Sunday, July 5, 2009

inFAMOUS review



Sucker Punch’s (the studio responsible for the Sly Cooper series) debut on the PS3 has finally arrived in the form of Infamous. It’s been one of the most hyped PS3 titles in gaming circles and while it instantly draws comparisons to Crackdown and Prototype, this title truly is in a league of it’s own with its moral choice system and the slight rpg elements included. Some may complain that the game lacks a true morality system since in order to get the most powerful version of yourself, you have to be truly good or truly evil, it’s fairly obvious that the game wasn’t designed with the concept of a grey area in mind and it embraces it with every choice that you make.


Gameplay – 8/10

Let’s clarify one thing now: inFamous is a pretty long game. That said, for the 30 or so hours it will take you to complete the main quest, you’re going to be in for one incredible ride and is well worth every cent of its price. Not to go into too much detail, the game starts off with a picture of a bike and the title screen displayed above it. The moment you press start, theres instantly an explosion, which serves as your prologue and sets you up for your cleverly integrated tutorial mission. As you progress through the game, you come through a few more sequences extending all the way up to the final hours where you enter a room and end up coming across a sewer that sets you up with a new power but also functions as a tutorial to help you come to grips with the controls for that specific move. Eventually, you'll find a point when you're easily able to judge exactly how far it is that you're going to be jumping and pinpointing your landing. Fortunately if you miscalculate a leap, the incredible parkour stuff kicks in.
Cole, for whatever reason, is extremely agile and capable of scaling nearly any building that populates the lush city. Any single ledge that you can see jutting out even the smallest bit is completely open for you to grab, which leads directly into the first complaint. Cole literally grabs anything within reach, which is awesome when you're scaling buildings vertically, but the moment you need to go sideways? You're going to find yourself wanting to leap from one side of the building, across two windows and a drain, then grabbing that very last one, but instead the game automatically forces you to grab on all of the things in between. Another major time this becomes an issue is during combat sequences when an enemy launches a rocket at you and you really need to dodge, but end up getting hit because you grabbed something you didn't mean to. It's nothing too major, but it does detract from the experience a small bit. Progression through the game, as previously mentioned, unlocks tons of abilities depending on which path you take, with the good side focusing more on sniper like attacks and the evil path gives you a huge area of destruction, since that's probably what you want anyway, right?
Once you become settled with the controls and gain some of the more powerful abilities, Cole truly becomes a force that can't be stopped... except by water and chain link fences. Dodging foes attacks becomes second nature as does using your environment and their strengths to your advantage. For a quick example, the kamikaze enemies you see throughout the streets are able to be blown back into a mob and detonated, taking it and several other creatures out with it. Of course, using your powers does drain your energy a bit, but quickly tapping the L3 key shows lighting icons throughout the world via minimap that you can drain in the middle of a fight, or you can drain enemies/civilians for a quick boost as well. While the entire game is pretty satisfying, unfortunately the mission variety starts to get stale about halfway through, with the basic missions being slightly different variations of things you've previously done. While I didn't mind, a lot of criticism has been aimed at how you do have moral choices, but it's almost always along the lines of "help the old lady cross the street" or "help the old lady cross the street, but when she's halfway across, shoot her into traffic, revive her, then detonate every car that surrounds her and wipe her and entire population nearby out as well." While the choices themselves may be extremely black and white, they do add a noticable change to your character and the way the city reacts to them, going so far as to slightly alter the ending and the way certain major events play out. It might not be the most incredible way to do moral choices, it actually starts to feel really fun, and that's what games like this should be about anyway. Last but not least, the storyline does a good job of giving you a slightly above average origin story and outcome of a completely original super hero that you could easily see belonging inside the Marvel or DC universe and the limited number of major characters in the cast allows you to become more attached to them than you realize.


Graphics - 8/10

While Cole is an important character, it almost feels like the central focus of inFamous at times is the city itself. Cole's character design isn't anything spectacular and could probably find itself comfortably fitting in any other game of this type and you wouldn't notice. His animations, however, are fabulous. While the controls feel great themselves, the fluidity of animations when you're running , then make a daring leap and grab on to a ledge just looks exactly how you would want it to. His various idle animations actually made me smile since this is one of the few 3rd person action games that has not just one, but several that happen as you're sitting there waiting. Sucker Punch really did an amazing job of giving you certain awesome looking moments that when you're holding on to an object with one while reaching out and pulling the electricity out of a nearby structure, or the way he slightly reaches up when he's crouched behind cover to take off a quick shot at an enemy. Enemy designs, while cool looking in the sleek comic style cutscenes, don't really look all that amazing in game. It's fine since you're almost too busy to notice, but instead of coming of as clever or creepy when they're alone, they just look...odd. NPC's in inFamous have enough models that create the illusion of a crowd when necessary, but you'll quickly find yourself coming across some of the same models throughout the 3 islands, which isn't bad considering how large the world is. Unfortunately the models for the cars are pretty bland, but that almost encourages you to just make one explode, which makes them look a lot better.

Sound - 6/10

Since this is such an anticipated title, it's a downer that there's almost no sort of soundtrack in 95% of the game. When the score does come into play, it's never intrusive in its style, but at the same time it's incredibly forgettable and seems to just happen at random times. I'm not certain if inFamous supports custom soundtracks either, so a lot of what you're going to be hearing will be the sounds of combat, the city, and npc's along with sporadic chatter with various characters from your cell phone. While the soundtrack and its integration was completely overlooked by the developer, the voice acting does a pretty good job. Cole's voice amused me since it captured that feeling of constantly being annoyed with people asking for his assistance, while others did an excellent job of portraying whatever emotion they were trying to get across. Since the sound effects consist of powers created via electricity, the team had a lot of liberty in creating whatever sounds they wanted to (I can't name a single person that's ever heard what's essentially a electric rocket launcher in real life) yet somehow everything sounds exactly how you would expect it to. A really nice touch that is typically overlook that inFamous completely nails is that NPC's actually react to you in the world, and even though it's not much, it's better than hearing "The hero of kvatch!" for 50 hours.


Overall – 8/10

For PS3 owners, inFamous is a must buy, without a doubt. If you're still a bit skeptical, you should at least borrow or rent it. The sheer size of the world, number of missions, interesting story, and creative powers will give you tons to do. Completionists will have tons of orbs to collect, which help to increase how much energy you have for your moves, the three islands to reclaim, two different stories, and loads of areas to explore. While the game on a whole is incredibly entertaining, the downside is that since there's so much to do, after playing about 50% of the time, you'll start to notice that even though theres so much stuff there, a lot of it lacks the polish of more focused games. The lack of a soundtrack for almost the entire game slowly takes it toll on you and drags the otherwise solid experience down a bit. Anyone that's a fan of superheroes, comics, sandbox games, or just looking for something to do this summer should definitely find a way to play this this out, but inFamous isn't quite what I could recommend to anyone looking for a system seller since there's all these minor gripes that add up. On the other hand, if you're looking for a game to add to your library or you're thinking of picking up a ps3 with this and a few other games, you're going to have an incredible amount of fun here.