inFamous: Festival of Blood

Overview

inFamous: Festival of Blood is a downloadable title for the PlayStation Network. It is a stand-alone game, and does not require inFamous 2 to play. It takes place in New Marais, the city in inFamous 2, during a local celebration called Pyre Night, and begins with Zeke siding up to a girl in a bar, relating the tale of Cole MacGrath being bitten by a vampire named Bloody Mary to impress her. Cole only has 8 hours to track down and kill his sire before sunrise or he permanently turns into a vampire and becomes one of Bloody Mary's servants.

Festival of Blood was included in the inFamous Collection bundle, which was released at retail. While inFamous and inFamous 2 are on the disc, Festival Blood is included as a download code.

New Powers

In addition to possessing his usual electric superpowers, Cole also gains a few vampiric abilities. He can bite and suck the blood of civilians to refill the corruption meter which is needed to use his new abilities, or kill Mary's crew to fill it in a more heroic way. Among those abilities are turning into a swarm of bats, a power that allows Cole to fly in any direction as long as the meter lasts. He can use this power to one-hit kill enemies by flying into them and staking them. There is also vampire sense, which allows Cole to see hidden vampires among the civilians which he then can stealth-kill. Gone, however, is the ability to choose different powers with the d-pad like it was in the main game. Cole gains upgrades to his electrical powers, like cluster grenades, by completing side objective or combat goals.

Locations

As previously stated, the game still takes place in New Marais albeit only on the first island and only during the night for obvious reasons.

An additional location is the catacombs where Cole starts out his adventure. They are reminiscent of the original inFamous in which Cole had to go underground to activate power generators to progress. In this case, however, players can return to them at their whim and use the front and back exit to get across from on end of the city to another, if they so desire. The second island from inFamous 2 is sealed off behind invisible walls.

New Enemies

Festival of Blood changes things up quite a bit when it comes to the enemies Cole encounters. Bloody Mary sends her vampires out to cause havoc during Pyre Night and since everyone is wearing masks, they blend in with the crowd. There are melee vampires and vampires with guns who also have the ability to "teleport" short distances around the environment, which makes it hard for Cole to shoot them with his electric powers. Since they are vampires, they cannot be killed by electricity alone and need to have their hearts destroyed. This encourages the use of melee with the Stake, a wooden weapon that Cole obtains in the beginning after losing the Amp. Outside of missions, they appear much like the random events in inFamous 2 on the map as clusters of red dots that are trying to feed on civilians.

Then there are the Firstborn, which are tall, bat like creatures that get their own mini-boss life-bar and take quite a few hits to take down. They sometimes appear during missions and are also hidden in human form among the party folk in New Marais. Cole has to use his vampire vision to find their cold bodies among the warm blooded humans. if he stakes them, it's an instant kill, but if he accidentally feeds on a hidden firstborn, they reveal their true form and Cole has to defeat them the regular way.

UGC Content

Although this is a standalone download-only title, Sucker Punch implemented the User Generated Content feature from inFamous 2 which allows players again to create their own missions, only now making use of Festival of Blood's exclusive new features and enemy types. New to the editor also is a comic book-style storytelling tool that allows players to set up and caption pictures of characters to tell their stories.