inFamous
Infamous is a realistic sandbox/ action adventure/ comic based game from the creators of the Sly franchise, but Infamous has almost nothing in common with the Sly series except the comic- book inspired story and cut scenes. In Infamous you play as Cole McGrath an ordinary bike messenger/ urban explorer which gets superpowers after he delivers a package that is actually a bomb which explodes and devastates over six square blocks and leaves him in the middle of a gigantic crater with dead people everywhere. Cole then realize that his gotten the superpowers to control electricity.
Government seals of the city to try containing the plaguing pandemic that happens right after the explosion and everyone in the city are left on their own. Soon after the explosion some bad guys calling themselves the reapers who are plagued survivors and gangs is invading the Empire City. It´s with your new founded powers and great new responsibility to clean up the madness surrounding the citadels. The enemies are many with an arsenal of weapons and powers which will make it a great challenge and because you are a one man army it won’t be a cakewalk and you will die a couple of times especially in the beginning of the game. But because of the great checkpoint system that will often restart you where you were right before, and later in the game having such a big arsenal of powers that it will become easier but the enemies will still be hard to defeat. There are only three different bosses in the entire game but it keeps the game more realistic and those bosses are pretty entertaining as well
The city is massive with three big islands which is a richly interactive and organic and Cole who is an urban explorer has no problems getting through the city by scaling building with ease and with his new powers he can also levitate in air between buildings and ride on railroad tracks or power lines or even hitchhiking on trains which makes it fast traversing between the islands. When you jump between the ledges, pipes or other objects are magnetizing so it is very easy to traverse through and dynamic. Throughout the entire city are 350 blast shards scattered after the great explosion that will make you search every inches to get the extra life bars or the trophies, and finding all of the shards are easier then what it is in other similar games because Cole can be sort of a metal detector who can detect a big radius of the shards with a simple tap of the L3 button. There are also satellites in different location which have personal voice recordings and interesting back stories that will give you a bit more information about different characters.
You can use your power too attack by shooting lightning from your hands in forms of bolts, grenades, beams, long distance firing, jumping with a charging attack on the ground, dealing out a shockwave or by bringing down a giant lightning bolt from the sky who will destroy everything in its path. The powers and combos are many and varied and it will keep you regally entertained for the rest of the game.
After the big devastation of the bomb and the radiation that followed it a big array of iconic comic book- style inspired villains appears which you will have to deal with one on one. A frail old man with powerful psychogenetic, a telepathic women with serious problems, a mysterious organization, and a shadowy figure that seems to be behind some of it. The story stays interesting throughout the entire game with some major twists after half of the game that makes you wanting to find out how it will unfold until the end.
You earn experience points for defeating enemies or interfering with the citizens in different ways or by doing side missions which are often pretty varied by doing rescue missions, stalking, helping the polices or the reapers, being on top of trains and protecting it, racing between antennas and many more. With these experience points you can acquire three different upgrades for your two different types of powers, either the good controlling powers that will make less destruction and capture instead of killing most of your enemies or the evil destructive power that will cause bigger mayhem and killing your enemies. Both of the powers have different colors with blue being the good power and red the bad one and these different powers will make you look either badly torn out or more shinier and the people will react either by sheering and waving at you or by throwing rocks at you or trying to beat you down. But the biggest difference will be truly apparent by the end of the game with the fate of the entire city clearly shown. These different powers are determined by what kind of choices you make in the game that makes you play as bad- or good Cole with either choosing the bad or the good choice either directly in the storyline itself or by helping either the police, reapers and the citizens on the side missions. The good or bad choices are kind of black or white with no gray- zone in the middle but with a slight twist when you make a choice and it does not turn out as you might think it would which makes it realistic.
The main story is over 10 hours long with high replay ability and other things to do on the side which makes it an average lengthy game. The quality of the action is excellent with superb game design and fun and engaging combat, movement and story which make this a superb superhero (fame) - villain (infamous) game for everyone remotely interested in a modern day superhero-styled game.
