A very unique game that shines with innovation. If you got a PS3, this is a must-try!
+ A beautiful rendering of a wrecked city
+ Great graphics
+ Great presentation
+ Great Characters
+ Great sound quality and voice acting
+ Addictive combat
+ Engaging and immersive story
+ Moral choises
Cons:
- Glitchy
- Framerate issues
- Karma moments have weak outcome
- Few different kinds of enemies
For the record, this review is based only on the single-player experience, The game has no multi-player.
Better starting off with the story. Cole McGrath, a courier in Empire City, is asked to deliver a mysterious package. Said package suddenly activates during transportation and wipes out several city blocks, killing everyone and levelling buildings all over the place, but also leaving Cole relatively unharmed. His chubby conspiracy theorist of a friend and his whiny girlfriend nurse him back to health, and he discovers he has new found electrical superpowers. Don't you just hate it when that happens?
These powers do not just turn Cole into an oversized walking battery, oh no, he has a large array of powers at his disposal, each of which are acquired evenly throughout the game, managing to keep it interesting. The powers themselves are very well made. Sucker Punch have succeeded in turning electricity into a useful and varied power, rather than the basic "shoot lightening bolts at people" thing............which is actually Cole's primary attack.........Anyway, powers range from sticky bombs (yes, inFamous effectively spits on science) to shockwaves which blow anything near Cole to the other side of the street, whether they be people or not. Helps keep the game from going stale.
There is actually a good explaination to most things in the game that all these powers can explain. For example, Because Cole automaticlly electricutes everything he touches, he can not use any of all the weapons enemies tend to use, since the gun powder would go off and have the gun explode in his face, nor can he drive vehicles since that would make the gas tank blow up. He also gets a natural enemy, Water, in which he will electrocute himself if he touches it, which creates a lot of the games platforming, which usually take place in sewers.
Back to the story. After the package destroys a significant chunk of the area, a plague breaks out and Empire City is quarantined. The city is a dump, with places trashed. It looks like a war zone, albeit the buildings must be made out of titanium since they have not fallen over. The city is taken over by violent gangs who have got a hold of some impressive weaponry, such as machine guns and rocket launchers. These gangs are the main enemies Cole must fight against in his struggle, although there is only 3 types of them. Cole is preoccupied with the ruined city itself, which brings us to my next point. Karma systems.
With his new found powers, Cole can decide to help save the city, or use these powers to control it. Very well, but the game then includes several 'karma moments', in which your actions will make you more good or evil, resulting in different outcomes, for example, choosing between blowing up an enemy and killing innocent civilians in the process, or letting the enemy blow you up, saving those civilians but causing you a bit of trouble. What this means is in order to see all the content, you need to play through twice. Once as a hero, and once as an arse. It's forced replayability, something which I would not be very happy with if it was not for the fact i liked this game. It is still pretty annoying though, and they should be scrapped from games entirely. The story eventually has you accused of being a terrorist that intentionally set off the bomb and caused the plague, so people generally distrust you and despise you early on. As you play, you are given options on what to do. For example, one part has you needing to deal with some guards protecting a path. You can either run up and assault them and have them drop the hammer on you, or go the evil path and shoot lightning at them from inside a crowd, making the guards attack the crowd in response and letting you to sneak by unnoticed. These choices will determine mostly if you will end up good or evil, though general actions also help. Taking out Reapers, healing people on the street, doing good missions, and capturing enemies alive helps keep you on the path of good. Killing civilians, draining the life from others, doing evil missions, and such help make you more evil. Do good things and the people will respect you more and the cops will even help you out when they are around. Being evil tends to be a bit easier as trying to avoid damaging civilians when Reapers are buzzing around them is hard to do, and eventually you can even have the Reapers following you around if you are evil enough, though the people and police will sometimes attack you on sight. Being good or evil also allows for further upgrades, so you generally have to commit. Being a little bit of both means you won't be able to upgrade your lightning or push attacks at all and you cannot unlock the extra powers. Good characters can learn a power that lets you strike enemies behind and around metal objects if they are using them as cover, while the evil side can gain an attack that chains lightning to living thing standing near the first target.
The characters in inFamous are very well written. Cole himself has one hell of an attitube and is not afraid of using it, usually insulting everyone he talks too while trying to be nice. His best friend Zeke is a conspirasy freak who cannot stop saying things like "Damn, that is some mean sh*t, reminds me of when my cousin got choced by a pizza and everyone puked" or "They are the the motherload of FBI crap, man, soon they f*cked you so hard you will not know whether you been f*cked or not". Together they make for some fun conversations that at times had me stop playing just to finish lauging. Like when Zeke calls Cole in the middle of a huge very important battle and tells you he has come up with a lot of cool names for your attacks.
Although the mysterious package meant Cole would never have to buy a new set of batteries ever again, it did not do anything for his physical capabilities (except for his strange ability to survive falls from any height in the game). Luckily, Cole is a master of free running. He can climb buildings and scale other objects at will. Literally anything he can grab onto. Ledges, railings, pipes, lamp posts, anything. He will automatically grab the nearest ledge. His jumping may not be enhanced, but with the aid of electrical powers later in the game, gaps between buildings do not become such a big problem. He is not the fastest superpowered guy in the world either, at climbing or at running. Perhaps a power that allowed some sort of teleportation would've made long treks across the medium sized city less tedious..........well, they've already screwed up science, so why not screw it up further? You can skate on train tracks which is pretty fun.
Moving about is probably the best thing about the game. The city is an open world, so you have to run, jump, and climb from one spot to the other. This is done fairly well evidently because Cole was into urban exploration before he took his job as a delivery boy, giving him the ability to climb nearly anything and jump from roof top to roof top fairly effectively. He can get up buildings rather fast. Cole grabs onto every ledge he can get his fingers on, jumping up windows and drain pipes and over hangs and just about everything else. What really makes the jumping and movement so intuitive is that the game judges where you are going and predicts what you're trying to do. Say you are jumping onto an electrical cable connecting two buildings. Any other game would probably require you to land dead on the cable or miss it utterly, and once your on force you to run straight or run right off of it if you deviated left or right at all. This game instead figures out that your running for the cable if you start correcting yourself mid-jump to aim at it or it's the only thing to jump too, and automatically aims you towards the cable at the last minute (just in case you were not trying to jump down to the street), and once you are on it you cannot fall unless you jump off or drop down. This makes running and jumping so easy and fun that it's a wonder other games have not done this before.
Controlling Cole, for the most part, is fine, though not without its share of problems. Moving Cole is fluid, his movements are smooth, and getting around the environment is, for the most part, a simple affair. However, there are problems. On occasion, the game Cole will stop mid run and begin sidling along, as if there is an obstacle in his way, when there is nothing. This is easily fixed with a quick jump, and rarely poses a problem when simply navigating the map, but it can occasionally result in your death if you're trying to escape from the hordes of enemies bearing down upon you as your health dwindles.
Climbing buildings and navigating more complicated structures also comes with their own frustrating issues. While trying to leap from one ledge to another, the game is far too assuming in what you actually want to land on or grab onto, often resulting in you randomly attaching yourself to a completely different ledge or platform than the one you actually made your jump towards. As if that wasn't enough, sometimes, too frequently to be just a minor annoyance, the game will fail to register your grip on something altogether, normally leaving you having to repeat most of a climb, restart a segment of a mission, or worst case scenario, sending you plunging into some water below, something that kills Cole very quickly. The combination of these two issues makes what should be a simple act of platforming into a chunk of time dedicated to pointless, flow-breaking repetition that could so easily have been avoided.
However, these issues aside, getting around the environment is not too badly executed. The ability to grind along power lines and rail tracks, along with a glide ability helps to take some of the stress out of what would have been simply unbearable without them if the previously mentioned issues were still present, and any more prominent.
Cole has the ability to drain electrical energy from anything that runs on electricity, such as generators, lamps, televisions or cars. This energy is stored and can be used for his stronger powers. Once he runs out of juice, he'll have to fill back up to use those powers again. If you do run out, you still retain the Lightening Bolt ability, which uses up none of Cole's electrical supply. Pressing L3 locates a source of electricity which will glow blue on screen and on your little minimap in the bottom of the corner, which is pretty helpful and not distracting. this brings us to the controls, which I find are well designed. hold L1 to aim, look around with the right analogue stick and press R1 to fire off a lightening bolt, or any other button to activate the relative power. Cole also makes use of melee attacks, by pressing the square button, something very satifying as Cole apperently know a whole lot of matrial arts, and combined with his powers this is just a pleasure to beat foes up.
Even at Easy mode, the game could become overwhelming. Thankfully, the game is very generous. If you die during a mission, you'll return to the last significant thing you did. So for example, you must destroy 3 satellites, if you die before destroying the third, you'll return to just after you destroyed the second. Very handy, as it avoids the usual frustrating scenarios where you must redo a large portion of a mission several times just because of one tricky bit late on.
The game is structured into story missions, which appear in the city as glowing blue markers. Go there to activate them. Yes, it is quite similar to Grand Theft Auto, but whatever. Side missions regularly appear too. And they actually have a useful purpose, other than to receive experience points which can be used to purchase extra powers. As the city is controlled by the crazy gangs, it can get hectic if you're running around a city full of psychopaths armed with seemingly infinite ammo and reserve a special hatred for guys with electrical superpowers. Fortunately, completing side missions earns you that section of the city. By gaining this territory, enemies no longer appear in that territory. Or at least, that is what the game says. They will not stand around there any more, but they will wander in from other areas from time to time. Still, better than nothing. And the side missions are not all the same. Aside from the usual go here and kill everyone missions, there is some degree of variety. One mission involves you disabling all the surveillance equipment the gangs have left over someone's building, while another involves you performing certain actions such as blowing up a car while a civilian takes photographs. How this clears the area of enemies, God knows, but hey, it works.
On a final note about gameplay. There a a few glitches here and there that can be somewhat annoying, but they are normally easy to fix. Leaving the area or finishing a mission can often remedy any glitch you come across. It also has a serious problem with the framerate that for some reason makes the game lag quite often outside combat, while huge battles runs smooth.
The story that follows as you play the game is amazing. It is also dark, very dark. If you can allow yourself to accept the game within its own story, you will find a lot to see and hear. Many games in this genre almost completely lack a real story (I'm looking at you GTA!). inFamous shows that you can have a great sandboxer with a great story and neither have to suffer. I recommend trying to discover the whole story, it adds an awesome dynamic to the whole game.
Graphically, the game is pretty damn good. character models looks great, as do Cole's powers, with his electricity either a blue or red colour, depending on whether he is helpful or an arse. The city isn't the prettiest in the world, but in context, it looks perfect. The graphic-novel style in some of the cut-scenes are also brilliantly realised and I enjoyed these short diversions from the main throughfare of the game. It's just been rocked by a major catastrophe, and it is clearly expressed both graphically and through audio. You can see people running around the devastated city complaining about how they've lost people and claiming how they were only supposed to be in the city for a couple of days. It really conveys the sense of hopelessness around the area as it falls apart and gets controlled by murderous gangs. The electric powers make satisfying noises too when performed, but you will learn to hate the sound of a rocket launcher being fired at you....
The sounds in this game were not bad, in fact, they were good. The only major problem I had with the sound is that there is no background tracks. That is right, no music for when you are traveling the rooftops, no tracks that help make boss battles more intense, nothing. There are some little bits of "music," but that only plays when you die. I might be slightly mistaken about there being no music, but there is very little and it will not make an impression on you at all. The voice-overs however are well done and the voice acting is great.
Length wise, it depends. If you just play straight through the story, ignoring everything else, such as side missions and collectibles, then its around 10 hours, I'd guess. But that would be like watching a film on fast forward. In order to truly appreciate the game, you have to go at your own pace, enjoying the whole game, and that would take roughly 30 hours to fully complete everything. Remember there is also the issue of playing through it again to see all the content due to the karma system.... And after all this there are also tons of collectibles.
Overall, InFamous is a very well put together action game, with addictive combat and a story that truly immerses you. For all the platforming it tries, it fails in some areas but succeeds very well in others. For every flaw inFamous has, it has an equally weighty positive aspect, all of which eventually come together to outweigh the negatives. It is one of the better sandbox games out there and is worth any gamer's time.