inFamous Review - PS3

8

Gameplay: 8
Graphics: 7
Audio: 8
Innovation: 5

Introduction

Sucker Punch Productions is known for the PlayStation 2’s Sly Cooper series, a well-received trilogy of platformers, but for their first current-generation game, they’ve crafted a brand new property. Infamous, rather lamely marketed as “inFAMOUS”, takes the platforming to the sandbox world of Empire City and places you in the shoes of Cole, an innocent bike messenger. Caught up in a mysterious explosion, he discovers he can control electricity, but as the world falls to pieces around him, the temptation to control society too may prove too much to resist.

Gameplay

Infamous is a third person open world action platformer – the sort of thing you’d get by mixing Crackdown and, say, Fable. As you recover from your injuries and start hunting for the reason why the whole world has come crashing down around you, you’ll explore more of the city’s three islands and gradually increase your powers. Cole has been charged (hah) with electricity, and is able to harness it in progressively cooler ways. That does mean you’ll spend a lot of time draining streetlights and cars and power grids for health and “ammunition”. Time invested finding blast shards hidden across the city is rewarded with new power cells – a welcome boon that makes life easier in battle. And no, you don’t get fire or water powers. You get a really deep, well-constructed electricity-based game, which for the most part feels like enough.

The game clearly separates main missions from optional side missions, so you can always stick to the story if that’s your thing, but there are plenty of reasons to diverge to those optional yellow icons. First, once you complete a mission you’ll take command of that area of the island, meaning that you won’t run into enemies. You’ll also gain experience points, which can be cashed in for new and upgraded moves. Plus, certain missions tie into the karma system, which is central to the game.

You see, along the course of the story Cole must make moral decisions between actions for the greater good of the city and actions for his own benefit (retributive justice). The game rewards you with more devastating powers the further along the good-evil axis you travel away from neutral. The abilities are different either way, which changes the way the game is played – as a hero, you have to stop and pop because destruction of public property is a no-no. As a villain, your powers become ever more explosive, because you don’t have to worry about destroying your surroundings.

In these types of games I always feel compelled to play as a good character, so for Infamous I made the conscious decision to always choose the evil option. That meant being selfish and hoarding resources for myself, being wantonly destructive with little regard for civilian casualties, and even harvesting bodies for health. (As a hero, you can revive fallen civilians – I realised late in the game that the easiest way to affect your karma meter is by your actions towards injured NPCs.) ...