In 2009 we saw the birth of a new genre, thanks to 2 games: inFAMOUS and Prototype. I can confidently say that without these two titles, Saints Row IV wouldn't have been as enjoyable as it was. These two games effectively began the open-world "superhero" genre. And, as the trend tends to be, this new genre was well-received, and a great deal of flaws were overlooked in favor of promoting a new concept.
Well allow me to shit on your parade. Infamous is a gritty, dark, superhero origins story with a morality system that makes about as much sense as choosing to guzzle down 400 gallons of Pepsi or Coke. Sure, there's the matter of personal taste, but in the end you're still going to wind up with diabetes.
You play as Cole McGrath, a now-unemployed bike messenger who unwittingly detonates some sort of bomb thing that grants him superpowers and wipes out everyone else within a two-block radius. Also, in addition to your new superpowers and terrorist status, there's also been an outbreak of some unexplained plague. Seriously. Unexplained. For the entire game. This causes Empire City (the fictional 3-island locale far enough off shore that any recognizable mainland is well out of render distance) to be locked under quarantine while the US government tries to deal with (see: ignore) the situation. After an attempted escape from the quarantine, Cole is imprisoned and released by an FBI agent named Moya, with the caveat that he become her personal lapdog. Motivation for the entire story is that you're trying to locate her husband, John, who had infiltrated the First Sons, the Illuminati-esque secret society, that designed and constructed the bomb that gave Cole superpowers. Known as the Ray Sphere, this weapon of mass destruction supposedly absorbs the life force of all nearby individuals and concentrates it into a single person.
With Cole as her new errand boy, Moya will order you all over Empire City. Here's where the narrative starts to get a little wonky. Your job was supposed to be to find John and extract him. However, on a regular basis, your FBI wrangler has you doing mundane and seemingly irrelevant tasks like turning the power back on and fighting a war against local gang activity. A few of these are even justified by her claiming that the military is breathing down her neck and if she doesn't maintain control of the situation, they'll glass the city.
Infamous is all about powers. Cole has been granted the gift of electricity which allows for some interesting mechanics. Health in this game does regenerate, albeit excruciatingly slowly compared to other titles. If you want to heal up in a flash, Cole can drain the energy from nearby objects like lamp posts and cars. Granted, the objects deemed "drainable" do seem a bit random. It's understandable why you can drain stoplights and generators, but a little frustrating that not all lamps, TVs or mounted light fixtures can be used as resupply points.
You'll travel Empire City entirely on-foot. This mechanic is explained early on in that Cole's electricity is constantly surging through his body, and anything else he touches for that matter. Guns explode in his hands, and sitting in a car will detonate its entire gas tank. Fortunately, Cole happens to be well-versed in "urban exploration" which explains his monkey-like ability to scale the side of buildings, clinging on to any ledge just wide enough for a human hand to grab hold of. Better in theory than in practice, the climbing mechanic pretty much just feels like Assassin's Creed with Down Syndrome. From the ground, you'll grab one ledge, and then just jam on the X button until you finally reach your destination. Occasionally, you'll have to exhibit some lateral movement, since the next platform is just barely out of reach. Where the movement really falls flat on its face is when trying to pick up collectables. The entire climbing system feels as if it was designed with an unrelenting snap-to-grid feature. Not only does Cole normally latch on to the nearest logical pole or ledge, he also has a hard time letting go. When you instruct the character to release and drop, he'll travel about as far as the next nearest protrusion and cling to that for dear life. This is a game without falling damage where 10 minutes in, you're prompted to jump off a five-story roof. For fucksake Cole! Moving about gets a little more fun when roughly an hour into the game, you earn the ability to perform an "induction grind" which allows you to move rapidly across rails and electrical/telephone cables. You'll also develop a skill that allows you to hover short distances called "static thrusters". What static electricity has to do with hovering, I'll leave to science.
Par for the course in any well designed game, Infamous starts you small with simple lightning blasts and melee attacks and builds from there. In time, you'll acquire shock grenades, electric rockets, and eventually the ability to call down straight-up bolts of lightning. These powers can be improved by dumping experience points into their 3-tiered upgrade system. While basic abilities like melee, thunder drop and damage reduction are all neutral abilities, the rest of Cole's powers are tied to the game's morality system.
Over the course of the game, Cole is given "tough" decisions that influence how Empire City views him, as well as effecting what powers he has access to, and how they can evolve. Disappointingly, the powers don't really end up with enough variance. I would think that having the entire spectrum of electrical super skills to chose from, Sucker Punch could have come up with a few more interesting evolutions. Picking the "Good" route through the game does offer a couple unique skills like redirect rockets and grenades that will live capture enemies for you and improve your heroic standing. The "Evil" route is pretty lackluster. Each upgrade to each individual power just makes things explode more. Your standard lightning bolts can trigger electric explosions, grenades turn into cluster grenades, and your rockets will fire mini-rockets. A wholly missed opportunity is that you can't upgrade your Thunder Storm ability at all. You know, the ultimate badass one that lets you drop lightning bolts on people.
While these morality-based powers seem like an interesting mechanic at first glance, the game would have been better off just asking you at the title screen if you wanted to be a martyr or a murderer. The game functions off a polar morality scale where increase in one side (Good or Evil) leads directly to a decrease in the other. Now, while I'm generally not a fan of this mechanic in any game, Infamous adds a few more obstacles. Since there are three tiers to each power, there are consequently three tiers to both moral alignments, In order to reach the highest level of each individual power, you're essentially stuck selecting one of the two alignments from the start of the game, and dumping all of your time and energy into trying to raise points in that particular direction. This causes a break between player and character. Instead of role-playing the game out and making the tough choices to mold Cole into an interesting character, the player merely looks at each option through the veil of the games mechanics. "Which one of these will get me closer to my ultimate goal of hero or asshole?"
What's an even bigger problem here is how little the moral choices affect the narrative. A Cole who's spent the past week saving people, healing the dying and fighting an all out turf-war against the local gangs is only slightly better received by the locals than a Cole who's spent his weekend slaughtering innocents and kicking puppies. I understand that there needs to be some kind of rigidity to a story like Infamous, but when forced to make major plot-changing decisions, to have them affect the end result so insignificantly is rather frustrating. Even the game's end is completely unchanged by your moral choices, and it's only the aftermath of what has happened to Empire City that's different.
In the spirit of keeping things open-worldy, Infamous features a variety of side-missions that allow you to lay claim to the territories in Empire City, which effectively chases off the badguys for good. Certain missions are morally linked, red for evil, blue for good. There's a special power for both alignments tied to these missions, and the only way to unlock their evolved forms is to complete all 15 of either the Good or Evil missions. The alignment missions are contextually based. Evil missions usually have you causing chaos or killing off civilian protesters, where as good missions have you escorting prisoners or cracking down on the local gangs. I wish there had been significantly more of these, because the neutral side missions are plentiful and kind of insulting. I can understand Good Cole stopping to help people remove surveillance equipment or blow up a gang-controlled murder bus. The issue here is that these missions don't change depending on your alignment. Excuse me? I'm EVIL Cole. If it wasn't for the restriction of my not being able to touch vehicles, I'd be DRIVING the fucking murder-bus. I want nothing more than to crush all you puny civies beneath my red thundering heel!
I'll avoid talking about the graphics this time around, and won't knock Infamous for its poor draw distance and having a significant amount of pop-in objects. I will, however, bitch about the animation in this game. All characters from the main cast to random NPC civilians move like coked-up robots. Every action is fast and precise, like the game can't calculate angles in increments smaller than 10 degrees. Watching game-engine cutscenes is especially brutal, since each character's face moves like a ventriloquist dummy - sharp, sudden facial expressions combined with lips fused to jaws that move only up and down. Fortunately, Sucker Punch knew this as well as we do, and did their best to replace any in-game cutscenes with a more stylized comic book equivalent. And frankly speaking, the art isn't half bad.
Though I find myself at odds with the control scheme and the moral choice mechanics, I bestow upon Infamous:
C+
Infamous was a solid new franchise for Sucker Punch that helped shape a new genre. While I personally had some issues with the game's handling of morality and the control scheme, that was irksome at best and rage-inducing at worst, I never really felt bored with the game. There was absolutely no level of excitement and wonder, yet 4-6 hours after firing the game up, I still found myself playing for reasons I can't quite describe.
-Nik "Latency" Trumble
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