I spent all day playing inFAMOUS, and actually didn’t put it down until 3:30 AM. For those that know me, they know this is a sure fire seal of approval. A bad or merely decent game would not have kept me up past my usual bedtime of 11 PM – my sleep cycle is way too rigid for that.
After playing it this much, I have started to lean towards the thought that it borrows a lot of it’s elements from other games and does little that is straight up original, but the things it has taken it does incredibly well. The movement is reminiscent of Assassin’s Creed, the shock grenades operate and look just like Halo plasma grenades, certain enemies remind me of the shield wielding Ganados from Resident Evil 4, and so on. This isn’t a bad thing at all, because it has it wrapped into a very nice package that is a hell of a fun ride.
The story is starting to unfold a little bit more, with some characters coming out of the shadows. The story is told through two different pieces – the storyline missions where I am working for an FBI agent named Moya and uncovering the truth behind the explosion at the start of the game, and dead drop cassettes that you find throughout the city, left by an old friend of Moya’s, John, whom she is trying to find. The cassettes each tell a bit of the story of what John experienced prior to vanishing, and give a bit more information to the main story as I go through the missions. Certain scenes in the story are told through comic book style scenes that are superbly done, but I do wish they had more of those scenes.
The controls and moveset is an ever advancing beast, which I really like. I keep learning new moves, and am always excited when I go to get the next move. The moves are given when Cole receives a very large amount of electricity through him, which happens during certain missions. It’s a bit predictable when you are going to get a new move – you go into the sewers to turn electricity on to certain parts of the city – but these little areas are also laid out to help you learn how to use the new move, like how the dungeons in Zelda always emphasize the item you got in that dungeon. The movement is very fluid and intuitive, but only when going up. When I try to drop down, either to hide from gunfire or just move down, I often have difficulty getting down. Cole wants to move towards things he can grab on to (which is great for going up, so you don’t slip and fall all the way down very often), but when going down, this is a bit of a nuisance.
There are also some side missions that range from way too easy to painfully frustrating, all with the objective of taking over parts of the city and freeing it from the roaming gangs. On the easy side, I found a picture of a package that I needed to find, and that package was less than 30′ from where I was standing in a really obvious way. On the hard side, I had to stop a prison riot by climbing up the prison tower and killing all of the rioters, and the climb up the tower was so long and not obvious, I fell a few times and by the time I got to the top, the guards had killed all but two rioters. On the plus side, the view from the top of that tower was spectacular.
Visually, it looks good, but probably won’t age well. It’s fairly generic semi-realistic graphics, the kind that always get beat out next generation, and in retrospect looked pretty bad. The comic style cutscenes will definitely age well, but I doubt most of the rest of it will. It does good work with draw distances though. When I got to the top of that prison tower, I could see all three islands of the city. It was foggy, but I could see very far and it looked really good.
Once I finish the game off, I’ll return for a third writeup. It is a good game, for sure, but it may not be incredibly memorable as the years pass. It does nothing to stand out and change the gaming landscape, but everything it does it finely crafted. It was well worth the cost, but I don’t see myself picking the game up again after I am done with it this first time. Sucker Punch did well, as they always have, but this game is a bit on the generic side.