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inFAMOUS (2009, Playstation 3) Review


A POWER TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE


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inFAMOUS is a Sucker Punch joint that I almost like against my better judgment. It contains all the right elements for a great time as a superhero; a sandbox open world, electrifying superpowers, parkour movement, moral choices and loads of frantic combat. The original story delivers some entertaining, evil twists and is presented in a fitting comic book artstyle.

Unfortunately, little of it works well in practice. It lacks the fine-tuning, pathos and immersiveness to make it the frisky gameplay- and storytelling experience it wants to be. By today's technical standards, it's ugly as hell, and its gameplay flaws are almost too many to list. Thinking about the things you can perform in the game, however, makes me admire the ambitions - especially considering how old it is.


For a frame of reference, this 2009-release is contemporary with Batman: Arkham Asylum and Assassin's Creed II, games that practically perfected the modern superhero genre and the open world formula. On its own merits, inFAMOUS made some neat innovations by mixing the genres, two years before Batman: Arkham City did the same thing. Its influence can be sensed today in a game like Marvel's Spider-Man

The game tells a pretty run-of-the-mill superhero story about destructive powers fallen into the wrong hands. It's not bad enough to be laughable, nor is it particularly memorable. You control Cole, a plain-looking guy talking with a menacing whisper, like The Witcher's Geralt of Rivia. The cast of characters includes a few allies, a girlfriend and some supervillains, all pretty non-descript, apart from the Redneck best bud, Zeke.


The game begins in medias res, as you awaken in the center of an explosion crater in a big city. Buildings lie razed all around. Raging fires, spontaneous explosions and loose wires among the debris turn the situation hazardous. Your buddy Zeke calls and guides you out of the area. In the process, you realize you've become some kind of human lightning rod, sucking up all electrical discharges from broken electronics around ground zero.

It turns out you're a freak of nature, a superhero (or anti-hero if you wish) with the power to harness electricity. After draining electric devices all around the city, you can zap enemies, glide through the air, surf power lines and raise a protective barrier, among other neat tricks. The further you progress the main story, the more skills you unlock, and some can only be obtained by spending experience points, earned by solving missions and downing enemies.


Power outages has crippled the city's infrastructure, causing criminal gangs to run rampant. Your task is to stop them and restore power to the city. Three major islands exist, each divided into many districts. The layout of the world map looks so uninspired that it was probably thrown together on a lunch break. Each island consists of a number of grey hexagonals, as if it was an 1980:s strategy game, that change color as you liberate the area.

The world's visual design mirrors that dullness, with brown or grey blocks of flats everywhere, only broken off by the occasional enemy base or skyscraper. A few inconsequential landmarks exist, and a railway system works as a poor man's "fast travel". It's a war zone of ripped-up pavement, debris, broken glass, car husks and hostile scumbags. Citizens are represented as laughably primitive character models, terrorized by the villains. The main story brings you back and forth across this city, using a lot of Assassin's Creed-inspired parkour to get you over and past buildings.


By today's standards the controls are poor. Cole is fast, flimsy, unreliable and overly automated. Many buildings are so tall that they take forever to climb. Some platforming moments caused my blood to boil as Cole refused to auto-grab a ledge, or missed a narrow beam, and fell to his death. A scarcity of checkpoints forced me to replay some long sequences way too many times.

This twitchiness also affects combat, turning aiming into an imprecise shitshow. It's one of those games where your safest bet is to aim in the proximity of the enemy, strafe back and forth, and blast away. At its finest moments, you feel like a conductor of devastation, raining electric bolts on enemies while blowing up oil barrels and parked cars. Sadly, constant framerate-drops harm the experience. Playing it through PS Plus, I'm not sure if it's a streaming issue or a PS3-one - maybe both - but regardless, it made some missions tortuous.


Right from the start, the city is bustling with hostiles. The enemies look mostly the same, they only wield different weapons. You get constantly peppered with gunfire, assault rifle fire, rockets, sniper fire and grenades. It soon started to drive me insane. The only way to get rid of the annoyance is to liberate each area by completing some arbitrary side mission. For some reason, this causes all hostiles to flee. Given the amount of side missions - I counted 69 - it's a huge time sink, but the peace of mind afterwards makes it worth your while.

Quality-wise, these missions - including the main missions that mostly consist of similar ones - are all over the place. Some are just plain fun enemy takedowns, where you approach a rooftop and try to take down a group of enemies. These test your inventiveness, awareness and skills, as you bombard them with your increasing arsenal of electric attacks, like rocket salvos, flash grenades or sniper shocks.


Another mission type is the hard but exciting escort assignments, where you have to reflect explosives and kill enemies to minimize the harm done to a vehicle as it drives down the streets. Others are frustrating speedrunning challenges across rooftops, that tries to delude the players into thinking that the controls are actually well-functioning.

Worst of the lot are the stealth missions, where you have to tail some crook to a secret stash. Being discovered means insta-failing, and the conditions for being discovered are extremely unforgiving. What is it about open worlds and the constant need to insert stealth in games without stealth mechanics? In every other part of the game, stealth is out of the question. Every enemy can detect you from halfway across the city as soon as you unleash a wet fart.


Your actions and moral decisions affect a karmic meter, a pointless feature that mildly affects story outcome, NPC reactions and the nature of some of the skills you gain. As usual, I found it unappealing to play an evil character just for the sake of being evil. Do you wanna murder civilians and antagonize the police force, and end up fighting the good guys and the crooks? Do you wanna be "FAMOUS" or "inFAMOUS"? Welp, it might just come down to what color you prefer - blue or red.

Nevertheless, all these flawed mechanics work in conjuction with the frantic pacing to create an appealing experiment. Some of the annoyances I learned to live with, some just faded away with practice and some were one-offs that I got over once they were behind me. I persevered long enough to liberate most of the city's districts, and the increasing challenge that came with tougher, and larger, enemies later on kept me entertained. Once I got over my worst grievances, I started to enjoy the sandbox.


I also appreciate the unobtrusive storytelling. While the craziness of all the urban chaos keeps roaring, the narrative is conveyed through someone's voice on the radio, explaining why you should care about the next objective marker on the map. It makes the story easy to disregard, if you want to enjoy the sandbox and just focus on following the dots on the minimap.

The clean interface and interaction further elevates the smoothness. All moves and powers are quickly accessible through intuitive button combinations. You don't need to delve into the menus other than to unlock new powers or look at the world map. And the boring world design serves a function - it's easy to detect certain collectibles, like the gleaming blast shards that increase your maximum power storage.

The ideas might not seem remarkable today, but it struck a chord with the player base at the time. It was very inventive. This was my second playthrough, and I still regard the game as a promising first foray into a new genre for Sucker Punch. It had the right ideas, but failed to capitalize on them because of some frustrating design decisions that didn't align with the twitchy control scheme. Some missions are fine, some are frustrating and some are just plain awful. With a little polish, some rebalancing and many tiny adjustments, inFAMOUS could have been timeLESS.

[All screenshots are taken from www.mobygames.com]

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