inFamous - First Impressions

Yet another huge PS3 exclusive has finally arrived, but was it worth the wait? You play as Cole, a completely normal man that's been infused with these electrical powers that he's slowly gaining an understanding of as he progresses throughout his adventure. What hasn't been completely clear in the marketing is how he comes across these powers. When you start up the game, you're shown the title screen that simply says the title of the game and "press start", with the serene city at night being displayed as the backdrop. The second that you press the start button, ish hits the fan. Hard. Instead of giving you a typical introduction where you have some abilities at the start, or starting you off as a character without powers that gains them through the adventure, pressing start triggers a gigantic electrical explosion, completely altering the landscape and killing tons of people before you even take your first steps in this game. After the explosion is done, you're shown some comic book style scenes, then you're awakened to the sounds of yelling over helicopter blades. Because the game starts off with you directly triggering the explosion, the movement tutorial area is you trying to escape what appears to be ground zero for the explosion. As you continue forward, you'll slowly notice things are reacting strangely to you, specifically electrical items that spark as you walk by. After progressing through this tutorial area, you eventually black out and awaken on the roof of a building with your friend there, giving you another tutorial on how to use your newly awakened electrical powers, and after you're done, you're completely free to explore the first island.



This is probably the most incredible way to explain a superhero/supervillain's origin that I've ever seen. Since you're actually learning about abilities throughout your adventure, it's pretty awesome when you yourself are seeing various powers awakening. While I was a bit put off by the looseness of the camera controls at first, you're able to go into the menu and change between a normal, fast, and faster setting, which might not be as precise as a slider, but lowering it down to normal worked fine for me. One of the heavily marketed aspects is the entire morality system, which gives players a completely different skill set depending on how they play. For doing good deeds, you slowly become a hero, which causes people to cheer as they see you leaping between rooftops or simply walking down the street, while also opening up quests that you can only do as a hero. From a powers standpoint, the hero powers are a bit more like sniper attacks, allowing you to focus on a specific target while the infamous powers are more damaging to a general area, since you're most likely going to be causing as much chaos as possible. While Sucker Punch could have probably just gotten away with simply reskinning the moves to be either blue or red, instead they have moves and missions that you can only embark on if you're playing a good or bad character, and in order to stay at the highest level of either side, you have to continuously perform good/bad deeds. In terms of mission structure, you've got story missions, good and evil missions, and other missions. The story missions obviously push you forward in the game, while the good and evil missions are dedicated to allowing you to make large jumps in either direction of the morality system. The other missions are mostly just things that you do for random citizens that, while they ultimately don't affect your morality or anything, they do give you a bit of experience and completing them causes enemies to stop appearing in that section of the island.



Graphically, while it's not the best looking game ever, it's still incredibly pretty and does an amazing job of creating a gritty yet realistic environment. The animations on Cole and the pedestrians are part of what gives this immersive feeling. When you're scaling up the side of buildings, leaping over poles, or dodging between cars while taking shots at enemies, everything feels extremely fluid. There's something about the way Cole reacts to the environment that just screams awesome, especially when you're dangling from a wire with one hand while targeting an enemy and watching the ensuing explosions. The car models work, and while they're not particularly great or anything, they all capture that worn down look that you would expect to see after a disaster of this magnitude happens, and it's pretty impressive when you launch a car that was driving down the road into a group of enemies and you look over to see the person inside slowly die at the wheel, which might be grim but makes perfect sense in context. While I haven't noticed any blood, the death animations are pretty believable depending on how you take out an enemy. Last but not least, the comic style cutscenes are beautiful to look at, but that style of delivering major story points might not be for everyone, but it is an extremely stylish alternative to the various in game storyline elements and adds a bit of variety.

I'll admit that the first time I had tried out the demo, I wasn't a fan of how the movement felt and almost found the game to be a bit boring, but if you let yourself just screw around in the world and pick your own play style, it's easy to just lose yourself for hours here. While the black and white morality choices might not click with everyone that wants more options in games, it's still extremely fun once you just embrace it and decide to go down your path, either healing everyone you find while doing tons of good deeds or just causing as much chaos as possible, from starting riots to finding a way to just screw the city over completely, and it's really awesome to see that people in the world are constantly reacting to you. The score works, and while I haven't noticed any memorable songs in it, there's also been nothing grating to listen to, and the voice actors and actresses all feel like they've done a great job of capturing how each character is supposed to be feeling, extending from major characters to random civilians crying out in amazement at your actions or hatred for what you've done. Controlling Cole gets to a point where it just clicks, and since the game slowly introduces more abilities to you, you don't start off with a million things you have to know, but once you've mastered those skills and powered them up, you can pull them off without much thought at all. I'm only about 6 hours in so far, so all of this is subject to change, but I really think this is a must own game on ps3 right now, or at least checking out what it has to offer. Once I'm done, there will be a review up and of course, once Prototype comes out, I'll do a comparison between this, that, and Crackdown. So far, this game definitely feels unique in comparison to anything else I've played since the movement system is so fluid, you can actually stop enemies from spawning, you've got different ways to develop your character depending on how you play the game, which is complimented by the morality system. If you don't want to drop the 60$ on it, there's always the demo up on PSN that you could give a try.