Was BioShock Infinite good?

polygon.com:

There are certain questions that repeat in the culture discussions around video games. Is any game where you role-play as a character an RPG? Is it OK to skip cutscenes? Subs or dubs? Alongside these perennial worries, there is a much stranger question that pops up regularly in far-flung forums and seemingly once a year on social media: Was BioShock Infinite good?

This could be resolved with a pithy yes or no, but it’s telling that every random discussion you find of this topic turns into a long litigation of the various positives and negatives of what Infinite offered all the way back in 2013. With a little context, and some hard work, maybe we can come to a definitive answer.

BioShock Infinite was developed by Irrational Games, and like BioShock before it, it was deeply tied to Ken Levine, the lead writer and creative director for both projects. The first game had taken five troubled years to finish. Infinite was created over a similar time frame, with parent company 2K Games buying it some time by placing the direct sequel, BioShock 2, with another studio, 2K Marin. It’s difficult from the outside to understand the extent of Levine’s power, but it seems impossible to come away from the making-of articles linked above and not assume that there’s a magic to the man that is appealing to many around him. Perhaps he’s great at the pitch, or he instills confidence. Maybe it’s just that he gets things finished, eventually, and sells millions of copies of games that are credited to him in the top creative positions.

I start with Levine because most discussions of Infinite eventually lead back to him. After all, he is almost unilaterally the “voice” of the game, and it’s a big project to speak for. Infinite is about a man named Booker DeWitt who heads to a giant floating city named Columbia to abduct a girl named Elizabeth. Columbia is its own world — it’s defined by a political religion that worships the American founders; it’s a utopian society predicated on a racial