inFamous

I only really picked up inFamous as inFamous: Second Son for the Playstation 4 looked interesting. That and I’m not really one to just jump straight into a series in the middle of a story.

At the time of writing, I have finished both a good and a bad playthrough, not that they really differ beyond some dialogue and reversal of role (fighting against the police instead of with them for example in side missions).

Personally, I thought the game was quite slow to begin with as I had no clear objective so it just felt like I was running around the city fighting enemies. Eventually, as you get more powers, it gets more enjoyable but it feels like every so often, they’ll drop in a plot element to keep you going then you won’t see it for another 3 or 4 missions.

The story was, I can’t say it was bad as such, it just had really weird pacing. You’d have characters introduced who you barely meet then they’ll either disappear for ages without explaining a single thing about them or their alignments or it’s straight to their boss battle with no real context as to who they even are. Even after two playthroughs, I had to read the Wiki just to even figure out half of what was even really going on!

EDIT: Since writing this review, I have gone on to collect all 350 blast shards and dead drops. I can now say that a fair amount of back story on the main enemy faction is contained in the collectable dead drops around the city. I hadn’t actually bothered to listen to them until I got them all so I didn’t realise that earlier. Woops.

The gameplay is pretty fun, you’ve got various electric powers that you unlock from underground substations. You’ll first get the power then platform for a bit, usually just as a way to test out your power and figure out what sort of scenario you would use it for, eg; disarming shielded enemies or taking out enemies on turrets. The later powers are pretty cool but I don’t feel like they are even that important by the time you get them. I even forgot one of the earlier ones even existed until my second playthrough and even then, I barely used it.

Beyond powers, you traverse the world using parkour which, at the best of times, feels really fluid and gives you the sense that the designers crafted every piece of the map so you can continuously rail grind from one side of an island to the other. At worst though, it feels like you’re just mashing X to climb buildings without having to do much at all.

Oh, the AI can be kind of annoying though. I played on both Normal and Hard mode and Hard just basically means lots and lots of projectiles and bullets flying at you. Like, the shitty kind of hard where you get knocked down and killed before you can even get back up. That and I didn’t think there was a lot of visual feedback on enemies. They’d just kind of stagger back a little until they died which only gets more annoying on larger bosses since you can’t even tell if you’re going the battle right.

All in all, I felt like the game definitely isn’t perfect but the enjoyment I had with it, still outweighed any of the glaring flaws. It’d recommend it if you come across a cheap copy and I’m definitely hoping inFamous 2 fixes the issues I had with the first game. It seems like the art style is more stylised which I think is good since in terms of graphics, inFamous definitely hasn’t aged hugely well. It looks very, err, brown and bloom to say the least even for a destroyed city.

Developer: Sucker Punch Productions
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Released in 2009
Platform: Playstation 3