InFamous
Here is my quick review of inFamous playable demo:
First of all, I should say I wasn’t among those who looked forward to this game and that’s simply because I didn’t know much about it nor about Sucker Punch, the company who made it. Based on the trailer alone, it was difficult to judge this game so when I saw its playable demo available on PSN I was like “…well whatever, I have nothing else to do so I’ll give it a try”. That little try turned out to take up my whole evening!
This game can be summed up in two words, unique and well done! I have to admit that I suck at it but the further you go, the more you learn how to deal with enemies in different situations. I’m not sure if it was a demo limitation but I didn’t get to choose the level of difficulty. Regardless, let me tell you, enemies in this game have no mercy. It does start from a fairly easy place but picks up pretty fast. I’m certain I died more than 10 times in the first hour of playing until I finally figured out what to do! The demo is long enough so that by the end of it you’ll have a good understanding of whether you’ll like the game or not. Controls in this game are easy and work smoothly. Camera view and rotation are great compared to a lot of other third-person shooters out there.
All in all I would say I loved this demo; it’s a great game and I may recommend it to a lot of people I know BUT I don’t think I’m gonna buy it!!! Why? Because it is pretty intense. At some points it rains bullets and rockets and there is no time to fight back, instead you should just dodge and run away to a safe area, find another route, then deal with enemies in smaller groups. I highly recommend downloading the demo. It’s around 1.3 GB and it is definitely worth trying especially if you’re not sure about buying the game.
Here is the gameplay footage I took:
Review followed up by mikestrife
On July 17, 2009 / Game review based on PS3
I have complete faith in Sucker Punch to make a fantastic game. I also LOVED Crackdown, which is similar to this in that it’s an open world sandbox game, where you play someone with super powers. So I bought this game day one. I didn’t regret that purchase. There are very few games that inspire me to play several times, before I move onto other games. As you can imagine, I have quite a few games to play, so when I constantly find myself wanting to come back to Infamous and sitting for play sessions that last several hours… that’s the sign of a good game.
The demo that was released was pretty good idea as it let you try out many of the powers that you don’t get until later in the game. The one problem with the demo is that it’s very tough to get the addictive feeling across in a limited area like the demo provided.
The game starts of with an amazing transition from the main menu into the game (Watch the video to see what I mean). The training mission is well done and fun and before you know it you’re tossed into the first island of the city. You play Cole, one of the survivors in the city after a huge explosion decimates the place. All authority has pulled out put up quarantine around the area, and life is hard. Luckily you’ve developed some incredible super powers (mostly involving controlling lightening). As Cole you use your powers to clear the city of the gangs who have taken control. Either save the city or take their place as its ruler.
There are tons of moves you can pull of as Cole. Your basic shooting out electricity feels like a regular gun. It’s incredibly fast paced and just feels like you’re using a gun that shoots lightning. You can also call down a huge thunder storm, or throw balls of electricity that explode. You can grind on rails and wires, and glide through the air. You can heal hurt civilians. You can capture or drain the life force out of downed enemies. Plus tons of other attacks. You’ll get a different set of attacks and powerups depending on if you’re good or evil as well.
The good and evil mechanic works pretty well here. You’re constantly moving one war or the other by how you treat civilians and enemies. But the biggest change comes during missions when you’ll get a choice to either do something very good or very evil. The game presents the choice, but ultimately allows you to complete it yourself. It feels much better to actually save/kill someone, than to just choose an option and get the cutscene showing you what you choose.
The storyline (which is wicked, btw) is pretty long at roughly 15 hours for your first play through. You’ll definitely want to do a second play though to play though both the good and bad scenarios.
The game involves main story missions which are required to restore power to each area of the city, gain new powers, and open up new islands (the game has 3 islands in total). Side missions allow you to gather more XP to upgrade your powers, and to permanently clear the areas of enemies. There’s an exploration element as you try to collect all the pieces of the blast shard, and retrieve dead drops from satellites around the city. The shards are ALL over the place, and as you collect them, the amount of electricity Cole can store will increase. The dead drops provide more back-story for the game. Both are easy to find because of the handy radar. You can click in the left analog stick at any time to scan the area. Shards show up as blue dots, and there’s an indicator which points you to the nearest dead drop. Getting all the dead drops is easy, but when you get down to the last couple shards they can be tricky to narrow down.
Being able to store more electricity is huge bonus. Everything aside from your regular attack uses it, and you’ll use it up fast. You can drain power from all over the city and anything with a battery in it, so it’s pretty freely available, but in the middle of a fight having to find and drain it could be fatal.
Despite being incredibly addictive and fun, there are some annoying things about the game. First is that it takes way to long to get the gliding technique, which allows you to float in the air a bit. This is really annoying when you can’t jump far enough from one rooftop to the other and end up falling all the way to the street and having to climb up all over. Also once you finish the game and all the side missions there’s nothing left to do. The last couple powers require quite a bit of XP to max out so if you’re stuck here, you have to resort to some VERY slow, boring and repetitive gameplay to get that XP. This is especially true on hard mode where the amount of XP you get from enemies is much less than normal. A couple areas, where enemies respawn, or a repeatable mission, or some type of after game bonus would have been handy. Finally is the overall polish. While the game plays really well most of the time, there are a bunch of minor glitches. Nothing major, and usually open world games of this magnitude have this kind of stuff, so expect that.
Overall, I do recommend this game to everyone. Even Jiosis to try the full version! It’s by far my favorite sandbox game to date.
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