Infamous drops you into the charged feet of Cole McGrath, a bike messenger who has recently gained some extraordinary powers.
Caught
in a blast, Cole gains an increasing amount of control of electricity
over the course of the game. With his abilities, you lead Cole down a
path of good or bad. Sacrifice your exceptional life for the greater
good, or dominate those less powerful. Like other good/evil systems,
inFamous doesn't allow for you to make middle ground choices. It
doesn't expect you to either. Access to high end powers relies on your
driving Cole down a clean road of good or a broken path of evil. What's
usually a detriment to good/evil systems has been accepted and dealt
with in an honest way. Additionally, inFamous does a good job of
letting you make these decision with real-time actions instead of menu
choices.
As Cole returns power to a quarantined city, a
mysterious story of a virus and an orb of ultimate power unfolds. The
story is is presented in three different ways. Highly stylized 2D
comics, television programs that you can stop and watch as you walk
past, and audio dead drops that tell the story that lead up to the
beginning of the game. A visual story also tells the history of each of
inFamous' three islands, but with few specific details.
inFamous
gives you a load free and open world to explore. Cole can climb
buildings and zip along electric wires and railroad tracks to get
around. Each of the games three islands are broken up into smaller
areas containing a single side mission. Side missions include some
original mini-quests, such as ridding an apartment building of sensors
or helping medics re-establish a clinic, and smaller versions of story
missions, such as destroying terror buses. Fifteen of the side-missions
are good or bad missions, that revolve around helping or hurting the authorities and gangs. As side missions are completed, Cole gains
control over land and encounters with enemy gangs become far less
frequent.
Cole's powers center around his electric abilities. He
can shoot lighting from his hands, throw electric grenades, create and
electric shield and even call down an electric storm on his enemies.
After playing games like inFamous for a while it's easy to forget how
stiff some other game control. The fighting feels so
natural that I'm at a loss as to how to describe it. Everything comes
together in an undefinable way -- some tactile thing, something
uncodifiable. The result is easy transitions between one movement and
another without a loss of momentum or inertia.
Doug
Church has described a gaming minute; one potential minute of gameplay
created from a combination of a game's systems and player decisions.
If one were written about inFamous, it would read as follows: Cole
moves though the city, riding on electrical lines. A group of enemies
ambush him. Cole jumps and thunder drops to the ground, throwing
tossing smaller enemies around him away. Cole dodges incoming rocket
launchers from nearby rooftops. He turns, zooms in and returns with
pinpoint fire. Cole turns to the thirty foot enemy throwing rocks at
him and defects the attacks with a static push. The smaller enemies
that Cole had knocked to the ground earlier are getting back up. He
picks them off with his electrical shot while dodging fire from larger
enemies. Cole focuses on the huge enemies throwing rocks at him again,
and unleashes a barrage of electric rockets. The enemy in damaged and
glowing red, but still alive. Drained of energy, Cole finds a source of
electricity and drains it. Finally, Cole pounds the last of his enemies
with electric grenades, and stands alone in the smoking aftermath.
I
can't say enough good things about inFamous. The complaints that I have
are so small that they're hardly worth mentioning. Grenades are kind of
hard to aim, and sticking to surfaces works too well at times causing
me to stick to a surface when I just wanted to fall. That's it, and,
combined, those where an issue all of half a dozen times.
Buy
this game. Play this game. Unless you don't like actions games, or fun
games, you don't have a reason to pass up inFamous. You're only doing
yourself a disservice if you do.
