inFamous : PS3
Following my ‘completion’ rules, I could have written this review for inFamous ten days ago when I watched the credits run for the first time. I’d just completed it on good and was sitting back smiling about how clever the storyline was, and I decided that I wanted to play it all again, on evil, set to hard because there was every chance that I could get 100% of the trophies for the game and still had fun. A couple of hours ago I saw the credits roll for the second time, heard the ding for the ‘completed as evil’ trophy followed by another for the ‘completed on hard’ trophy, but I still only have 90% total because collecting everything on inFamous is actually pretty damned hard!
InFamous is supposedly an open world sandboxy kind of game where you play Cole, thrust into being a super-person and left to fend for himself in a city filled with nutcases with guns. I have my own belief on how linear sandbox games really are, because if, like me, you can’t watch a mission go past without completing it (even if technically it’s a ‘side mission’) then inFamous is just as linear as Final Fantasy XIII. Still, I don’t mind, I didn’t play it because I was after a feeling of being able to go anywhere. So let’s start at the beginning then.
After a mysterious explosion with you at the heart, you wake up with some cool new superpowers; mainly the ability to shoot lightning from your fingertips and an immunity to death by falling, then you set about trying to get out of the city which proves harder than it should be and puts you in the position of having to undertake some missions to win your freedom. One of the lovely things about inFamous is that throughout the game you feel that what is going on makes sense (or at least, when it doesn’t, you know it will later). Simple touches like the fact you die if you come into contact with large bodies of water (because you’re all electric - don’t try to dig into the logic too far or you’ll start saying “but the human body is mainly water” and it’ll all go downhill from there) mean that the sea that surrounds the island city is a proper barrier and not just one where you sit there thinking ‘why can’t I just swim away’? Your powers get better as the game progresses, adding grenades and rockets and all sorts and though they are all just analogous to shooting game standard weapons, it’s quite cool that it’s all done through lightning - it feels a little more Star Wars than Call of Duty in that way.
So you end up in the loop of find mission / complete mission / upgrade power / learn a little more story and the map slowly becomes revealed to you. One of the supposed stand out features of inFamous is the fact you can roam all over the map, climbing to incredible heights and jumping without fear to the ground (well, you might fear the twenty or so bad guys with guns standing there on the ground, but you’re not going to fear the drop), and Cole is good enough to cling to pretty much anything he can find making the climbing a lot easier than Prince of Persia, Uncharted et al. The problem with the climbing though is twofold; one, it is too easy and there’s no sense of achievement about getting anywhere, it’s just a case of mashing the X button and arriving at the top of a building; two, Cole is a little too clingy and you can’t easily perform accurate little drops as you are bound to end up hugging the very bit of wall or pole you are trying to get away from. These are little niggles though, as generally the sense of zooming about the city does feel very superpowered; if you compare Cole to Nathan Drake or the Prince, you feel he has the edge when it comes to traversing a cityscape and he’d definitely win a race - thus the difference between superhero and umm, normalhero.
The missions can be a bit repetitive too, with 70% of them being variants on ‘kill this group of badguys’ and the other 30% clones of each other, but even through two sequential playthroughs, they don’t actually become boring and you’re always happy to mash the next group of guys without prejudice. There’s an XP system which is adjusted by game difficulty, meaning that on hard I wasn’t able to upgrade everything in a playthrough and had to make a couple of choices as to what I wanted towards the end, and there’s a variety in weapons depending on your good / evil choice, so it’s not at all a play-in-the-same-way game the second time through.
This leads me on to the good / evil mechanic, another thing which the game is infamous for (sorry!). It’s all a bit in your face, to be honest, with you literally being told ‘do this and you get good points, do this and you get evil points’, which is a shame because some ambiguity around what the choices actually do would have been a lot nicer; Dragon Age Origins still has the medal for best morality system and this comes off a lot worse. Simply put, you do the nasty stuff to get evil points and the obvious good stuff to get good ones. The feel of the game does change significantly through your choices though in both obvious and subtle ways, and I found myself disliking my evil playthrough because the game ended up feeling oppressive, whereas my good game was a lot brighter in tone. It’s all good fun though, and draining one of the whining women pedestrians that walk past of her life force in order to save you mid-battle is definitely a high point of being evil that makes it worth a go!
Where inFamous shines though is in its plot and conclusion. It’s by far the best plot I’ve ever seen in a western computer game, and though some of the Final Fantasy plots are better, this one never descends into Japanese weirdness at the end, which all FF games tend to do. I sat back at the end of my first run through, felt extremely satisfied with the story outcome, and immediately determined to pre-order the sequel. Oh, and I’ve watched a couple of the trailers for that and it looks amazing: a serious visual upgrade on the first game! Looking forward to it.
In conclusion, I loved inFamous. I loved it enough to spend over a week running through it all again as soon as the credits rolled and though it has a great number of weak spots which stop it being perfect (too grey, annoying boss fights, repetition and no reason why you can’t enter a building), it also has a huge number of qualities that make it a standout game. As a PS3 exclusive, it’s yet another reason to own one.
