BioShock: Infinite Released 149
kandelar writes with news that BioShock: Infinite has been released. It's the third major release in the series of BioShock first-person shooters, and it's available for Xbox 360, PS3, and Windows. The game is garnering good critical reception, for the most part. Rock, Paper, Shotgun said, "Infinite is a game ruled by artists at least as much as it is by its writers. It’s the ultimate answer to the question of whether art or technology is the most important part of creating a visually excellent game – Crysis 3 might have far more going on under the hood, but its uninspired paintjob makes it seem so dull compared to Infinite’s vaguely Pixar-esque fusion of the photoreal and the colourfully unreal." Ars' reviewer wrote, "Infinite's battle system doesn't wear out its welcome or weigh down the game's excellent pacing. Infinite avoids the problem of near-endless waves of identical enemies that plagues so many shooters these days. The bits of shooting action are spaced and timed to serve as gentle punctuation marks that break up the story rather than full stops that bring it to a grinding halt." However, RPS adds this criticism of the player's effect the plot: "Infinite’s a triumph in terms of fantasy-architecture spectacle and bringing superb flexibility to the modern rollercoaster shooter, but in other respects it’s a small step down from the player agency and even the singular aesthetic of BioShock."
Re:I've been playing it since yesterday. (Score:4, Informative)
Here's my complaints:
16:9 resolutions on a 16:10 monitor is bugged. Any 16:9 resolution you pick the game will stretch it out to 16:10.
Mouse sensitivity is screwed up as you say. One it is too sensitive and two it seems to move in y axis faster than in the x, so when youre walking you view moves up and down too much , and I'm not talking about the head bob.
If there are stairs that are part of a building you have to jump to walk up them unlike all the other stairs in your path.
Game is very linear in your choice and it is very short. I finished it in 10 hours yesterday.
During the game and in the menus I have to hit the enter key. I can't remember when I last had to use the enter to in a game other than for chatting.
The Menus are very dumbed down and simplified. If you want to get to the nitty gritty stuff you have to edit the ini files.
You cannot manually save. All saves are automatic and you dont know when it happens, which means if you die you dont know if those items you last picked up have to be picked up again. Also makes it harder if you just want to explore the place and not worry about dying because if you die its hard to keep track of your progress unlike if you could exactly when you wanted to.
These are the main things that annoy me about the game.
Re:I've been playing it since yesterday. (Score:4, Informative)
I'd agree with the comments here. To add a few things to it: the combat is marginally better than Bioshock 1 and 2. My biggest issue with those games was that the weapons lacked any sense of clout. You'd have an enemy charging you who was basically a psychotic human (no armour, no supernatural powers) and to take them down, you'd have to pump multiple clips of ammo into them. That just felt poor. Infinite has, so far (in normal difficulty) felt better in this regard. Not perfect, but better.
The two-weapon limitation is a step back for the series. Very, very few shooters are improved by two weapon limits. Makes sense for realism-heavy military shooters (Operation Flashpoint, ARMA etc), in anything else it just forces bad game design. "Oh look, there's a sniper rifle over there, the game is telling me I will need to snipe in the next sequence". By all means do what Borderlands and its sequel do and, for console control-convenience, have 4 hotswitch weapon slots manageable at any time by your (much larger) inventory. But absolute 2-weapon limits are the absolute worst trend in fps gaming over the last few years.
The story is good. I must say that, as with the original Bioshock, I suspect it's not quite as good as some of the reviews have made out. In particular, I don't think the political and moral dimensions are quite as sophisticated as they claim to be. It's all a bit... well... undergraduate. The first game was "Ayn Rand is bad!". This one is less sophisticated still "Racism is bad!". I actually thought the second game tried to be a little more sophisticated and grey-shaded, but that had the least rapturous reception of any installment in the series.
And on the technology front... I'm running on an i7-3820 (3.6ghz) and an Nvidia 680 in ultra detail. The graphics are very good - better than the console versions. However, they're not better than the console versions by the same margin as we've seen in Crysis 3 or (to a slightly lesser extent) Tomb Raider. With those games, it felt like the PC version had been developed to a level that was in-line with what we should expect from the PS4 and the 360-successor. The PC version here is more halfway-house-ish.
Slight digression on Crysis 3; I was discussing it with a colleague at work who does all of his gaming on the 360. He was really disappointed with the game, largely because of its campaign length. I came to it's defense "But look at the technology, this is next-gen stuff, so it's no surprise that other elements of the game got a bit squeezed, just as happened with the likes of the original Gears of War early in this cycle". His response "What technology? It looks just like Crysis 2."
A day or two later, I got to see the 360 version running on a demonstration machine in my local Game.
"Oh, so he wasn't even playing the same game as me."