Review: inFAMOUS
By Joshua WhitleyThe first game from developer Sucker Punch to grace the PlayStation 3, inFAMOUS is a sandbox style game that plays out like a comic book, complete with beautifully drawn still cut-scenes and terrific voice acting. Reviewing this game will be a short affair because quite simply, the flaws in inFAMOUS are so minor that none of them bring down the game in any way. In my personal opinion, this is one of those games like Dead Space and BioShock (after the Vita Chamber patch) that I just can’t find anything bad to hold against it. It is as perfect of a game as you could hope for on current generation hardware and even after finishing it twice, I still want to play more.
inFAMOUS puts you in the shoes of Cole, a bike messenger in Empire City who starts off the game by waking up in a smoking crater the size of several city blocks. His memory is foggy, his body is banged up, a mysterious voice is commanding him towards an unknown destiny, and it seems he’s now at the center of a plague that is turning average citizens into fearsome gangs of hoodlums who terrorize the streets. The government has setup a quarantine around Empire City so it’s up to you to find a way out and help your friends survive. You’ll have to rely on your goofy friend Zeke, your ex-girlfriend Trish, and a shadowy FBI agent named Moya to navigate the city and track down Kessler, the man who seems to be holding all the cards in this mystery. Oh, and you get to shoot freakin’ lighting from your hands!
As a broad overview, inFAMOUS borrows many elements from other successful games that have hit the market recently. It’s a sandbox game with main story and side missions, very similar to the GTA series. It’s got a moral choice system that really forces you to choose between light and dark at every turn, similar to BioShock. The combat may use super powers, but it’s really just an over-the-shoulder third person shooter with other, smaller, elements of popular ideas fused into an eclectic mix of design. However, it manages to come across as feeling fresh and new for a variety of reasons.
The story missions range from heading into the sewers to repair the electrical grid and restoring power to the city, to escorting friends around town as they help the sick and wounded to make-shift hospitals, to racing against the clock to disarm bombs chained to innocent civilians setup by your nemesis Kessler. You’ll also face some semi-bosses and full on boss fights, some of which are rather tricky with multiple patterns to learn and work around. The side missions are really the saving grace of this game, as often in these sandbox games we wind up doing the same three or four missions over and over again. InFamous, on the other hand, has more than a dozen different missions which it mixes up regularly. In addition, within the side missions are special goals and objectives that focus on good and evil deeds. These missions add to your karma score while also unlocking valuable special powers you can only get from completing these missions.
But your control over Cole is the true star of the show. He reacts to controller input quickly and accurately. The level of transparency here is some of the best I’ve seen in quite a while. All of the movement feels natural and the corresponding animations are a treat. Scaling buildings, jumping from roof top to roof top, dodge-rolling from side to side during firefights all feel really nice under your hands. Second, the combat is fun and engaging with a variety of enemies who react to your attacks in different ways. In the beginning, you’ll be fighting mostly hoodlums with AK-47 rifles who take a few zaps to put down. As the game progresses, however, the variety of enemies will expand to include a host of tougher dudes and even some oddballs like a giant golem made of trash that you’ll have to methodically take apart piece by piece. Also expect to see Semi-trucks with machine gun turrets on the back, flying drone robots that can turn invisible and shoot grenades at you, and even little energy spiders that will swarm you if you don’t take them down quickly.
Your super powers manifest themselves in some common third person shooter conventions, and some that are more exotic. You’ll start off with a basic bold attack that will let you take aim and zap any enemy within a hundred yards or so. You’ll eventually get a Shock Grenade and the powerful Megawatt Hammer which is sort of like a rocket launcher. Later in the game you’ll also pick up the Precision ability which is more or less a sniper rifle. The more unconventional tools include a shock wave that will hurl away anything near you including cars, enemies, and flying projectiles. The Static Thruster ability will let you execute a controlled descending glide from high places and carry you further than a simple jump. Combine Static Thrusters with the Induction Grind ability which lets you rapidly skate along electrical lines and you’ll be zipping around town in style. Cole’s abilities are really fun to use and given the open world nature of the game, you’re free to climb up the nearest building and just start flying, grinding, and blowing stuff up stuff killing scores of enemies…or civilians…as you see fit. Sucker Punch gets a gold star for their combat design and execution.
It also helps that inFAMOUS runs really well. When you first load up the game, you’ll see a ten second boot up screen, and then you’re in the game world. After you begin a game for the first time, you will never be taken to the main menu. The game will always auto-load the most recent save file, cutting through the tedious process of navigating menus. On top of that, the game has no load times to speak of. When was the last time you saw a giant sandbox game with a fully fledged digital city that had no load times? If Cole is taken down in battle, you’ll see a short fade out and back in as he wakes up at a clinic, but that’s it. The game loads all scenery in real time and texture pop-in is pretty rare. I have no official word on this, but I suspect the game is running on a modified version of the Uncharted engine, which was also praised for having no load times.
As far as complaints go, I could complain about how the start menu screen does not list a description of your current objective, so if you get side tracked after accepting one the lack of a goal marker on the map can become confusing. I could mention that the good vs. evil paths don’t seem to effect the game in any meaningful way because the main story plays out the same no matter which path you choose, but that’s tough to complain about given that you pick up a couple of unique abilities for good and evil paths, not to mention a load of trophies. I could get on a soapbox about games that have a collectible quest with more than 300 individual items to find (remember those flags in Assassin’s Creed?), but in inFAMOUS the collectibles serve a purpose by increasing the amount of electrical energy Cole can store in his body. And I already mentioned the occasional texture pop-in, but that is swiftly negated by the complete lack of loading time throughout the entire game. So all in all, the minor issues with this game simply can’t be held against it.
If all of the above goodness wasn’t enough, the game also has a fantastic soundtrack that defaults to DTS Master Audio, a lossless track with great emphasis on the discrete surround channels. I haven’t heard my rear speakers this active since the last time I watched The Kingdom. An industrial musical score filled with trash cans, kitchen gadgets, and other manor of junkyard instruments mixes with subtle direction to throw some great music at you while you’re playing. Sound effects are also pretty good, though they don’t stand up to the best games in the field such as Dead Space. Still, blowing up cars shooting dudes with lightning attacks sounds plenty convincing. A surround sound system will come in handy when you’re crawling around on the roof tops wondering where those bullets whizzing by your head are coming from.
In the end, inFAMOUS is a great game. If you haven’t purchased a PS3 yet, put this game on your day one purchase list along with Uncharted: Drakes Fortune and Killzone 2. If you’ve already sunk the cash into a colossal black monster, you should get a hold of this game as soon as possible. I’ve spent more than forty hours with inFAMOUS so far, and I haven’t gotten bored yet. It looks and sounds fantastic, the trophies are all obtainable in two runs, it runs smooth as silk, and it’s got great voice acting, writing, and beautiful new school style comic art throughout the entire campaign. It just doesn’t get much easier to recommend a game than this.
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