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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