inFamous

At this point, it feels like preaching to the choir to say that there isn't much incentive toward owning a PlayStation 3.  The unfortunate thing is that while the aforementioned statement is commonly perceived as true, there remains very little evidence to back it up.  Since the console's launch, it's managed to build an impressive library of first and third party titles, and though none of them quite measure up to that over-sought "killer app" status, games like Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Metal Gear Solid 4, and LittleBigPlanet all bring enough to the table to have them considered amongst gamers as must-haves.

Sucker Punch--the developers of the Sly Cooper series and, well, pretty much just Sly Cooper--have thrown yet another of these finely-tuned titles onto store shelves with inFAMOUS, an open-world action game starring an electrified superhero with a knack for climbing buildings and leaping off of rooftops.  Sound familiar? 

In truth, if you've played open-world games such as Crackdown or even the better entries in the Spiderman franchise, it's obvious that inFAMOUS borrows pages from their respective books.  Nearly every moment spent scaling buildings and dropping enemies bears a refined likeness to most of these familiar titles.

InFAMOUS stars Cole McGrath, an urban explorer working as a bike messenger to make ends meet.  After getting his hands on a particularly dangerous package, Cole inadvertently destroys a significant portion of Empire City and becomes infused with electrical powers.  As a result of the blast, the city is quarantined, and Cole finds himself working with the FBI in an effort to escape a city collectively possessing a blatant animosity for his accidental extirpation of their every-day lives.

It's difficult to approach this game without talking about the story.  Much of the narrative is handled in vivid, brief, graphic novel-style expositions.  The art during these segments is quite brilliant, adding a distinctly comic book feel to the game that likely would have never emerged otherwise.  These portions of the game also contain the vast majority of the plot, verbally summarize what could have otherwise been a very cinematic experience.  The rapidly paced progression of the story fits the game well, but it's difficult to shake off the idea that there really could have been a lot more there to witness.

As a part of the narrative, inFAMOUS also features a good-or-evil alignment mechanic.  Choosing path of righteousness generally involves helping civilians and keeping the amount of destruction caused in the wake of Cole's electrical wrath to a minimum while  Evil, naturally being the polarity of the word "good," takes a different approach.  Cole's powers and upgrades while basking in his own infamy aim to enhance his destructive potential with zero regard for civilian casualties. 

Both paths are fun in their own ways, but it's the concept of morality that must be called into question here.  Though you could probably fill a bookshelf with the number of titles that have made an attempt at approaching moral decisions as a gameplay feature, very few have done so successfully.  InFAMOUS places near the top of the list for the most arbitrary uses of this type of system.  Cole will often be given to choice of doing one thing or another, both highlighted as either Good or Evil, and  to say that it's difficult to care about the city and its inhabitants would be an understatement.  Because of this, your actions during these events will generally be dictated by your approach toward combat rather than any real sort of moral dilemma.

When you're not dealing with that whole mess though, you're bound down city streets, leaping off of buildings and grinding down train tracks.  When it comes to open-world games like inFAMOUS, getting from Point A to Point B is half of the action.  Sucker Punch has definitely done a great job of making that process as entertaining as possible.  Cole is able to electrically skid across structure-connecting cables, an entertaining and fluid process that closes the gap between objectives in no time.  He also comes equipped with the ability to glide in the air for brief periods of time, extending his already absurd vaulting potential by a fair margin.

Combat is the other half of the inFAMOUS formula, and it feels great.  Utilizing an over-the-shoulder aiming mechanic, as has become the third-person action standard, Cole's electrical powers fill the demand for just about any sort of weapon you can think of.  Out of the box, Cole comes with a basic electrical attack, followed swiftly by a sort of knock-back ability (see: Force Push).  These are succeeded  by electric-powered grenades and even an explode-on-impact lightning ball, satiating the need for the action-game obligatory rocket launcher.  All of these powers use up Cole's energy, which are rechargeable using any source of electrical energy.

Enemies encountered in inFAMOUS are fairly standard, if a bit visually deviant.  You have the machine gun guy, the rocket launcher guy, the suicide bomber, the stealth-shotgun guy...well okay, maybe they're not <i>all</i> entirely the axiom of baddie archetypes, but they're close enough.  They start off simple enough to put down, but as the game progresses and new gangs and types of enemies are encountered, things get a little more dicey.  It doesn't help that while Cole is a walking thunderstorm, he was somehow passed over for man-of-steel influenced bullet immunity.  You'll often find yourself fleeing from combat to juice up, and a good portion of the time, you won't make it.  Cole's susceptibility was a pretty tough grievance for me early on, but as I learned to handle him more easily, it became considerably easier to dispatch entire crowds of enemies before having to high-tail it for an energy source.

Outside of combat, there are a few other limited things than can be done around Empire City.  Through optional side-quests, you can attempt to take back the city from the ravenous gangs that have claimed the streets as their own since the quarantine.   As a part of these quests, you'll destroy surveillance equipment, race against time to recover satellite uplinks, and occasionally tail enemy couriers as they menacingly carouse the city.  Also present are a few hundred Blast Shards, which can be collected in large quantities to increase Cole's energy capacity.  

The biggest compliment I can give to inFAMOUS is that it's extraordinarily difficult to put down.  I found myself playing for hours upon hours at a time, bringing the game to its inevitable conclusion far more quickly than I actually wanted to.  The entire experience comes in at around ten solid hours, give or take a few depending on your personal preference for running side quests.  Once that time has elapsed, you're more than likely to flip the game right back to the beginning and take the opposite moral route.  There's more than enough here to place inFAMOUS as a shining star among the PlayStation 3's slowly expanding library of great games.