First Looks// inFamous

I obviously did something right this week. As The Evil Editor angrily stormed in the direction of the kitchen yesterday morning in search of more liquid brain stimulation he turned to me and said, “Are we expecting any good new games in the post?”

“I'd rather like some inFamous code”, I radiantly replied. This morning, what floats in through the SPOnG Underwater Castle airlock? inFamous preview code! This, it turns out, is enough to make me unbegrudging of the bright breezy day happening above the waves because I'm happily firing electricity out of my hands, jumping off buildings and killing buses.

I've had my hands on it for all of an hour so far, so this is not a preview. This is me unable to wait to tell you what an enjoyable time I'm having being a superhuman in Empire City. Remember, this is an OPINION piece.

The videos for inFamous (many of which I've gathered below for you to soak your eyeballs with) show an open world, super-powered adventure title that mixes up plenty of superhuman free-running with bright crackly combat. I'm totally bloody delighted to find that the game actually looks set to deliver on the promise of the vids.

The mission I'm supposed to be completing is taking down an armoured bus that's going round shooting shit up (you can see Sony footage of it below). I say 'supposed to', because I keep getting distracted like a dog in a cat factory, haring around and exploring the so-far-impressive map open to me. While it doesn't seem to be rife with pick-ups, there are loads of enemies for me to shoot off rooftops and the environment itself is well designed enough to warrant a nosey all by itself.

Getting around the environment's fun, too. The way you navigate the city isn't dissimilar from the way a certain friendly neighbourhood wall-crawler gets about. There are no web lines, but it's all about getting a couple of stories up and moving about fluidly across the rooftops. You can, if you want, move around the well-realised street level, but getting high's far more fun.

Climbing's a good start to gaining some altitude. Cole, your character, can't quite stick to anything, but he's an athletic bastard and there are plenty of ledges and pipes to use. Basically, easy scalability is the rule rather than the exception. I have, however, noticed one very ominous, fortified-looking exception....

Once you're up there the fastest way to get around is to grind along the assorted wires and rails hanging around. With Cole's electrical powers helping him along (don't ask me about the physics of that) it looks cool as hell.

You can also pull off a glide (again, using Cole's electrical powers in some feat of physics bending I'm yet to understand) which is a handy move if there isn't a grindable object to foot.

If all else fails, you can jump right off the top of a building and it seems to go just fine.

Right, onto combat. I'll go kill that damn bus and then I'll be back to tell you about it... Full preview soon!

Now, have a look at some videos: