inFamous
What’s better than being able to summon a lightning storm to fry your enemies? The answer is having a nice plate of chips to go with the crispy BBQ bad guys. One of the core gaming aspects of inFamous is the wide variety of electricity-based powers that never get old. Even the basic lightning bolt power that you can use from the moment you can use your powers is used throughout the game and is very satisfying to shoot enemies and allies alike with.
The simple pleasures that come from having a super-powered protagonist aside, inFamous is a very entertaining game to play through; the story is well written with enough twists to keep you interested, but not so complex that one loses interest. The usual movie sequences you get in most games are replaced by comic book-style slightly animated drawings with Cole McGrath [our protagonist] doing the voiceovers. I don’t want to reveal too much for those who haven’t played it, but when you reach the final cut-scene you get the “oh, didn’t see that coming” reaction, and the pieces of the puzzle slide into place.
The storyline itself doesn’t take that long to finish, even on hard mode. Although for me, it may have been because I just played it solidly for nearly an entire weekend. I’d estimate you can get a good 12 hours of gameplay just from the main storyline, if you stop to do some of the various side-quests you can add another couple of hours on top of that. Even once you’ve finished the main storyline you get the opportunity to go back and collect all the shards [350 collectables scattered throughout the world to give you more electricity to use], clear all areas of enemies and finish off either the good or evil side-quests.
Now as you may or may not have heard, one of the main selling points of inFamous is the ability to choose whether your character plays through the game in the most evil or heroic way possible, or somewhere in between if you’re feeling a little indecisive. Admittedly this is played up to be a little more free than it actually is; you can’t really go through the game making half good, half bad “karma” choices because that will leave you almost neutral, thus preventing you from being able to unlock the more powerful upgrades for your various abilities. Luckily however more than half of the powers are ‘neutral’ and can therefore be upgraded to maximum no matter which karma choices you make.
I may have made this up to be a really awesome game without any errors but even inFamous is not without flaws; sometimes the game bugs slightly and you’ll sink slightly into a wall or area of floor, it feels in some small areas slightly under-polished. The graphical properties are also slightly flawed. For instance, when you’re zooming around on top of a train or using your own electrical powers to slide yourself along one of the tracks, the game doesn’t load the next area of the city quite as it should – you can see a slightly fuzzy area of track in front of you that suddenly loads properly, it’s not quite right. As well as all this the character animations for most of the civilians in the city aren’t that great, the AI is good but their voices aren’t always in sync and their animations just look a bit too basic.
However, I am none of these things affect your gameplay experience enough for you to notice very much. This is still one of the most enjoyable experiences I have had on the PS3 and is worth buying for the super-powered lightning rod, on top of the fact that you can play it through twice [once as a hero and once as a villain] without it getting at all old.
Overall 9/10.
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