3/5 ★ – AllieN7's review of BioShock Infinite.

Such an absolutely frustrating experience, a game that completely drops the interesting world building and set up in the 2nd half, while exploring so many different ideas and themes that it never truly figures out what it’s trying to say or be, and just ends up being a complete mess. It pretty much has the exact opposite approach of it’s world and setting compared to the first two Bioshock games, a lot of the immersive and detail that fleshed out the world is missing and the game just feels like a shadow of what came before. Columbia looks great and the art style is fantastic, but when it’s simplified into the more traditional first person shooter style of gameplay with bullet sponge enemies and less interesting atmosphere, it just falls flat and never comes to life as much as Rapture does. There’s some really fun gameplay here, even with the streamlined and more fast paced action, I think BioShock Infinite is a lot of fun and offers some really good variety in terms of gameplay and level locations, though I really wish the skyhook was used a bit more. Elizabeth is a great aspect of the game, both from a story and gameplay standpoint, I love how she’ll stay out of the way during combat and throw useful items such as ammo, health, or coins. Obviously she was a pretty big deal in the landscape of gaming back in 2013 and I still think she’s utilized very well here, the dimensional tears she can pull during gameplay is pretty cool as well though I do wish a little more was done with it on the gameplay side. Overall, it’s just kinda a mess that never reaches the highs of the rest of BioShock or manages to be all that great when removed from the content of being part of a video game franchise. I think if I played this back in 2013 or a few years after release, I would have loved it, but time hasn’t been the kindest to this game. Very unfortunate, you can really tell there wasn’t all that much consistent direction during the development of this game and the final product really shows how many ideas they had, but never found a real balance for. I hope BioShock 4, whenever that comes out, manages to reignite that feeling of the older BioShock games.