inFamous is a 3rd person platformer shooter. I think. I have no idea how to properly categorize it into a particular genre. It features sandbox-style gameplay (yay!) where you play this loner rough-talking guy who suddenly develops the superhero ability to control electricity after a massive electrical explosion in your town. The protagonist in this particular cliche is Cole MacGrath, some random bike messenger who was tasked with delivering a package which turns out to be a bomb and it…zzz…
OK, inFamous isn’t big on the whole story thing. It starts out by giving you a 5 minute boring lecture on the backstory and how you got your powers. And proceeded to start you off in the middle of the city, where you somehow bunk in with your best (and only?) friend at the top of some building. At least, the action starts out bright and early, and the controls are very easy to get into. Cole’s superpowers gives him some sort of ability to not break bones (how does electrical powers translate to unbreakable bones anyway?) when you jump off high buildings. Couple that with his background hobby of “urban exploration“, you have one badass MF who can parkour his way all over the city. I feel like the game handles this particular aspect of the game real well. You can easily climb pillars, swing from girders, jump from building top to building top, etc. There are some side missions that require you to do this particularly well (spying on enemy couriers) or fast (disabling radar towers, or is it enabling, with timers). Soon you will gain the ability to glide on the air and slide on electrical lines or train tracks which will give you additional options to move about.
However, I’m appalled that with all Cole’s amazing parkour abilities, he is still unable to climb over chain-linked fences. I’m not sure why the designers made it that way. Is it because the city that Cole is in is surrounded by fences, so as a way to limit Cole’s movements, they made fences insurmountable? Ok, I’m fine with the constraints of a game. I understand that a game cannot be truly open-world. There has to be some sort of boundary for the game world, which in this case, happens to be a chain-linked fence. It’s not waist height, but high enough the Cole can’t jump over it. But why can’t I climb over chain-linked fences within the city? This seems to be a huge oversight, and it really kills the mood. Somehow, if the designers want me to go to a particular direction, they use chain-linked fences. I dread seeing them when I’m doing missions within the city. It’s like all the options I had considered for the mission gets ripped out of my head, just because of the presence of the chain-linked fence. You suck!
Cole’s electrical powers also means that he is somehow vulnerable to large bodies of water. Which I don’t really get. Does he get short-circuited or something? Why does his health go down (and subsequently die) when he falls into water, but it’s OK for him to stick both his arms into huge electrical inlets to restore the electrical generator? OK, maybe I’m just nitpicking here, but if he can stick both arms into some sort of giant generator to “complete the circuit”, then isn’t water the same?
The main missions are quite the standard kill-the-bad-guys-save-the-city fare, with some variation. I’m not complaining much, it’s not an RPG anyway. Action games == kill everything that shoots you. These move the plot along. The side missions is just a distraction; for every side mission you complete, you get a portion of the city under control, which means enemies won’t respawn or something. There are a few types of side missions, each with its own level of fun, stupidity and insanity. I love it when a side mission requires you to kill all enemies or deactivate (or reactivate) satelites (which is just a time-limited parkour run, which I love). But other irritating ones are the supposedly follow a courier stealthily and find surveillance equipment to zap (which you can’t zap from afar for some reason). One also requires me to perform certain actions or stunts so some random guy I don’t care about can snap pictures of me. That one’s fine, just mildly irritating. The missions are also based on DIAS (acronym for “Do It Again, Stupid!” invented by Shamus). However, if you die or fail to perform the required action, you just re-spawn at the latest checkpoint in that mission. It’s not like GTA where a death or failure requires you to get back to the mission start and redo it all over again. I can live with this.
There are also moral-specific missions, or sequences within a missions that tells you which action you take will determine your moral compass. The thing is, you can either do an action that says you’re good OR evil, but there’s none of those morally ambiguous choices. You cannot flip-flop doing some good and some evil stuff. This is because the most awesome power unlocks are only available to one or the other end. I started out doing “good” stuff, because it seems like the sensible thing to do at the time (and I’m basically Mr. Nice Guy). It was only then that I realised that the best abilities are locked by your karma. Because of that, I am tied to being Mr Nice Guy all the way! Sigh. Oh look, another person needs rescuing…
Being a PC guy, it took me quite some time before I can get used to aiming with the right-analog stick. I’m getting better, but it’s still very counter-intuitive. Aiming with a mouse is vastly different, totally on a different scale altogether. I can easily imagine the controls to be much better on the PC
But if you can overlook the flaws, inFamous is a very accessible game. If someone whose dexterity and hand-eye coordination is deteriorating by the minute can enjoy it, I’m sure the money you will inevitably splurge for this is well spent.
Tip: it is actually possible to do this in the game. What I usually do is that I will melee a passer-by, knocking him down, but not killing him, and then heal to get 3 XP (good). Repeating it does not net me additional XP, so bummer. I’m not sure if knocking a passer-by will lower your karma though, but I don’t think so, as only if you drain a knocked-down person will you get evil XP.
