inFAMOUS

Review from Jae - Tuesday, 02 June 2009 @ 12:09pm

With shows like Xmen and Heroes exploring the supernatural abilities of the human race, I’ve always wondered what ability I would want to have. That would be easy: shape shifting. Being able to morph from one person into another at any given time would mean I could anything and I mean anything. Well beggars can’t be choosers so we’ll just settle for the ability to harness electricity in inFamous.

If you familiarise yourself with the television series Angel you would remember the character Gwen, born with the ability to manipulate electricity. To some of you Kristen Bell’s character in Heroes, Elle, would seem a little more familiar with her sexy electric tantrums and bolts of electricity. inFamous takes a more masculine approach and puts you in control of Cole. A man engineered and blessed with the powers of Thor, through a freak nuclear bomb, you choose the path by which you live your life. Cole, or as I like to call him the offspring of Spiderman and Storm, is the product of a freak accident by which a bomb set off in Empire City has caused chaos and destruction. To quarantine off the effect on the rest of the world Empire City has been locked in with no one allowed in or out. Cole is now desperate to get out of Empire City so he does what other’s bid to get his meal ticket out of there.

ZaaaaAaaaAAAPPP!

inFamous is as stated, an open world sandbox action game. It does so many things right that you don’t generally notice how well they’ve been executed. When you start up the disc there is a seaming less start and continuation of your save file. Even if you have multiple saves the game will start with the latest file and load quickly. When you die you don’t have to restart a mission, you will generally start less than a minute away from where you were before. Menus are fairly simplistic, you can hardly ever mess up if you fall and you can climb almost anything and everything. It is as if Sucker Punch has taken the great elements of sandbox games and applied a “+1” to all of them. It would’ve been nice to have destructible buildings but the explosions of cars, enemies and everything else make for some great action. Empire city is large as it encompasses a few islands and underground sewer levels. The landscape doesn’t ever seem too overwhelming or too constrictive either so the feeling of freedom is there when you want it.

Every 28 days Cole has a heavy day of red

I can see many flavours coming into this game from other top tier titles. There is a Metroid feel to the main arc of the game with you traversing to many power conduits to re-energise the city. After you get to this point you’ll earn a new power like grenades, power slides or air gliding. Once you get the gliding ability I found the city to be much easier to parkour around. The way extra powers are assigned to the buttons on the Playstation controller feel well fitted. I did immediately change the inverted vertical camera when I started as that view is just freaky. As I mentioned before you can pretty much climb onto anything in this game, even if it juts out one centimetre. Along with his electrical gifts Cole has somehow gained the ability to defy gravity. The game encourages you to stay high majority of the time as the advantage you have over your enemy is always good. I can’t really fault this game too much. Graphically it could’ve been better polished as you will see lots of jaggy edges and minimal close ups.

I haven’t been this addicted to collectables since Pikachu told me to subliminally collect 151 of his enemies and trap them into balls. inFamous has the right amount of collectables. Blast shards are found every where and when collected help you increase your electrical capacity. Completing missions will increase your experience and sometimes earn you some shards. Experience buys you power upgrades and some missions will make you more evil or good. The other collectable to look out for are these snippets of voice recording found in certain satellites, just 32 of them meaning the task doesn’t feel arduous. Finding all these items and missions are easy with the help of a very good map. Icons are set out clearly and you can never get lost in the large city. All of this makes the game sound easy but there are challenges. For example you can get tipped off as to where a secret stash of blast shards would be but all you have is a photo of where it is. Using the landmark clues in the photo you have to figure out where that package is. One of these challenges took me a good half hour to do but it kept me hooked whilst collect other items along the way. What I found here is that there was always a balance between the main story and the side missions. I didn’t feel like the side missions took me too far away from the main story and I didn’t feel like I only wanted to ever complete the main story on its own. inFamous has somehow manage to find the fair balance that will extend your gameplay and keep you well engaged.

Cole competes with a train for the race against time

Replay ability comes in the form of your choices in the game. Choose to be good or choose to be bad. Either way you’ve got to make sure you take it to the extreme. The more of a goodie goodie or bady bad you are unlocks a greater range of power upgrades. Certain missions will give you the choice to be good or bad. For instance the city’s water tanks have been rigged by the Reapers, your main enemy, to place a black substance that infects them with a virus. You can choose either to detach the rigged viruses or blow them up which causes an influx to contaminate the water more. The menu doesn’t do a very good job of selling the goodie choices in the game. The powers of good tend to be healing whereas the evil powers increase the amount of damage you can do. Naturally most gamers would go with the awe-inspiring powerful choice. Once you finish the game you have the option of going back and playing the opposite path. I haven’t quite gotten around to that because I think I’m bad for life. That’s what my parole officer and psychologist tell me anyway. Apart from good or evil there isn’t really much else you can choose from. You can try and stay neutral but you’ll never reach your full potential with powers.

Pros

Nice use of powers and well designed open world. Good balance between main story and side missions.

Cons

Graphically it could be better. Choice is limited for in-game decisions: be very bad or very good.