I had no choice but to kill them-men, distributing food to the poor. I can run away-which I did, but when I emerged from the bar I'd holed up in, they were waiting for me. This apparently was a storefront, and by stepping over an invisible line these men, whom I now realize were trying to distribute food, pulled out shotgun, engaging in combat with me. I saw something I wanted-a vial-just behind the man at the desk. "One time in Finktown, a shanytown for factory workers, I saw a bunch of people in line for something that looked like a desk. But it just comes off a little brutish, potentially because just before and after meaningful moments in the story that play with the idea of racism, you have to mow down whichever side of this civil war isn't trying to kill you, be that Columbia's rich white police force or the downtrodden yet violent Irish and Black 99 percenters, Vox Populi. " BioShock Infinite sets out to explore the issue of racism. Its inconvenient clutter obscures the vista, depersonalizes it, without even the grace of providing meaningful cover."Ĭolin Snyder writing for Vice also had problems with Infinite's violence: It doesn't even do it well I wouldn't even say competently. "It's that Infinite's is a sterile, mechanized system that could have been ripped from any other listless hyper-modern game like a bloody spine and grafted messily onto this vision, obscuring it. BioShock the first was a combat game, and even though I think killing is the laziest mechanic known to game creation, it had a weight, a necessary friction. "It's not even that I wish it wasn't a shooter, or that there was no combat. At every turn, a pile of trunks and crates that let you know a modern war lies ahead. The secret stink of money is all over everything. "Every exploration is stymied by a velvet rope, every promising corridor just leads to a restroom, a gift shop. It's pale, smudged at its edges, bright in the wrong places. " Infinite intends to reek of quaint Americana, the innocence of cotton candy, boardwalks, Independence Day relics. Gamasutra Editor-at-Large Leigh Alexander summed up her feelings about this on her blog, Sexy Videogame Land: BioShock Infinite purports these high ideas about religion vs state, rich vs poor, white vs black, but too regularly devolves into a cut and dry shooter. There's also been plenty said about that old chestnut "ludonarratological dissonance", ergo, the way Infinite often parks its quite lofty story in favour of long, dumb shooting matches. Despite superlative reviews on launch day, leading to the game's now oft-quoted 94 point score on Metacritic, critics have been raising issue with Infinite's treatment of political and racial issues, calling the game out for side-lining these more serious topics in favour of its flashier sci-fi meta-narrative. Put another way, reception to BioShock Infinite has been mixed. This seems to be the way most people feel about the game. I emailed back saying that despite some of the comments in my review, the fact I could talk about Infinite for hours with my friends meant that, actually, I probably was enamoured with it. The response I got said it was interesting to read how I wasn't "overly enamoured" with the writing. I had an email from Irrational's PR earlier this week explaining that the developer was compiling BioShock Infinite reviews, and asking me to send mine.
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