A game with a great story in a perfect package. The gameplay is still addicting and gives quite a bit of freedom for the player to experiment and pick their favorite methods of dealing with enemies. The visual style and sound direction holds up extremely well, immersing the player with a trip to 1940's. Voice acting plays a huge part in the game, all the characters feel like real humans with their own part in the big picture. I haven't played modern FPS games in a long time, but to me this was one of the last ones that carried the tradition of pure weapon-enemy-map interaction experience before the genre was dominated by console-oriented tube-shooters.
I am a big fan of the original Bioshock because it wasn't too linear, the weapons had lot of variety, all the little game mechanics (like hacking, sneaking, damage properties, and looting) felt cohesive, the visuals and setting felt original, and the story was really solid. It also had enough options in plasmids and tonics to customize your setup to suit your style, distincting it from generic FPS games. Some people think it's too consolized when compared to System Shock 2 and Deus Ex, but personally I like the balance it went between a classic shooter and a role-playing game. While Bioshock 2 felt like a cheap expansion, Infinite doesn't feel like a sequel at all. The beginning of the game felt familiar right up until the first enemies appeared. For the first ten minutes I kept trying to make a sneak kill until I realized the game itself didn't have any kind of stealth mechanics: the moment you make contact, every enemy is after you and things don't calm down until you kill them all. After that the next big disappointment was weapons. Almost every gun does similar damage when relative to ammo capacity and there was no difference in the type of damage you did. When combined with the two-weapon carry limit and your melee weapon turning into the usual "press Ö to finish enemy with a short cutscene" thing, all the excitement from gun action was completely gone for me. I still completed the game, but there wasn't really anything in the game that I liked. Instead of flying the skies freely with a jetpack like in Duke Nukem 3D, you were limited to clinging on a rail that looped over a section of a map. Looting was pointless since ammo machines were everywhere and there was nothing special to gain, just tons of different food that had the same effect (which was pointless with the regenerating armor/health system). I liked the old security bots of BS1 more than Elizabeth and the plot cenetering around time paradoxes felt really artificial.
