inFAMOUS for the PlayStation 3 (2009) is a new super-hero sandbox by game developer Sucker Punch Production. You may know Sucker Punch from such games as the Sly Cooper series. inFAMOUS is the company's first game in four years, and it's kind of obvious as to why: it's a PlayStation 3 sandbox game, and it takes a whole room of people just to render the graphics of one of these hobos. But the game came out and I was utterly uninterested, even after playing the demo. Since I got a free copy--and instead of trading for another, better game--I decided to keep it and try it out for the sake of reviewing it for all of the fans I may or may not have reading this.The story follows Cole McGrath, who is a bike messenger and is unlucky enough to have a package blow up in his hands but lucky enough to survive it and be granted to manipulate electricity in such a way that you can't step in water, hold guns, or make friends particularly easily. Everyone blames this explosion, which killed thousands of people in Empire City--an obvious New York skyline copier--on you. You start on a mission revolving around three big baddies, your friend Zeke, and your estranged love-interest Trish. You go through, fighting through three islands each inhabiting different gangs, and a morality system. The story is really good, and is actually affected by your moral choices. Things that hold true for evil route do not necessarily in the heroic road.
A historically common grudge of mine resurfaces in this game, that I haven't had to explain in a while: the enemy's aim is WAY too good. Their accuracy is that of the highest powered sniper rifle of the face of the planet, but their using automatic machine guns, rocket launchers, and miniguns. In the meantime, I'm scaling buildings, trying to find out where the hell I'm being shot from, and ultimately falling off the building for being too slow at both. And on the subject of climbing, why can't Cole climb chain link fences? The bitch from Velvet Assassin can climb chain link fences. Alex Mercer in Prototype, which is functionally the poor man's inFAMOUS, can climb them too so why can't electricity man? And on other gripes, what is with the soundtrack? The song playing during the credits is among the worst I've heard in a video game.
The good things about the game, other than the story, is the progression of powers. You start with relatively weak powers, but enough to excite you and keep you playing, and each of the other powers add to the excitement. The side quests of the game, which free up territories of the map and make enemies less frquent, are all repeating, but not in a way that gets boring or aggravating. The collecting of dead drop messages and "blast shards" are easy enough and entertaining, even if the "blast shard" collection can get a bit tiresome.
In the end, the game is just like every other sandbox--when it's over, it's totally over. There is less of a need to keep playing after the story is done than usual, unless you played the evil way and killed everyone and then you can just continue killing everyone, but that gets boring after a while. Collecting things, trying to level up by kicking people and then healing them and maybe fighting the odd enemy that happens to spawn nearby, and free running collecting trophies does not a fun post-game-play make.
-Evan "Dez" O'Connor
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