Now hold on here and understand where I'm coming from.
B:I does a lot of things right and sets new standards in how NPC tag-alongs should act. It's very story driven and people go batshit over the ending. But everything it does right is because your expectations were shit to begin with and everything it does wrong is being toted as the best parts of the game.
First off, B:I was more railroading than Super Mario Brothers. Like, the first game. Where you can only run right. Except an experienced player would choose to skip levels and a poor player would die from timer death in a castle for poor choices. B:I goes out of it's way to tell you running into a turtle in protest doesn't even matter. But before plot, let' talk game play.
BI: tries an "innovated" & "original" method of Fuck Exploration. All but the life freezing hat doesn't matter so clothing a a wasted effort under utilized. Instead you'll find your self desiring to hunt down upgrades. But not upgrades like new Tonics or new abilities, those are sold in vending machines placed every five feet and handed out at plot intervals. No, you hunt for Life/Shield/Mana upgrades. And those are found in a single room tacked onto the main path with a locked door separating you from it. How to open the locked door is broken into two things, one is search the linear areas areas for shiny lock picks (or buy them, appears to be a buy limit through) and the other is omfg seriously? enter the area, get a side-quest message pop up, goto the end of the area and get plot-key. You now get the glorious "fun" of trekking all the way back to the start of the area, pick up your upgrade, and trek all the fucking way back to the end. Really? Fucking lame. I thanked my lucky stars the Siren level at least made a giant loop, I felt the map designers made progress and expected the game to open up even more in the coming levels. But that's it, a giant loop without even a single intersection. That's the best it has to offer.
Secondly, the plot goes out of its way to explain to you that you are nobody. Fuck you. Like at the start you can pick to be baptized or not, then heads or tails, some time later birdy or cage? Well it doesn't matter. And we're not talking about it doesn't matter because the choices were not followed up on, but because the NPCs fucking tell you it didn't matter. The real pill to swallow is those flash back scenes. Every time Booker is knocked out for plot reasons or is gunned down because you suck you enter another flash back and poof we're back to continuing the story. Yeah, the game is trying to sneak past that you, the player, are controlling an infinite world's protagonist brought in by the wonder twins as he continually dies from his little adventure. Sink, swim, fall, fly, crushed, exploded, gunned down, or set on fire. a Booker is completing the game with or without you so you'd better shape up and do it right this time. The finality of this, if your low intellect doesn't pick up on it in time, is even brought up by the characters. How, in a infinite multiverse, can any choice or action that take have any true consequences?? You are lead to believe, with no reason at all they just get the idea and do it, that by committing voluntary suicide the one true Booker kills all alternate versions of his evil self. Except, the suicide isn't voluntary. Booker chooses it. You watch. Which is your role in this game.
So both in plot and in game play, it's fundamentally about railroading and they tell you it is. But seriously, think about it. "Railroading" and "Good"? You just ate that and enjoyed it. Instead of game designers looking at something like Batman Arkham X to wonder how they can interweave story with an open world and plenty of free choice based leveling and ass kicking, we're going to have to deal with Final Fantasy: The 1st person shooter with no over world map, side quests, or obtainables.
The other thing being toted as awesome but horribly sucks is the rail system. Zipping along means you can't hit a damn thing, decreasing your speed in a cover to recharge your shields game is to die. So you'll use the rails to pull you to a new cover and leap off them to murder a guy. Half way through the game this gets old. Same leap animation that takes a couple seconds, same jump off can't see the guy you tried landing on bounce behind you. Same precious seconds lost trapped in those animations as enemies grind down your shield. Using rails becomes an inferior method of fighting that also spams mini cut cenes to keep the player from getting too excited, only it employed because it's the only cool aspect of the game and pretty damn awesome at that. ...And then you find your self in some areas choosing between summoning a hook or motorized gatlinger robot. Yeah, I already know it's inferior, now I have to choose rails or usefulness? ...And then Handymen come in and globally shock the entire rail system in the area because heaven forbid you get to use this "super cool" rail system.
It's almost as if the rail system was added for an ascetic railroad joke. Zip around in circles but totally the wrong way to be playing things. It wasn't until the out-of-house player testers and screen grabs that they realized the rail system was the only fun aspect they had. So they hastily attempted to support it as their marketing continued to up play it. The result of which was the clothing system btw. 90% of the gear is directly related with jumping onto or off the rails (which makes them worthless 75% of the time). Which probably explains why most of the clothing is sitting right next to the upgrade bottles or where you'd except such a bottle to be and disappointingly found out it isn't.
B:I is the first NPC escort game that doesn't painfully shackle you to an NPC. Elizabeth never gets shot and has no life bar. No matter her position relative to you she teleports outside your vision to walk up and do what you ask her to do. They even gave her an ammo/hp/mana recovery function on hidden cool downs and she continually finds you free money (an event you can forcefully trigger by open/closing a vendor machine every couple of minutes). So everyone is toting Elizabeth as the best escort EVER. All hail Elizabeth! Godsend of 2k Games!
Call me bitter. But it took us almost 30 fucking years for the the FPS part of the gaming industry to realize we hate escorting NPCs? And after they went un-huh escort is bad they gave us one anyway. Since I already used Batman I guess mentioning Oracle is out. How about tits-and-ass from Metal Gear Solid? Yeah that'll work. Walky-talkys is how you a real game gets an NPC to interact with the protagonist. Anyway, B:I plays off this load of garbage FPSs have a sick fucking fetish for, instead of giving you an NPC with a shitty AI you'll hate they give you an NPC that gives your gifts. Of course you'll praise B:I. And I'm not saying you shouldn't. Keep proclaiming it's awesome because we need more of it. But seriously, lame. It's about as innovatively-creative as googled the word escort with adult search turned off. Or in 2K's place, they have an entire forum bitching at them for a few years over defending Little Sisters.
Really the game is mediocre. Boring battles spiced up by an underused, and later penalized, game play mechanic. It's very focused and rail roaded, designers thought lamp-shading that fact made things ok, and by their sales figures it must have helped some. It's not very original (bioshock railroaded!) and feels like they almost tried to hard. Like what were your two favorite Plasmids? You will probably say Telekinesis and HANDFUL OF BEES!. So you get the Crows super early in the game to mess with, and they split Telekinesis up. After you upgrade your sucking hand you can chuck missiles back at mobs but if you want to rape powerful NPCs with hilarious tossed-them-over-the-edge shenanigans that makes them both easy and fun to mess with then you absolutely need to play with their new tentacle porn addition. Get it? Hardy har-har. And were Big Daddies to hard for you? Handymen have a weak point in the
middle of their chest and on hit they go into a lengthy omg you hit me animation so you can kill them fast by "scoring a lucky hit". Don't you feel special for killing one now?
*yawn*
It's a rentable. 5 out of 10 stars, mediocre. Play it once and read it's wiki for the plot details you don't understand.
