Maybe my memory is different, but I recall Infinite being extremely well-received at the time. Much better than Fallout 4 was. Like, it was talked about as being one of the greatest games of all-time.

Rather, I think its a rare case where public opinion sours over time. Part of that is because the game itself really doesn't hold up to being replayed. The best part of the game is the story, and mostly because of the sense of mystery that pulls the player forward and leads up the the big twist reveal at the end. In a lot of media like that, its really fun to go back and are all of the little pieces of foreshadowing that you overlook or misinterpret the first time. Or heck, maybe some people pick up on it and predict the ending, and that can also be incredibly satisfying. But Infinite doesn't have any of that. When I replayed Infinite a couple years ago, I got to the ending thinking "yeah there was absolutely no way I woukd have been able to figure that out on my own the first time", which was really unsatisfying.

Not only that, by parts of the story are actively bad when you stop to think about it. There was the whole arc where they go to a different dimension where Daisy is leading a revolt against Comstock and she just kind of decides for no reason that Booker is an enemy who has to die. It really felt like they just ran out of ideas to make the enemies you had been fighting up until then visually interesting so they tried to cram in a different faction somehow. The scene where Elizabeth sneaks up on Daisy and kills her with a pair of scissors to the neck felt incredibly out of character and unearned. There were moments during the revolt sequence when Booker acts sickened by the violence against Comstock's soldiers, though he never reacted like that to those soldiers oppressing civilians earlier in the game.

Some of it is cultural context too. Fascism has been on the rise globally since the game has come out, so I think a lot of the audience (myself included) is less interested in condemning the oppressed for violence against their oppressors than they may have been at the time of release. When you put it next to BioShock 1, it seems like Ken Levine is just using political extremism in general as a narrative device for conflict rather than actually trying to make any particular statement about politics. That kind of centrism has not aged well.

Without that, the rest of the game falls apart. The peaceful segments are good additions for the sake of pacing, but the NPC's don't really interact with you much and are more just scenery. They aren't people that you ever care about, so changing the world state to the violent one where you're shooting enemies never feels all that meaningful.

The action sequences are okay, but not good enough to stand the game up on its own like some of its contemporaries did. Games like Uncharted and Assassin's Creed have their own issues of course, but it was really fun to just run around as Ezio or Drake in most of the games in a way that it never was for Booker. The enemies in Infinite feel repetetive, almost every "arena room" area feels the same. The guns aren't that interesting and the gimmick of the vigors wears off quickly. Elizabeth isn't all that interesting in combat, just an occasional extra source of health or ammo. The time rifts are basically the same. The sky hook was cool, but wasn't used often and there wasn't usually much of a benefit to being airborne vs grounded anyways.

So the only thing left to really enjoy is the spectacle. It still looks good. The art style is a great balance between realism and stylized that looked great at the time and has aged well. The sound is all good- voice acting, sound effects, music, all of it. The setting and environments are creative and interesting.

So I'd say it is worth playing once for most people, but doesn't live up to its Metacritic score. In tier terms, it seemed upon release like an S-tier game but has aged into more of a B-tier.