Hey! So, it’s been a month or so since I finished Infinite for a second time and wanted to get some things down in writing before I forget them entirely. This should be a transition sentence, but I can’t think of anything. So first, the middle stretch starting about when you first meet Daisy is a bit blah. After Booker and Elizabeth get on the airship for the first time, the dialogue is basically a literal version of what I imagine the story outline said: “Elizabeth discovers Booker is steering toward New York, instead of Paris. She feels betrayed”. About what we get:
Elizabeth: “I’m so happy-hey wait, those coordinates are for New York, not Paris!”
Booker: “……uhhhhh.”
Elizabeth: “I never should have trusted you!”
And I’m sort of left feeling like, shouldn’t there have been human dialogue there? Some back and forth, Booker comes up with a lie that is eventually dismantled? We soon transition to Daisy Fitzroy, whose depiction I thought was problematic the first time through, and I’m still left feeling like the studio transformed her into an simpler caricature (= Comstock) when they realized they didn't have enough time left before launch to flesh out her story with Booker (what we hear hinted at when she tries to kill our Booker). By the end of her story, Daisy is smeared with blood and threatening a child! The game is really teeing up your villains for you.
Second, the “arenas” with Skyrails and open areas to navigate through felt like a missed chance for Infinite to distinguish itself. The AI was often pretty static; I recall sitting behind a wall for about 3 minutes while a rocketeer standing on a barge fired at me while never trying to fly around to a better angle. I think the Z-axis is an underrated idea a lot of game developers still have trouble trying to integrate into a 3-D space, and I loved the drop-shoot-jump-skate away freedom that the Skyrails give you to attack from multiple directions, so it’s all the more disappointing in the moments when Infinite sort of waved its hands and thought “well that’s good enough”.
The times Infinite breaks out from that box are often still frustrating. The Handymen encounters are a good example; I remember in particular the final area in Finkton before Fitzroy as an open area with a lot of attractive summonable items and weapons stored around, only for the Handymen’s +100 Death Melee Attack to force me into almost never leaving the skyrail and attacking with potshots from far away. Because that attack is paired with the Handyman’s ability to jump very far, as well as skyrail anywhere, walking around on solid ground was death and I ended up playing a more desperate style more reminiscent of Skyrim where I didn’t mind sniping to death boss characters from a room and a half away. That’s fine with Skyrim because the whole game is meant to be broken and rebuilt in your own image, but when presented in Infinite with this problem in an area with so many attractive summonable items in open space I couldn’t figure out how to use, I was left annoyed with myself instead of feeling free and opportunistic. There must have been a way to use that Tesla Coil! What didn’t help was how your deaths wouldn’t reset your progress. I kind of get the narrative resonance there, but it still left a few encounters on both playthroughs where I quite clearly made a mistake but ended up “winning” merely by throwing at myself at the enemy for long enough. It kind of breaks the “enemy as puzzle” dynamic to retain your success and not punish failure in that way.
All that said, there is one area in particular that I want to call out for praise, which is the “arena” right before your climactic encounter with Comstock on the airship. That room design really steered into the benefits of the Handymen’s design by giving you a tight donut-shaped room with many elevated platforms to jump around on. That congested everything to the point where you could start using cooler tactical ideas like summoning turrets and luring the Handyman into its range of fire.
This was crafted to be a negative post. Boo, negativity! Whining, complaining. But it’s not meant to be balanced; where what I think Infinite gets right in the fundamentals of atmosphere and play ends up giving it a 3/5 or 4. I think it’s good, and I think I see how it could have been better.