BioShock Infinite's Complicated Legacy Overshadows Its Greatest Failure

gamespot.com:

BioShock is celebrating its 10-year anniversary today, March 26, 2023. Below, we reexamine the game with modern eyes, in the context of its place in the series as a whole.

If you're reading this, odds are that you have some opinion of BioShock Infinite, and it's likely to be a passionate one. When it released in March 2013, it generated enormous fanfare, inspiring strong stances from both excited series fans and those who felt let down by the final product. It continues to garner polarized reactions 10 years later, perhaps to an alarming extent. Once you go beyond the social media furor and the thwarted expectations, you have a game that ultimately failed to live up to the identity of its own series--and one that deserves neither the seemingly-bottomless stores of love and hate that some still heap on it.

The by-the-numbers nature of BioShock Infinite is perhaps most apparent in its moment-to-moment gameplay. Though ostensibly intended as the true successor to the original BioShock, Infinite simplifies the mechanics of the «immersive sim»-inspired series to the absolute minimum. The FPS part of this so-called "FPS RPG" series is tuned to max, and the RPG part is nearly cast away entirely.

Not only does it have fewer Vigors than both previous BioShock entries had Plasmids, it replaces the Gene Tonics system with a generic Gear system that allows for much less customization than in BioShock 1 and 2. Infinite also lacks the research camera system, a key non-combat mechanic of the original two games, and an important part of their identity. Infinite removes several other staples of the immersive sim genre, including the ability to hack objects--there's no Pipedream-inspired minigame here.

While there's nothing wrong with