- shows it’s age a little

+ some very interesting level designs

+ level design variety

- very hard at the beginning (yes, another game without the understanding of the word ‘easy’)

+ but at least with a purpose, as then the battles feel more valuable

- the endings feel too recycled

+ some very interesting environment interactions with physics and breakable objects lead to interesting solutions

+ a level of moral grey that you rarely get to see in games

- (though realistic, i guess) sometimes it’s not clear how to choose sidequests or what choice you’re making, could be as little as taking a wrong left and you’re choosing the opposite of what you wanted by entering the wrong destination

- some backtracking

- got stuck a couple of times

- as usual I played as a mage and it was quite dissapointing to see after a lot of effort and skill points involved in higher level magic that it’s annoyingly designed: the fireball is put in the center of the screen and blocks view, often i would just use the fire arrow

+ some interesting characters and environments. Both story ones and enemies. For example I found the orcs surprisingly well done.

- some quite non-obvious moments in which the game could easily leave you stuck. would have helped to have more hints. On the other hand sometimes i did solve them and in that case the satisfaction was indeed big. Still, i think it’s a risky choice to risk alienating your players like this, and if you’re gonna do it you should make sure there are more obvious solutions too (i mean they did pay for your game and it’s a bit of an evil thing to stop a man half way through an interesting movie because he can’t read your thoughts).

+ some interesting game design elements, for example the bow with a rope is ingenious and leads to some very surprising moments

- it felt like pretty much all the art assets (textures, atmosphere, ideas, even models) were reused, with only reaarangements, so that was a definite minus

- way too many monsters. And sending waves after waves

+ they kept the audio journals, and though they weren’t as interesting as in the first due to the not so relatable character, they still provided some entertainment (and an opportunity for me to learn more german)

- so much repetition, of fights, repeated quest tasks (gather x sisters type), that by the end I had to add a cheat to finish it, and even that wasn’t too helpful as it just gave adam and not a way to make things easy

- yet another game that doesn’t know the word “easy” and confuses it with “hard”. On easy level i was expecting to breeze through the game (i’m a person who’s been playing and loving shooters for more than 15 years now), instead it was pretty challenging and i had a couple of deaths

+ in the end i’m happy i pulled through it as towards the end it pulled out a couple of gems, the story got more interesting, and in particular one moment blew me away, you end up playing as a little sister, but what I loved about that is that all the rusty dead bloody world through your new eyes now looks like a castle with roses and statues and drapery… very interesting stuff

+ the ending was also pretty interesting, and I suspect there are multiple endings depending on how you play it

- all in all I could feel the director of the first bioshock didn’t work on this one as it felt much more “point a to be kill everything, rince and repeat”, losing what the original had: a feeling of discovery, an exploration of social and political order, but I’m happy to say I have that vibe about Bioshock Infinite a bit more, and indeed I did see Ken Levine back in charge presenting things in imagination stimulating ways. By the way, I have to mention here my initial disappointment with Bioshock, something that holds true for the second one even more: when we were sold on the story it seemed as if each mutant would be unique, one guy would have fire, another teleport, and I was looking forward to finding out each guy’s story and psichosis, an illusion which was severely destroyed when you encounter tens maybe hundreds of each. That’s a missed opportunity for games. I realize this is a shooter… but still, for example Bioshock 2 should have imho had 20% of the monsters it had at the most. We have to get away from this kill-kill-killl thing.

- they should have takend a bit more care with sound bytes: my wife was particularly annoyed (as was I) by how killing certain female splicers would result in loooooooong dragged out screams, many continuing for whole seconds after the character was dead. Maybe you can do that once, but when it happens tens of times it’s just embarrassing for one to play such a game with anybody in the neighborhood :P

+ it was nice to walk through the underwaters, but it wasn’t given enough love and points of interest (i was expecting some magical underwater mirracles, some peaceful fish, isntead it felt like hallways made out of plant textures/models.

well, hoping the next Bioshock will be better.

+ fantastic visuals

- too many waves of waves of waves of enemies

+ superb colors

+ ingenious change of settings: sure, they crash a lot, BUT this game brings back what games in the 90s used to have better than today: a lot of change of scenery, radical changes… great excuses for new views, new shapes…

* it has that thing with numbers flying on the screen, but the good news is that you can disable it so in the end it was okay

- some portions dragged on, and you could feel the linearity. For example the remote controlled dinosaur was fun as an idea but after a while i just wanted to move on and didn’t know what to do (another catch in waves of enemies triggering and end event)

+ the level design is brilliant, the changes, the environment, even the use of the environment is pretty fun, though sometimes it seems a bit too convenient

+ unlike what i had heard the story i thought was pretty decent. I mean yeah, sure they were mercenaries not philosophers, but at least they stayed in character

- too many military elements, barking orders and that kind of stuff, ‘macho’ jokes and whatnot.

+ looks fantastic, great level design, pretty fun weapons, fantastic level design/scenery… some of them feels like you’re moving through concept art! Sci-fi meets destruction, meets plants meets a lot of variety! Worth it even just for the visuals!

Okay, just finished, quick, before I forget them:

- EA forced me to make an account with them and connection issues. It sucks to pay for something and not be able to play it! What if my internet hadn’t worked? What about the customer wasted time! Bad corporate move! Major bad points for EA

+ the graphics was amazing

+ a lot of attention to detail in geometry and lighting

* the story is okay, not fantastic, not bad

- a missed opportunity with the audio logs as there’s not a lot of them and not particularly interesting

+ very nice cool deaths, and brilliant animations

- a bit too much dying

- way too many monsters, wave after wave even on the easy level. I mean it was okay in terms of difficulty but an abuse to your ears in terms of screaming without a deeper meaning

+ some nice quiet surprising nostalgic moments where the game shows a bit of character depth

+ a couple of brilliantly design gameplay ideas, like mixing cinematics with gameplay in a very natural and surprisingly delightful way (a moment where a tentacle grabs you and you think it’s a cinematic but you end up shooting while dangling upside down)

All in all, on a -5 to 5 scale i’d give the game a 1.5: quite good, high production values, a bit repetitive though. Some fascinating visuals and great engine.

- – - Boss battles. Particularly annoying if you happen to have played most of the game as a not so strong stealthy-hacking game like I did… this is a trap I see in many games: they say they offer you the choice to play any way you want, but if you happen to want to play the game without shooting everything in sight everything is okay right until the moment when they lock you into a room with a boss and suddenly you, the person who had trouble even with normal enemies in the open have nowhere to hide, nothing to hack and it feels like no alternative solutions (or if they are there, they’re unintuitive and you only find them out after dying many many times in frustration).

+ original story (I think probably we should see more games like this in the next decade, the theme of bioengineering should come soon)

+ nice hacking element

- very little content

- feels like the old game engine, just with a higher resolution… the textures are very bland, feels like no details. Content wise this feels like a 2004 game, a deus ex 2, more similar to the 2000 game… yes, that’s a good thing in some ways… but not 12 years later :P

+ whistling and pieces of the cool Deus Ex music

- but they didn’t hire Alexander Brandon to make some new one :P

+ split finish

+ some surprising choices, but fewer than I would have hoped

+ multiple ways of doing many things

Well, this was a long play. I wish I could be super impressed with the game, but I’m afraid the excitement isn’t proportional to the time I spent playing it:

+ a lot of content

- a lot of the content is recycled (eg the first time you see a cave/dungeon/ruin it’s super new and exciting, but soon it doesn’t feel so fresh)… the exception to this is that ‘soon’ may mean many hours later

- as I was afraid from the start it doesn’t have the same warm mood as Oblivion: I’m keeping with my first intuition of it all, I suspect it’s the setting: the nordic realms predispose to a certain ‘snowy’, non-sunny look

- you can no longer travel the landscape easily and in a straight line because of all the mountains… I guess this is understandable but it did force me to actually even use fast travel… which I consider a cheat and I tried hard not to… but you could feel the game was not meant for that… all seriously aggravated by the next one:

- in a game where everything grows by doing they took out the one most important to me class: athletics: no longer will your running speed and jumping heights improve. This basically means they killed onfoot travel for me. That and the walking feels slower and the sprinting only happens for very short distances (relative to the size of the landscape) and in a game oriented towards choice they killed my choice not to use the horses (which are not that great btw)

+ a lot of quests

+ a lot of side stuff

+ many dialogues

+ new big scenarios

+ first person :D :D

+ magic :D

+ a lot of content in many languages (learned a lot of german through the many dialogues)

- the dialogues still haven’t passed the level of a shallow list html… I was really hoping this time around they’d have some branches. Yes, they compensate some by having spacial choices… but I would have liked dialogues about which it actually matters what you choose. I don’t think I ever felt that anxiety of a real choice in a dialogue.

+ some very interesting quests.

All in all I obviously liked the game, since I spent more than 170h playing it… but I’m saying it could have been better in some ways. It did so many things good though that it totally redefined the playing field for many games to come… and hopefully it showed other developers too what an open world can be, how big it can be and that first person is a great choice for an RPG.

+ pretty big story

- the music is often quite generic (lack of themes/soul/feeling and instead often semi-random orchestral noises), and sometimes even distracting pausing in cinematics strangely

+ a lot of different worlds, each with nice bystander stories as bystanders talk

- but they’re often very linear

- it’s a very army-like story. I was looking forward to playing a character but instead it’s a very “for the team” type military experience, all in a pretty generic ‘the universe is in danger’ type of story (reminds me personally of Halo stuff)

+ they make some nice attempts at sci-fi tv type cinematics

+ dialogue choices are nice, though the morality system is pretty simple, 2 sided… though it did have the occasional nice moral grey choice that made me think!

Am I looking forward to ME3? Not particularly. Military experiences are a dime a dozen. I play rpgs for the worlds to explore, and in this game like in ME1 the open world seems to me more of an illusion, everything feels scripted and linear (yeah, sure, you can choose the order, but still feels constrained). The world doesn’t feel alive. And most importantly I didn’t feel so much it was MY experience, it was Sheppard’s. I was just going through the motions. A few times I was hoping they’d indeed enable me to find and explore galaxies, to discover planets and interesting things, but instead I found just mini-games and no real or interesting out-of-main-story places worth visiting or discovering. Okay, so i may seem like i’m totally criticizing the game, I’m not really: obviously I only finish good games, others I just abandon or don’t even start, and indeed this game has very high production values… it’s just that I had much higher expectations of a RPG (really playing your OWN character), particularly one that teases you wit ha whole universe, planets and galaxies… you think you’re gonna actually go and explore planets… not really :P

Well, this game has a lot of mixed stuff.

+ artwork is fantastic, I’m talking about the sculptures (general geometry not so much, landscape & especially caves feel rather generated)

+ there are a lot of minigame type things, and a lot of complexity under the hood (so much so that I couldn’t figure out how to use the magic system without online tutorials), I’m amazed they put so much work for example in an original alchemy system, or even mini-music games

- the character choices are pretty much non-existent, it felt to me: the dialogues are very linear, no branching, as feels the story, though there are many quests spread out… though I can’t say I was attracted to them

- the difficulty is was for me super frustrating. I decided to abandon the game though I would so love to get the story. yet another one on the long list of games that don’t know the meaning of the word “easy”. Or maybe it’s just annoyingly super hack&slashy, or at least playing as a mage was super frustrating: a battle consisted of what felt like tens of repetitious clicks to do tiny ammounts of magic… and this in a world where monsters are copy-pasted everywhere … I decided it’s not worth my time. Sorry. I would have loved to at least get the main story…