InFamous review

Executive summary time - Assassin's Creed with electricity and The Suffering's karma system. Hmm perhaps too complicated for executive's?

InFamous is a third-person free-roamer from Sucker Punch the makers of the excellent Sly Raccoon. Despite my initial summary this can really be seen as a realistic shoot-em-up version of the Sly Raccoon trilogy but enhanced. As with Assassin's Creed your character, Cole, can climb pretty much anything and as larger groups of enemies tend to appear at the street level heading to the rooftops is a wise-choice.

The plot is delivered through the game itself and I don't want to spoil too much, but it's very well-handled. Someone's been learning lessons and the installation process runs concurrently with the tutorial section so other than a slight load pause at the beginning to get enough data to run the game you're thrown straight into it from the very menu screen itself - A nice camera view of a perfectly normal busy city with a "Press Start" overlay, do what it says and... well you'll see for yourself woah!

So as mentioned you play Cole and you come around from unconciousness as apparently the only survivor at ground zero of an explosion wondering what happened. This is the basic tutorial showing you how to look around and move, then how to jump and how you grab onto objects. As you get a bit further a couple of weird things happen around electricity generators. Get out to the police cordon and... things go awry. Saved by your friend Zeke you crash out at his place and via static animated (static cutouts that are moved) cartoon cutscenes reminiscent of God of War you're shown learning about your new powers and how the city has been quarantined off and left pretty much to fend for itself.

Back to the game and the tutorial continues and you learn how to target and shoot electricity bolts when a TV broadcast from a 'hacker' informs you of a supply drop in the park, worth going for a look-see. The TV is a subtle touch here as later on more broadcasts appear which you can ignore or stay to watch and they all enhance the plot in small ways. So well-integrated are they that they caused me to swear when one news item gave credit for my actions to the army - cheeky bar-stewards.

Anyway on to the suply drop and you discover you can survive a four storey drop off a building and how to blast objects out the way as you help Zeke pick up a gun. Oh and in a passing remark you learn why you can't use a gun or a car, you fry or explode them.

You also discover you're not truly invulnerable as you're suddenly left weak after all the practice zapping. However draining electricity up from a power source heals you and also tops up a meter used for special abilities.

Following Zeke to the supply drop you find it stuck on a sculpture, time to test out those climbing skills. Free the crate and the people swarm in and you're presented with a Karma moment.

Karma moments freeze the action and turn to your inner voice, in this case do you zap the people and keep the supplies for yourself and your friends or let them help themselves. Back to the game and the choice of action is yours as are the karmic rewards.

As I said it's a bit like The Suffering - inner voice, and good or bad actions. Do the good thing and people will like you, do the bad and they'll flee or attack you. However like the Suffering there's a flaw and this is in how your powers develop. You can buy extra abilities for your powers using XP gained from performing tasks, but it's split between the two sides, buy all the good ones and then turn to evil and you'll be unable to use those additions, likewise from the other side. That means picking a path and sticking to it, so no changing your mind half-way through.

You can just happily bop along the city smacking down the baddies and helping the city-folk, but there are set missions to accomplish and the come in three flavours - Story, Neutral and Karmic. Story ones obviously progress the story and, as well as dishing out XP, unlock more story missions and certain events, such as restoring power to an area of a city. Neutral events and Karmic ones also give out XP but also flush out the enemy from that area leaving you relatively free to roam without getting shot at. Karmic missions come in pairs one for each side and performing the one locks out the other as well as giving you a Karma boost in whichever direction.

Events are relatively diverse. Escort these prisoners to jail, protect these demonstrators, clear a building of surveillance devices, restore satellite links, rescue hostages, etc. How you go about these tasks is up to you. Precision shots to take out the kidnappers, just lob electric grenades in, or Thunder Drop down into the middle of them. Also nice is that you can abandon any mission before completion and it takes you straight back to the mission start point where you can ignore or restart it. No backtracking required.

As part of the game you get a 2D top-down mini-map and a radar. The radar takes the form of an electrical pulse from your head that highlights power sources you can drain, enemies, Blast Shards and Dead-Drops. In a nice touch the pulse truly does emanate from you and dissipates leaving the map blank once more except for enemies that are, or have been, shooting at you. Move fast enough and you keep up with the limits of the pulse until it fades out and you can even see on screen the delay between a near-by pinged item and a far-off one as they become highlighted.

Okay I mentioned Blast Shards and Dead-Drops. Blast Shards are remnants of the explosion and if you collect enough they add an extra 'battery' to your power meter; dead-drops are voice recordings that add to the plot. You don't have to collect them, but you'll pretty much want to which is the way such collection quests should work.

Handling death is done well as you simply can't die you can only fall unconscious and then wake up either at Zeke's place or at the nearest clinic (if you've unlocked one). Might seem annoying throwing you to a different part of the city, but it works as part of the story line by not making death a game-stopper while making it worth your while not to get 'killed'.

Finally on this part I have to make a special point about starting the game mid-play. No menu screen - no cut's and barely any loading. You put the disc in, it kicks through the title screens and there you are waking up just as if you'd been 'killed'.

Combat works well and as you can use either hand you can switch viewpoints, very handy when you're in the middle of climbing a pole, hanging off the side of a building, or crouched behind cover. Yes there's a cover system and not only can you shoot from the middle of a climb, but you can keep yourself in cover while you do so, advanced stuff here folks.

Your electrical powers also come with some simple stuff, you can heal someone with a quick jolt (very common as all the residents seem to have a heart-attack tripping over a kerb-stone), restrain someone by chaining them to the ground, or suck the life-energy out of them.

Of course you can have some fun with this.

On the technical side the graphics are okay, if not spectacular as with FarCry2 move faster than than the game can keep up with and you'll start getting pop-in. Likewise clipping bugs mean your feet can fall through certain surfaces (but it hasn't crashed the game or taken me out the world map yet) and I did have one enemy shooting at me through a sheet of metal because the tip of the barrel of his gun had clipped outside it.

Some things that look climbable aren't and the climbing mechanic can be inconsistent when it sucks you in towards a climbable item but makes you bang your head on an electricity pylon conductor when you try to jump to the top of the pole instead of moving you around it to perch on the top. Likewise some uneven surfaces force you to jump 'off' them to the next one.

The suck-in also grates when a Blast-Shard is positioned between two climbable items - jump to it and get sucked over while missing the point of your jump. It's not game-breaking as it doesn't happen enough to really annoy, but it does highlight a certain slap-dash approach to level design.

The controls are fluid and work, even if at times you feel like you're playing an extended Quick-time event - jab the X button continuously to climb. Targeting is surprising precise and you've only yourself to blame if you don't hit what you're aiming at, the only failure is that there's a dead-zone between your hands - target someone heading into this area with your right hand, switch and you still can't hit them with your left hand.

Okay gameplay glitches, or annoyances. Scripted events caused mes ome cursing. Case in point in protecting a medical drop. I headed to the rooftops for a couple of reasons, advantage of height and a couple of power cables I could grind across and restore my health and batteries. Knocked out the first wave and here comes the second and control is removed from me to present a scripted event of the second wave coming in. No problem except now I'm standing like a lemon back on the ground. Did that to me twice in that event forcing me to scramble back to the rooftops- not a happy bunny.

Some might complain about the chainlink fences, but within the game world it makes sense in that you can't shoot through them (except for the Thunder Hammer) or climb them and to be honest I found them to be no problem at all.

Other than that it ran fine, and if I had to present an even more concise summary it would be one word - seamless.