REVIEW: inFAMOUS

inFA­MOUS box art

inFA­MOUS

                Funny thing about the apoc­a­lypse: it hasn’t hap­pened as of yet, but we all pretty much know what to expect based upon how it would come about. We all say “If soci­ety came crash­ing down I’d do such and such.” We all have pretty much decided whether we will be good or bad once the rules we fol­low no longer apply. The ques­tion is if it really did all come crash­ing down, would things go the way we planned? Enter Empire City, your stan­dard New York City clone and the world of inFA­MOUS, the first PS3 game from the mak­ers of the Sly Cooper series. You are Cole Mac­Grath, your aver­age every­day nobody with an aver­age every­day job that is going nowhere. Sud­denly every­thing changes and you are the cen­ter of atten­tion. One has to ask, “Do I make the best of the sit­u­a­tion or do I just take advan­tage of it and make things bet­ter for myself?” As you play through the game, almost every­thing you do involves a moral choice; choices that cumu­la­tively shape your char­ac­ter and deter­mine how you will progress. Imag­ine GTAIII with a con­science. You might think that sounds like no fun at all – but then you pick up this game and see just how wrong you are.

STORY

                Cole Mac­Grath is a bicy­cle mes­sen­ger. He loves his girl­friend, Trish Dai­ley and his best friend Zeke Jedidiah Dun­bar is like a brother to him. His life is sim­ple: he does his job, hangs out with Zeke get­ting into what­ever trouble/fun they can find and he spends time with the woman he loves, who coin­ci­den­tally is a para­medic. This comes in really handy the day he is told to deliver a pack­age to the His­toric Dis­trict. Turns out this pack­age is a “bomb” and it makes Cole ground zero for the worst dis­as­ter Empire City has ever seen – The His­toric Dis­trict is now quite aptly named as it is marked by a huge crater. The War­ren looked like crap before and now it’s worse with half the pen­i­ten­tiary look­ing like some­thing took a huge bite out of it. Last but not least, the Neon Dis­trict is just not look­ing so col­or­ful these days, and this is still dur­ing the good times. Three days after the explo­sion, you wake up and start dis­play­ing elec­tri­cal abil­i­ties Trish and Zeke are scared at first, but they help you con­trol your pow­ers. The sto­ry­telling is done in comic book form which is very fit­ting for the game and on the morn­ing of the four­teenth day, you are given con­trol of Cole and the story begins – but is it the story of a superhero, or that of a supervil­lain? That’s really up to you now. The con­cept of good Cole vs. bad Cole is pre­sented very well and Cole’s appear­ance changes as he becomes more heroic or evil, a la KOTOR or Fable. The only unfor­tu­nate dip in the sto­ry­telling is that the main mis­sions are exactly the same regard­less of your path. I noticed dur­ing one cutscene on my evil playthrough that Cole’s aura was blue (that of the hero) despite my dis­tinctly evil karma rat­ing. This was not enough to take away from over­all enjoy­ment of the game, espe­cially since the numer­ous side mis­sions do change based upon your karma. Good Cole always has to stand alone against his ene­mies. Con­versely, bad Cole at cer­tain points gets to have min­ions. Your ene­mies also change based upon your karma: good Cole only fights bad guys but evil Cole often has to fight every­one. I can only hope to be wrong about this but right now infa­mous has (for me) the best sto­ry­telling in a 2009 videogame. With­out spoil­ing, I will say that the big reveal was a jaw-dropper for me.

Score: 9.9/10

comic book-style cutscenes

GRAPHICS/CAMERA

                Empire City is an “ugly yet beau­ti­ful world.” The city was blown up; the hero is pow­ered by elec­tric­ity so his ene­mies black­out the city to try and ren­der him pow­er­less – there sim­ply is not much to look at in Empire City. Regard­less of this, the back­grounds are well drawn, the fram­er­ate is solid and the char­ac­ter mod­els show that there was effort put in by the artists. This is a post-apocalyptic sce­nario, but only within the actual city. The rest of the world is fine and that is part of the dynamic the game is going for. Empire City is falling apart, both fig­u­ra­tively and lit­er­ally and it shows as you progress. If you become a hero, the city gets brighter as you restore power. If you become infa­mous, the city looks bleak and dis­mal; fewer peo­ple walk the streets and the sky even­tu­ally is red dur­ing the day. It’s a shame that this game is so prone to glitches. There are even places where you can inten­tion­ally glitch the game and have Cole walk and fall through solid objects. There is also some slight popup where cars just appear out of nowhere, espe­cially on bridges. Aside from this, the cam­era has no real issues that I can recall. I had no prob­lem dur­ing boss bat­tles or even reg­u­lar fights in tight alley­ways. The draw dis­tance is awe­some – using “pre­ci­sion” which is basi­cally a sniper mode, you can head­shot an enemy through a crack in their shield from a rooftop. In terms of detail, there are not many games on the PS3 to rival this one; I just hope the inevitable sequel deals with the glitches and popup.

Score: 9.0

Cole vs. Trash Golem

MUSIC/SOUND EFFECTS/VOICE ACTING

                I swear I’d pay to be able to hear the con­ver­sa­tions between Sasha and Kessler – that must be some twisted dia­logue. It’s hard to talk about this game with­out giv­ing spoil­ers because the sto­ry­telling was ter­rific. Audio plays a big part in the game because you spend the entire game col­lect­ing “dead drops,” which are encrypted satel­lite trans­mis­sions left by John, an NSA agent, for his han­dlers to find. It’s a very cool touch that when you are near a dead drop satel­lite that you can hear a trans­mis­sion sound since there are other dishes on rooftops . Cole owns a cell phone, and every­body seems to know his num­ber. He gets a call at least before and after every mis­sion and if they don’t have his num­ber, they just hack his fre­quency and then he has to lis­ten. Then we have Sasha, who speaks to Cole tele­path­i­cally – say­ing more than that would give too much away; just play the game. Top all of that chat­ter with a musi­cal score that just fits no mat­ter where you are in the game and we have a win­ner before we even men­tion the voice act­ing (hear it now at http://www.infamousthegame.com/ ). Jason Cot­tle (Cole) is just bad-ass in this lead role. I would stop right there but the char­ac­ter of John is voiced by none other than Phil LaMarr. If you don’t know who Phil LaMarr is, you prob­a­bly still love him. He’s voiced many char­ac­ters on Car­toon Net­work and car­toons from other sta­tions as well. He’s been in mul­ti­ple video games and….who am I kid­ding? All I have to say is that this is the guy that voiced Samu­rai Jack – the rest is his­tory. You want to know about sound effects – in a game about a guy that con­trols elec­tric­ity? Let’s just say my neigh­bors must have hated me because the explo­sions were insane. The final power you obtain, aptly named Thun­der­storm, will prob­a­bly make the pic­ture frames fall off your wall on a good sur­round sys­tem. Sucker Punch is def­i­nitely going for sen­sory over­load in this depart­ment and I wel­comed every moment of it.

Score: 10

GAMEPLAY

                Cole has a good deal of abil­i­ties at his dis­posal and map­ping them to the PS3 con­troller seemed like this game would be dif­fi­cult to con­trol; for­tu­nately the pac­ing of the game makes move­ment, com­bat and item hunt­ing really sim­ple to pick up if you sit and play the game for five to ten min­utes. It’s really com­fort­ing to have a game with a plat­form­ing ele­ment in it where some­one said “I’m tired of falling to my death.” Now there is the fact that Cole will not die from a fall of any height (unless he lands in water), but no one wants to fall into a group of armed bad guys either. This was fixed by what has been described as “AI jump­ing.” You have to lit­er­ally try to miss a jump off of a rooftop and even then you will prob­a­bly grab onto some­thing. Stay­ing above ground level is a very impor­tant part of com­bat. Cole is extremely durable, but he is not at all bul­let­proof.  You have about a 100% chance of dying if you try to go up against a group of Reapers/Dust Men/First Sons with­out hav­ing any­where to hide and/or recharge. Recharg­ing is the heal­ing dynamic in the game and you can do it any­where there is power (hint: when there is no power, make some by zap­ping things and pow­er­ing them up). Find­ing your way around is never a prob­lem between the mini-map and the L3 but­ton. L3 is prob­a­bly the most impor­tant but­ton in this game, even though it is not an attack. It makes Cole release an EMP wave that makes all pow­ered objects in range of it glow. When you are try­ing to find your last 10 blast shards, this tool will make you drop to your knees like Jerry Fal­well and have you thank­ing Jesus. The com­bat is noth­ing to write home about but I just had so much fun play­ing it. You can chal­lenge your­self by see­ing how long you can stay alive on ground level using just your stan­dard attack. If you can last more than a good two min­utes on hard then you should pat your­self on the back. Once you start get­ting some of the more destruc­tive abil­i­ties you just want to get some pay­back. That ran­dom guy on the rooftop with a rocket launcher needs to pay; so do the garbage golems and trash scor­pi­ons.  Prac­tice hit­ting mov­ing tar­gets at long range; you aren’t using a mouse here and the ene­mies can move really well when they want to. The major dif­fer­ence between good and evil pow­ers is that the good pow­ers are more pre­cise and the evil pow­ers are lit­er­ally for blow­ing stuff up and caus­ing ram­pant car­nage. There is the famous “Cole can­not shoot through a chain link fence” com­plaint, but this was never an issue for me. There is almost always a safe way to get rid of your ene­mies; in the later areas where that becomes less and less pos­si­ble, you should be good enough to impro­vise. You’re a guy who got his pow­ers like two weeks ago; impro­vi­sa­tion is the name of the game – but explain­ing that fur­ther would be a spoiler as well.

Score: 10

REPLAY VALUE/TROPHY & ACHIEVEMENT HUNTING

                For the tro­phy hunters, know up front that it takes min­i­mum two playthroughs for the plat­inum tro­phy. The good news about that is that this game is fun as hell to play and if you get all the col­lectibles on the first playthrough, you only really have to worry about play­ing through the main story. This may sound like I am chump­ing out but I highly rec­om­mend play­ing the game on nor­mal first and on hard the sec­ond time around. The rea­son I say this is to keep some kind of chal­lenge in the game. I got beat into the ground at some points the first time I played and that was the heroic story on nor­mal. My sec­ond time around, I played the infa­mous track on hard and mopped the floor with every­one includ­ing the final boss. When you get good at this game, you just start rag­ing all over the bad guys. The stunts are a bitch to com­plete and you really want to get those out of the way as soon as you can. Unlock­ing all of the abil­i­ties and the upgrades is really just a mat­ter of patience. Until you clear an area, there are always plenty of ene­mies to fight for expe­ri­ence points. There are one or two tro­phies that may seem really dif­fi­cult like Hot­foot and AC/DC, but even those are easy once you deter­mine how you will accom­plish them. Since there is no online com­po­nent to this game, there is no way to tro­phy boost for those look­ing for an easy road. There is not much to do on a third or greater playthrough if you have your plat­inum tro­phy other than just hav­ing some fun, which is easy because the game is not that long. Still, when you are done with this game, you are done – all you really want to know is when the sequel will come out.

Score: 8.9  

OVERALL

                infa­mous was the first big exclu­sive for the PS3 in 2009. Due to tim­ing and early game info, it was heav­ily com­pared to [PROTOTYPE], but hav­ing played both, let me assure you the games are noth­ing alike (and you should expe­ri­ence both for what they are worth). The story in this game was fresh com­pared to what I have been see­ing in games lately and it made room for an inevitable sequel that I for one am dying to play. The audio and video were sim­ply beau­ti­ful and make my mouth water with antic­i­pa­tion of what the sec­ond game could look like (can we please have it in 1080p instead of 720?). The game­play was very good, not great and I def­i­nitely want to see a bit more vari­a­tion in pow­ers in the next iter­a­tion, but sticky grenades and thun­der­storms are oh so sat­is­fy­ing; things like that need no fix­ing. A game that begs to be played twice is def­i­nitely worth the price tag for a pure single-player expe­ri­ence, and this is a gem all PS3 own­ers should have in their library.

Final Score: 9.6

Decide the fate of Empire City.

Handel

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