Reviews// inFamous

There are a few boss battles of sorts littered about the place, but only a handful of them take the traditional 'one όber-powerful enemy' form. The more challenging, bigger encounters tend to be more along the lines of full-on firefights, such as the mission in which you have to defend the prison from a Sand Bastard assault.

Graphically, inFamous is superb. It's crisp, the superpower effects are well done, and Empire City is extremely well realised, especially given its impressive size. Given the amount of time you'll spend leaping about its architecture, that's no small deal.

So far, so awesome. I do indeed love inFamous. That's not to say there aren't problems. A bit more variety in the enemies would be nice. Empire City is broken up into islands, and on a given island you get a given standard sand grunt. They'll attack you in different ways – with gun emplacements, with shockwave powers, with rocket launchers – but on a given island they all look pretty much the same.

The whole moral choice thing, for its part, feels like it could offer more variety, too. I saw a Sucker Punch dev saying somewhere^† that you might want to switch your character one way or the other for a given mission for the different powers on offer. I won't be doing that. There's not a great deal of difference in the good and evil power sets, for starters. More importantly, the heavily-flagged 'karmic moments' don't offer enough of a change in where you are on the karmic barometer to make it convenient to chop and change a lot. Similarly, I'd like to have the not-heavily-flagged moments where you perform 'good' or 'bad' actions to impact your karmic balance. Good and evil feels like a bit of an empty distinction when you can steal civilians' bio-electricity, killing them (rather than heal them) and not have it affect your standing.

It would also be good if there was more loot to be had. You can pick up blast shards to increase your power-storage capacity (you get power by sucking it out of people or the power grid) but beyond that there's not much to find. Seeing the city is still interesting as you leap about its rooftops, because it's well-designed and pretty in a grim sort of way – but there's not much point in exploring for exploring's sake.

Some kind of multi-player would also be good – preferably co-op – but it wouldn't particularly fit with the game as it stands and I'm not that interested in seeing it tacked on for the sake of it. Maybe in the (inevitable) sequel...

That is, however, about the extent of my niggles.

SPOnG Score: 96%
Conclusion
inFamous is, simply put, damn good fun. The combination of super-powered combat, free running, varied mission structure and the extremely healthy size of the whole thing combine with a solid narrative to create a great action/adventure experience. It's not perfect - there are a few complaints, but these are far outnumbered by inFamous's good points. A damn fine reason to own a PS3.

^{†OK, I'm not that lazy. I checked. It was Sucker Punch co-founder Bruce Oberg – he said it here.}