extra content patches (give players a way to play the launch version pleaseeeee), but there's just so much in the game that feels like Content For Content's Sake. the game like a love letter to the old metroidvanias the developers loved that has been weighed down by AAA games' addiction to More. i can see the mechanics (literally) taken 1-to-1 from Super Metroid, but i don't see the tightly crafted world, simplicity, or elegance of it. i see a checklist of things to waste time doing rather than a curated experience.