Staying in cover and planning how to fight enemies that are accurate is skill. It requires a different approach to combat than in previous games, yes, but I never felt that death was a planned part of the experience. The damage output of the enemies and the quickly depleting shield means you have to keep moving and looking for better positions. This gets worse the more enemies the game piles on you and throws in a Handyman for good measure.
It's a challenge, yes. More of a challenge than previous titles. I don't recall a situation in either Bioshock or Bioshock 2 where the game piled twenty or so enemies on you simultaneously. I prefer the kind of combat Infinite provides, as with the shield and Liz it can pile enemies on you much more liberally. The lack of health and salts you carry with yourself doesn't bother me either, as it forces me to watch my supplies closely. The hotkeyed first aid kits and EVE syringes rendered combat easy in previous games.
As for taking down bosses with a bar... In 1999 mode Handymen, the Siren, Beasts and bosses regenerate their health almost completely if you die. That means that you can't defeat them without 5+ deaths, as you'll end up in an unwinnable position forcing a reload. Had to do it at least twice. Don't recall this
See what I mean? "Wah, someone doesn't like the game I like, instead of responding to their arguments I'm going to dismiss them as whining, thereby saving myself from actually having to respond to any of it. I'm so clever!"
Yours wasn't an argument, but a bunch of single sentence quips that boiled down to I DON'T LIKE GAME STOP LIKING IT.
No, that's over-simplifying.
Which is exactly what you're doing with Bioshock.
Not every character in Planescape is a subversion of an RPG trope. Furthermore those characters who are tend to be fully-developed characters in their own right, with fairly unique motivations and goals, as well as complicated involvement in the story. Now, this doesn't apply to every character. Annah, for example, is only a subversion as far as her appearance goes. Otherwise she is a pretty typical "hooker with a heart of gold" stock character. But, consider characters like Morte and Dak'kon - their involvement in the plot goes back many, many years before the game even starts. They really don't fit any topics for subversion and their characters are multi-layered. You only actually learn the true details of their motivations if you pay very close attention and complete their personal stories/quests.
Both are plays on the cliches associated with the RPG genre. Dak'kon is a play on the Wise, Old Fighter with Unswerving Loyalty trope, expanding into new tropes. Morte is the most troperrific of characters, as he's the Affable Scoundrel with a Dark Secret. Most of Morte's tropes are played straight, the subversion lies in the fact that he's a. dead and b. the person he backstabbed is immortal, which makes him feel guilty.
Now let's look at Infinite's supporting cast (spoilers).
- Jeremiah Fink - wealthy industrialist who is a greedy man who likes money and being a jerk to people underneath him, also a thief and co-man.
- Daisy Fitzroy - maid/servant girl who is framed for the murder of Lady Comstock and becomes the unwitting but later willing leader of an underground resistance movement which eventually escalates into revolution.
- Comstock - basically Booker's alter-ego but with a beard and 30 more years, he became aware of the tears somehow and used them to convince himself he was a prophet who could divine the future. He's also a militant racist who basically wants to dominate the world, thus giving the player a reason to consider him an enemy and bad guy.
- Lutece - basically just your standard eccentric scientist and little more than a plot device. Not really much of a character in her own right.
- Slate - he used to work with Booker back in the day. He's a racist asshole who goes insane and wants you to kill him and his men in a shallow justification to send the player through an extended combat arena.
I would mention other characters but there really aren't any, at least none that don't die immediately after you meet them or who serve any further purpose in the story other than "convenient plot device".
How is your assessment not an oversimplification?
Now look, I'm not saying every game needs to have extremely deep, complicated or highly imaginative characters. On the contrary, some of my favorite shooters have simple characters. Half-Life 2 is a prime example of a simple story with simple characters, told well. The difference is that in Half-Life 2, character motivations are clear and unconflicted, and nobody exists "just because" someone is needed for the plot to advance, or to poorly justify the player doing some random gameplay scenario.
Here's where Infinite gets me: it has delusions of grandeur, as do many of its fans. People play it up like it's some sort of epic mindfuck arthouse meta-commentary that's the gaming event of the century. It's not. It's just a swashbuckling adventure with a dimension-hopping twist, and some poorly-conceived gameplay which is an awkward mish-mash of mechanics that do not really form together into coherent systems, and worse, they do a great deal to undermine the consistency and logic of the setting the game takes place in.
Which is something you fail to substantiate by explaining it in detail. You're constantly dismissing elements of the game with a handwave and a claim that it's "poorly done," "random," or "simple" without actually detailing how and breaking down the characters. The problem is that if you started breaking them down, you'd have to dig deeper and start working against the point you raise.
It's more fun for me to talk about things you don't like, and more useful as an intellectual exercise to explain and understand why something doesn't work than to nod your head and say "yep, that thing sure is cool."
And where did I say that you should do that? It's very easy to bash things, as you demonstrate. You just take concepts you don't personally like, dismiss them as poorly done, and expect others to accept that as a detailed critique and breaking down of each and every element of the game.
Being positive requires you to be able to see both sides of the coin, not just the bad ones.
It is interesting how different people have different impressions. MCA, for example, loves the game.
I think I'll take his opinion over yours.
