inFamous

So a friend at work reviewed my entire purchased games list. The top of his list was inFamous for PS3. I was surprised I hadn't played it yet, since it came with my PS3 when I first got it. I suppose it's not too mysterious that games sit on my shelves for months or years... but still.

The game is a sandbox third person brawler/shooter with RPG elements. Your powers start out quite simple, giving you the ability to zap things, and will likely wear out your trigger finger if you spend too much time doing that. Progressing the plot will open up new powers and I highly recommend crit-pathing the plot for a while until you get some powers that will spare your trigger finger the pain. Doing the missions and taking out enemies with weak powers is just not fun and might lead you to putting the game down.

The story takes place in a city that's been mostly destroyed by a huge explosion, so it has a bit of a post-apocalyptic feel to it. Your character, Cole, was at the epicenter of the blast, and somehow got electricity super-powers as a result. As you help to restore the city, you are confronted with moral decisions that lean you toward the ambivalent hero, or feared bad-ass. Either way, you're helping the town, but people will either love, or fear you. Going with good deeds gives your powers generally more pacifying qualities, while the evil deeds give you more damaging bonuses. It's quite neat to see the civilians react to your good karma and start cheering for you as well as throwing rocks at thugs. I don't know what they do if they fear you, but I assume they would just stay away from as you run by. The story progresses well, but can get a bit monotonous with repeating the same type of quests. This is alleviated by having cool new powers to blow up enemies with, while doing these quests. Following the story to completion actually surprised me with how good it was.The ending literally blew me away.

The controls of the game are quite easy. Move the stick to run around, jump with X, punch with square, the standard hold L1 to switch to third person shooting view, and press other buttons while in this view to shoot various powers at enemies. The only slight frustration with the controls happened for me, when attempting to jump onto a truck underneath a bridge, and Cole did everything in his spider-monkey powers to grab onto the bridge instead of going under it. For every other situation in the game, this is the ideal behavior.

I do have to mention though, it's easy to accidentally attack a nearby civilian. I had multiple situations where I was shooting and beating the crap out of a thug, and suddenly Cole decided I was targeting a nearby cheering civilian, and decked them in the face. It's all okay though, because you can give downed civilians a healing jolt for an easy 3 experience, and some good karma. So yes, punch civilian in face + healing jolt = net good karma. You will probably also heal a bunch of civilians when the easiest way to take down a bunch of bad guys is lobbing 10 grenades into the crowd.

The graphics were really good. You could occasionally see mip levels popping in when traveling around really fast, but otherwise I never noticed it. The audio and sound effects was good, and the voice acting was quite good. The animation on the character while voice acting wasn't top notch, but it got the job done.



Anyways, if you haven't picked it up yet, and own a PS3, do yourself a favor and pick it up. It's on the greatest hits list, so it should only be $20, and is easily worth double that.