Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Mike Escobar

How would you handle the burden of ultimate power? Does absolute power corrupt absolutely? Or does it just rock absolutely? This is the question that inFamous attempts to answer in its own little way.  You play the game as Cole MacGrath, a street messenger in Empire City that gets caught in the middle of a twisting, turning plot that would baffle the writers of Lost

Imagine your confusion – you’re just doing your job delivering a package, and the next thing you know you wake up at ground zero, in the middle of a huge crater left behind by a massive explosion.  As you stagger away from the scene of the blast, a helicopter hits you with a spotlight and announces over the PA to evacuate the area immediately.  You limp slowly away, and you can see the damage caused by the blast – shattered buildings, dead bodies, and fires raging out of control.  You weave your way across the nearest bridge to what you think is safety, only to have your new abilities manifest, destroying the bridge (and everyone around you) right before losing consciousness.  Thus begins the tale of Cole and his exploration in the uses and responsibilities of power.

The ability to make a city live, breathe, and react to your character is one of the biggest advantages of the current crop of consoles.  Having the graphical and computing horsepower to handle the various people, buildings and vehicles all at once has done more for the virtual sandbox genre than nearly anything else.  Cole’s movement as he Parkours around the city; climbing, fighting, and just plain exploring is fantastic.  The lighting effects of Cole’s electricity-based powers make for gorgeous visuals that you won’t soon forget.  Hanging from the side of a building, launching lightning bolt after lightning bolt at your enemies and seeing the blast toss them around is, if you’ll pardon the pun, a blast.

As you progress through inFamous, you’ll be exploring every nook and cranny of the city’s three islands, each area with its own look and feel.  From the trash-strewn streets and alleys of the neon district to the classier, “uptown” feel of the historic district, you truly get the feeling that this is an actual city surrounding you.  The fact that the city and the people constantly change, both reacting to your decisions and the passage of time is nothing short of amazing.  If you decide to use your powers for good, people will start gathering around you, asking for your help.  From time to time you’ll even see people cheering for you, taking pictures with their cell phones and talking about how they can’t wait to tell their friends they saw you.  Go the evil route though, and as you’d expect people will avoid you, mutter behind your back, and even get to the point where they run screaming in terror whenever you show up.

The voice acting from all the major players is perfectly done.  Cole’s voice is understandably angsty, but never so over the top that he gets annoying and you don’t sympathize with him.  His sidekick Zeke is moderately clueless and fairly self-centered (especially when it comes to women), but he provides some of the lighter moments in the game without making it seem like you’re being talked down to.  The rest of the villains and government operatives are all suitably menacing and played superbly.  While it has been the recent trend to have big name actors provide the voices for your title (Samuel L. Jackson in Afro Samurai, Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber in X-Men Origins: Wolverine) the cast for inFamous is made up of little known actors that excel at bringing their characters to life, proving that even if you don’t have a big time name you can still get a big time performance.

The environmental sounds of Empire City are incredible, and just immerse you in the game that much more.  You’ll hear the sounds of traffic as you walk down the street, catching bits and pieces of other people’s conversation, only to have them drowned out as the subway rumbles by and then fades into the distance.  Standing atop a skyscraper and looking across the island you’ll hear the whistle of the wind and the hum of the rooftop air conditioning units, all providing you with the sense that you’re a part of this city.

The controls for inFamous are extremely easy to pick up and use, but are very limited in how much you can customize them.  You really only have the option to invert the y-axis control and change the speed at which the camera can pan around.  That’s the bad news.  The good news is that Controls section of the Start menu is very nicely laid out, clearly and concisely laying out the controls for all your powers.  The only other complaint I have about controlling Cole is the Parkour aspect of it.  When first introduced in Assassin’s Creed, scaling buildings and moving from rooftop to rooftop took some planning and keeping an eye out for subtle hints as to what routes were available to you.  Whether it was a small ledge or some convenient knobs in the decorative stonework, climbing a tower took some skill.  inFamous goes the other direction – you just hold the left stick in the direction you want to go and mash the jump button and you’ll scurry right up pretty much every structure in the game.  Not a major issue, but I was disappointed that they made this part of the game so very easy.

 

As previously stated, you start out inFamous staggering away from the carnage of a massive explosion that knocks out all power and causes the government to quarantine the city “for our own protection”. After four days in a coma, you wake up to find society has broken down, with the local gangs having mutated and now terrorizing the population (I hate it when that happens).  After a conversation with your best friend Zeke and a very short tutorial-type of exercise, you and Zeke are off on your very first mission.  Zeke accompanies you on the way to your objective, explaining along the way why Cole can’t use guns or ride in cars (apparently they both just explode whenever he’s around them).  While many games would just let this gap in logic slide, the developer has enough respect for gamers to give us a plausible reason why Cole can’t shoot or drive. 

Arriving at your mission location, you are tasked with rescuing some air-dropped food supplies that got stuck on top of a building.  At this point you are confronted with your first Karma Moment (KM).  Developer Sucker Punch implemented Karma Moments as a way of measuring whether your actions in the world were basically good or evil.  This has many effects in the game world.  Several of your powers are available to you only if you’re good or evil.  Also, people in the game world will react to you differently and later on in the game you are presented with some different choices and missions.  In concept it’s an incredible idea, allowing you to have a meaningful effect on your environment.  In practice though, it falls a bit short.

First of all, the major Karma Moments are blindingly obvious what direction your choice will take you.  There are no subtle unintended consequences here.  But back to your first KM mission.  Once you’ve knocked the food crates down to the ground the game pauses and you’re given the option of sharing the food with the rest of the refugees in the area, or killing a few of them and keeping all the food for you and Zeke.  Hmmm, so which choice is evil again?  By way of comparison, we are presented with plenty of moral choices in Fallout 3.  When you help the poor, downtrodden zombies take over the luxury hotel because they’ve been unfairly discriminated against, they end up living in peace with the rest of the residents, demonstrating to all of us that no matter what our backgrounds or beliefs, we can all live in harmony.  Ummm, no.  Actually, those poor downtrodden zombies wipe out (and presumably eat the brains of) everyone they can find.  Don’t worry though, in inFamous you won’t have to exercise your brain or your moral compass much.

The next KM mission you encounter is when you join a mob forming at one of the bridges that lead out of the city.  Since the government has quarantined us, the bridge has armed guards and barricades to deal with.  This time you have to decide whether to let the mob act as cannon fodder for you and take out some of the bridge guards, or whether you lead the attack yourself.  As you can see, it’s easy to tell which decision counts as evil karma.  Either way, once you complete the bridge mission you come in contact with Moya, an FBI agent with an agenda all her own.  This is where the plot twists really begin.  I don’t want to ruin any of the storyline for anyone, but take nothing and no one for granted.  Just when you think you have it all figured out, inFamous throws you another curve.

The city map in the game presents you with a host of information, including what areas have power restored, and what types of missions are currently available.  Yellow marks are side missions, giving you an opportunity to earn some experience and rid that area of gang members.  Blue marks the location of missions that advance the plot.  Evil side missions are yellow with a red background and good side missions are yellow with a blue background.  The good and evil side missions are always paired together, so if you complete the good mission for a location it will remove and lock out the evil mission in that area.

The concept of playing through the game as good or evil and having the world react to you differently is a fantastic idea, especially in this setting.  That’s why it is all the more disappointing in how the evil side is implemented.  The “good” play through is absolutely amazing.  As you restore power to the city and begin taking out the gangs the city is cleaner, businesses are open again, and there are people out on the streets.  The side missions fit in perfectly with the flow of the game, doing things like driving the gangs away from field hospitals (giving you a spot to respawn if you get killed) and assisting what few police are left in the city.

This is where the evil playthrough really falls short.  The first evil side mission you have available is called rampage.  You’ve found out through the grapevine that the cops are putting together a task force to take you out.  You decide the best way to stop the police is to cause so much property damage that they are forced to come after you before they are fully ready, making the cops far easier to take out.  As you can see, you’re not becoming evil at this point, you ARE evil.  Yet on the very next mission you get, you’re approached by some random woman who tells you that the local gangs have kidnapped her brother and she wants you to rescue him.  Now if I’m so evil, why on earth would I help this person?  This happens with a lot of the side missions when you’re playing through as evil.  And since you need the experience that comes with the side missions you have to just try and ignore all the good you’re accomplishing when you do them.

Combat offers a huge variety of choices for gameplay, and not just the difference in powers between the good and evil side of things.  By the time you’ve reached the third island in the game, you have quite a large number of options in how you approach combat.  Straight up melee combat is mixed in with the ability to throw electrical grenades, and you have the option of shooting lightning bolts or even a type of long range sniping.  The last major power you acquire is the ability to summon and control a localized lightning storm that is moved around using the motion controls of the Sixaxis controller.

Unfortunately the replay value is where this title really takes a hit.  Your first time through the game as good will take you about 20 hours to complete, and this includes a fair amount of time exploring, doing side missions, and hunting for blast shards.  Your second time through (as evil) will only take you about 15 hours to complete, owing to your knowledge of the city and being used to how the missions are laid out.  With a little bit of planning this should get you to around 75% of the trophies available in the game.  And that’s it.  If you’re really a trophy hound, you could spend another 5 or so hours finding those last few blast shards and pulling off the last couple stunts, but then that’s really it.  This is especially disappointing because after you’ve played through inFamous both as good and evil you’ll realize just how awesome multiplayer could be for this game. inFamous is a classic example of a game that tried to do too much.  This title has so much that it does so very right.  The gameplay is rock solid with a living, breathing city as your playground to explore and enjoy.  The sound quality and graphics are absolutely top notch and will leave you spellbound, and the story line (for the good side) has plenty of twists that will keep you enthralled for the entire time you’re playing.  The evil playthrough, on the other hand, has too many things that just don’t fit.  While the variety in powers attained by being either good or evil is entertaining and requires a different style of gameplay, it’s really not enough to make up for the plot shortcomings of the evil side.  Be that as it may, this is definitely one of my must-have games for this year.  It’s too bad it's so damn short!

Gaming Trend Score

89

1. Graphics: 95
2. Audio: 90
3. Controls: 90
4. Gameplay: 97
5. Value/Replay: 65
6. OVERALL:89