Save What's Left... Or Destroy It All
The official tagline for inFAMOUS is way too fitting not to use here. Luckily, we came up with a few words of our own to describe the ultimate fate of Empire City.
Published: May 27, 2009
Before I really start digging into the meat of this review, I feel it's kind important to make a very important distinction about inFAMOUS that may well change what you expect, and thus how you enjoy Sucker Punch's latest little comic-fueled epic: this is not a sandbox game. It's open-world, yes, to an extent, and there are moments where you can sort of bend the rules a little to create your own outcome, but those expecting this to be Grand Theft Auto with superpowers will be sorely mistaken.
You can't jack any car in inFAMOUS, you can't fire guns (hell, you can't even hold a gun or it'll explode), most objectives are pretty much handled as the game presents them with little in the way of deviation from the basic rules. I mention all of this not to condemn the game, but to make it clear that this isn't a GTA clone. What inFAMOUS is is really quite simple: it's a truly next-gen advancement of the platforming concepts Sucker Punch has been working on with the Sly Cooper series. There's a lot of Sly in leading man Cole Porter (and I don't just mean the Cooper patch on his messenger bag); he can run along narrow surfaces at a brisk pace, will automatically attach himself to any eaves and overhangs on a given building and generally just "sticks" to everything.
For most, their first few minutes and probably well into the first hour with inFAMOUS will be frustrating. At first it seems like Cole McGrath isn't actually listening to the controller inputs -- he'll keep slipping down the surface of a building when he should be jumping, and he'll grab incessantly when you just want to get down. And then there's a breakthrough: you start to let the game sort of half-play itself. You're still steering the ship, but there's a bit of auto-pilot that's going on. And then, suddenly, it starts to make sense. By simply pointing Cole in a direction and hammering the X Button, he can pretty much scale anything. Statues, buildings, bridges, signage, railings, rooftops, power lines -- all of it is automatically gripped and made into a surface that speeds Cole to his ultimate end.
I'm not claiming it's perfect, of course. There were instances, in fact, where the game just straight-up freaked out, sending Cole running in some mystery direction or running him into a wall. The wonkiness and the initial frustration slowly receded, though, and gave rise to one of the most liberating feelings of being able to go anywhere and (generally) jump in any direction without fear of falling and having to do it all over again. When I wanted to go up, I simply pointed at a wall and tapped X in rhythm to where Cole's urban exploration-honed hands and feet connected. When I wanted to go down... well, that was a bit of a problem until I got a definite feel for how "grabby" things were. Leaping away from a building just to climb down it isn't a concept that's easily learned after years of that essentially spelling doom, but it too started to make a little sense in the game's version of logic.
There's a definite sense that things exist in the bubble that is Empire City's charred, rubble-strewn trio of inter-connected islands. For one, the game's attempt to shoehorn a sense of morality into the minute-to-minute choices Cole must make is a little... well, it's not quite as loose as some of the comics that the game seeks to emulate. There are moments where the game actually employs a keen attention to the folly of a black-or-white decision and in those cases, the weight of those decisions is made abundantly clear. In a general sense, though, you are indeed carrying out slightly different versions of the same choice throughout the game.
You can't jack any car in inFAMOUS, you can't fire guns (hell, you can't even hold a gun or it'll explode), most objectives are pretty much handled as the game presents them with little in the way of deviation from the basic rules. I mention all of this not to condemn the game, but to make it clear that this isn't a GTA clone. What inFAMOUS is is really quite simple: it's a truly next-gen advancement of the platforming concepts Sucker Punch has been working on with the Sly Cooper series. There's a lot of Sly in leading man Cole Porter (and I don't just mean the Cooper patch on his messenger bag); he can run along narrow surfaces at a brisk pace, will automatically attach himself to any eaves and overhangs on a given building and generally just "sticks" to everything.
For most, their first few minutes and probably well into the first hour with inFAMOUS will be frustrating. At first it seems like Cole McGrath isn't actually listening to the controller inputs -- he'll keep slipping down the surface of a building when he should be jumping, and he'll grab incessantly when you just want to get down. And then there's a breakthrough: you start to let the game sort of half-play itself. You're still steering the ship, but there's a bit of auto-pilot that's going on. And then, suddenly, it starts to make sense. By simply pointing Cole in a direction and hammering the X Button, he can pretty much scale anything. Statues, buildings, bridges, signage, railings, rooftops, power lines -- all of it is automatically gripped and made into a surface that speeds Cole to his ultimate end.
I'm not claiming it's perfect, of course. There were instances, in fact, where the game just straight-up freaked out, sending Cole running in some mystery direction or running him into a wall. The wonkiness and the initial frustration slowly receded, though, and gave rise to one of the most liberating feelings of being able to go anywhere and (generally) jump in any direction without fear of falling and having to do it all over again. When I wanted to go up, I simply pointed at a wall and tapped X in rhythm to where Cole's urban exploration-honed hands and feet connected. When I wanted to go down... well, that was a bit of a problem until I got a definite feel for how "grabby" things were. Leaping away from a building just to climb down it isn't a concept that's easily learned after years of that essentially spelling doom, but it too started to make a little sense in the game's version of logic.
There's a definite sense that things exist in the bubble that is Empire City's charred, rubble-strewn trio of inter-connected islands. For one, the game's attempt to shoehorn a sense of morality into the minute-to-minute choices Cole must make is a little... well, it's not quite as loose as some of the comics that the game seeks to emulate. There are moments where the game actually employs a keen attention to the folly of a black-or-white decision and in those cases, the weight of those decisions is made abundantly clear. In a general sense, though, you are indeed carrying out slightly different versions of the same choice throughout the game.
