I make it a policy to pay no more than $20 for a video game.
It’s a good policy (highly recommended): it’s kept me from experiencing more
than twenty dollars’ worth of disappointment — until now.
During the first two hours or so of Bioshock Infinite I was
experiencing a rekindling of the love I had for the first two Bioshock games. Infinite’s “Columbia” — like “Rapture” — is a beguiling, immersive
environment that pulls me in faster than do the environments of most other
games. But as the game wore on, I noticed a growing torpor that I normally do
not associate with Bioshock. I was
getting bored. The action for all three games is moored to a rail, but this time the characters themselves seemed fixed (and utterly without interest). How was this possible —
especially with a game that received a Metacritic rating of “94”?
Mike Barthel
explores the disconnect I experienced, as do Leigh Alexander and Tevis
Thompson — two reviews that are delicious reads (criticism at its finest,
really). They all argue, persuasively, that Infinite’s
failures don’t just make for a poor gaming experience, they in fact actually
qualify it as a Bad Game (Thompson: “Not just the worst game of the year. It’s
the worst game I’ve played this generation”).
Meaningless mayhem: sometimes that's a bad thing. |
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