Paul Plays Playstation: Infamous

For my next gaming adventure with my new console, I thought it best to pick the pace up a bit. As much as I enjoyed Heavy Rain, outside of a few select moments, it wasn’t exactly pulse pounding action, and I figured Infamous, the mass destruction superhero simulator, would be the opposite experience.

It’s a game I’ve been wanting to play for a long while now, ever since it was advertised in tandem with Prototype, a game with a similar premise and execution, but one that I’ve found ultimately did a worse job of it. The PS-exclusive Infamous does far better with idea, though in the end it didn’t quite live up to my expectations.

Gameplay is a lot more fluid than Prototype which seemed like an arcade button masher rather than something that required much, if any, strategy. While you can’t elbow drop tanks until they explode here, Infamous’s crisper graphics, better animations and smoother controls make the experience more enjoyable. It’s not exactly Grand Theft Auto with superpowers, but it’s close.

“Take that, public transportation!”

The game has you in control of Cole MacGrath, a bike messenger granted extraordinary powers when a top secret package he’s delivering explodes, wiping out most of the city. As riots and disease spread, the metropolis is put on lockdown, and as the most powerful man around, Cole is tasked with getting the lights back on, and taking down the gangs now running rampant across the three boroughs, which are progressively unlockable GTA-style as the game goes on.

Cole’s powers are all electricity based, and you’ll never even touch a gun for the duration of the game. Your quick attack is an unlimited supply of short electrical bursts from your hand, and as you progress through the game, powering up more sections of the city, you will unlock new abilities that can be further upgraded by collecting XP.

These powers are cool to look at yes, but when you strip away all the flashy electricity, the game is a bit less innovative than it appears. In fact, most of your offensive abilities directly coordinate with regular weapons you would receive in other titles. Your electrical zap might be your starting pistol, shock grenade is just a grenade, precision shock is a sniper rifle,  and megawatt hammer, despite its cool name, is really just a rocket launcher. The only really distinctive powers you acquire are the movement abilities like induction grind, which lets you slide on rails and cables like you’re Tony Hawk, and Static Thrusters, which make it easier to navigate while airborne.

Getting around is far better than most open world games of this type.

It is kind of cool how you recharge yourself through various electrical devices littered around the city, but your powers rip through your meter so fast, it’s often annoying to stop and recharge after every volley, and almost impossible to do so effectively while in combat. The end result is that the vast majority of the time, you’ll just be spamming your R1 quick attack. It’s fine when enemies take two hits in the first section, but as you progress, even the basic ones will take three, then all the way up to five, even with upgrades. But it’s not like you can just stand there and mash it, your shock will often send enemies tumbling, and you’ll have to re-aim and finish them off, which can be a tricky prospect if they’re convulsing behind cover or on top of a far away roof.

The enemy groups you’ll encounter are threefold. Reapers are hooded death dealers who were former junkies. Dust men are the homeless who have organized and now wear armor made of scraps with garbage bag capes which is an admittedly hilarious concept. The First Sons are paramilitary, and might as well be straight out of Killzone. Each group has maybe one or two unique enemy types, but 95% of the time, you’ll just be taking on grunts with machine guns.

There are a LOT of enemies in this game. Not in the sense where this makes the game hard, more so that it’s just flat out annoying that you will spend the vast majority of the game walking around the city getting randomly pelted by bad guys from literally every single rooftop and at every intersection. It’s like playing Grand Theft Auto and having every cop you see start shooting at you automatically.

“Did I do thaaat?”

To combat this, the game has side missions that have you clearing out the city by performing a designated task in a certain area. Once you do so, the enemies will vanish. Sounds good, but in each of the three areas, there are about 25 different missions to do before you clear out the whole section, and once you do? You’re on to the next one which is brimming with baddies once again.

With about 75 of these side missions in existence, they really do make up the bulk of the game, and often times you’ll get so caught up doing them, the main plot feels like an afterthought, and the amount of time you’ll spend on the main quest line pales in comparison to how much you’ve spent scrubbing the streets free of gangs.

To the game’s credit, they do try to diversify these missions a bit, having you do things like peel surveillance equipment off a building, escort prisoners to a jail or destroy a bus ripping up the street with machine gun fire. But even if they have 10 or 15 different types of missions, you still end up doing them 5 or 6 times each, and they start feeling like chores midway through the game.

Infamous also has one of the worst offenses of a divisive moral choice system I’ve ever seen. It annoys me enough when a game like Mass Effect wants to classify me as “Paragon” or “Renegade” based on my decisions, but Infamous takes it one step further. Not only does it have a literal meter onscreen at all times showing you how good or bad you’re being, but it has morality exclusive move sets and upgrades, and every time you have to make a choice, the game literally pauses and asks you, “Do you want to be GOOD or EVIL here?” It’s all incredibly ham handed, and honestly I don’t think it adds much of anything to the game other than giving players a haphazard reason to play it again and see if their reversed actions actually change anything.

Oh, apparently you get red lightning too.

As this game is quite a few years old at this point, I feel comfortable discussing the plot through the end, which contains one of the games better moments. The story up until the finale is rather muddled, and revolves around finding the mythical Ray Sphere which is the powerful device that gave you your powers and messed up the city. You interact with a number of government agents and shadowy figures I couldn’t keep track of, and are forever being hounded by a mysterious figure named Kessler who seems to have a great many of Cole’s electrical powers.

Well surprise! There’s a reason for that, he is you, and you’ve traveled back from the future to force Cole into saving the city, which in his time has been completely ravaged even more so than it is now. It’s a cool little plot twist, but really the only interesting story moment in the game, as the hour long breaks in between main missions excavating new areas out from under gang control doesn’t exactly lend itself to a terribly well-paced story.

There are definitely some things I like about Infamous. Combat is generally fun, even if it does get a bit repetitive over time. You really do feel like a superhero, and that’s an effect that most games haven’t been able to produce very well to date. The segments where you have unlimited juice to use any power you want as much as you want are among my favorites, and that made for some memorable missions.

But with so much of the game devoted to side missions, and a neverending stream of enemy grunts flooding all areas of the map, the game often feels like work, and can get a little dull despite all the sizzling electricity dancing all over the screen.

With reports that the second game is a lot like the first, repetitive combat and overbearing moral choice system intact, I’m tempted to avoid it. I may be in the minority opinion here, as this game is much beloved by many, but unlike Uncharted and Heavy Rain which surpassed my expectations, Infamous did end up falling short.

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16 Comments

  1. Infamous can get pretty repetitive, when i played through my second time as an evil Cole, I refused to do any surveillance missions or criminal escorts. You should give God of War a try next. The first two are classics and the third was a tour de force of Kratos and the power of the PS3.

  2. I too just bought a PS3 recently. I played InFamous first, I agree with your review. The side missions really are the bulk of this game. I heard that InFamous 2 is much better.

    I’m currently playing Heavy Rain and enjoying it immensely.

    I’ve also heard that 3d Dot Game Heroes is a fantastic game.

  3. I’ve been helping a friend of mine work through this game since he’s not exactly the best with most games. So far the one thing I really find annoying above all else is the Spy Drones mission where you have to take out the UAVs.

    Shit is frustrating as hell, since I usually down a plane and it goes straight into the water. I’ve tried different vantage points but seem to come up with the same problem each time…

  4. I enjoyed Infamous a lot. It was fun to run around the city and i didn’t mind the side quests. That being said, I got the game for free (as did most people) and I doubt I’ll spend money on the sequel. I played the demo, I liked the improvements to moving around the rooftops, but the combat felt worse.

  5. I enjoyed the game an incredible amount even though it was a bit repetitive. One of the things they could of improved on though is the differences between the light and dark side powers. They are mostly similar stuff but if they made the dark powers really interesting or more vicious and evil then they could of radically changed the game on a second replay as opposed to basically just the story and trophy values.

  6. I downloaded this one free after the ps3 network hassle, and I am in the group that enjoyed it a lot! I found the limiting of long cutscenes refreshing, since the bulk of the story line is given to you via phone call while you’re still moving around doing stuff. And I never had a problem with running out of juice with the powerups you can earn, good karma and your regular zap attack drains energy from enemies, and bad karma you can just drain downed baddies.

  7. I thought the controls were awful, the plot weak, the morality system completely ****ed up, the missions repetitive and boring, and the characters could all die for all I cared.

    And I was playing through as a GOOD character.

    For example, one of the first missions was, “Do you give food to the other people or keep it all for yourself.” To my knowledge, neither decision affected ANYTHING. In Fallout, if I made that decision, I would have received something for performing the “evil” action. Instead, the GOOD vs. EVIL thing was just a “be a dick” or “don’t be a dick” button.

    Spoilers for those who haven’t played.

    During one of the missions where you have to save Trish, I was trying to go to the building to save the 5 doctors instead of Trish. I got really confused and ended up climbing the wrong building. I was completely sure I was at the correct building so I ignored Kessler when he was calling me selfish. I thought he was trying to trick me, so I ignored him. Then I end up accidentally with the evil path and the “plot twist” happens that Trish was on the other building. I would be fine with that, but I wanted to go to the other building! I reload and go to the other building and lo’ and behold, Trish still dies because she was in fact hanging from the other building.

    I do not appreciate railroading in my video games. If you’re going to make me have a moral decision, you can’t go changing the universe to fit your plot.

    I thought Prototype was much better personally. It KNEW that it was a hack and slash and the movement through New York was much more fluid. I’m apparently in the minority though. It didn’t pretend to be something it wasn’t. For what it was, it was good (I wouldn’t say very good, as it had its fair share of problems too).

  8. @ Paul

    Luckyyyyy. Mine crash into the big crane/structure I’m on and then plunge into the water. I’ve only had one of them actually stay in place long enough to get the intel.

  9. I really think you should give resistance a shot. The first one is a pretty good game, but the second one is really fantastic. The enemies can be pretty generic, but the story is pretty cool and where it really stands out are the creative weapons. It’s made by the same people as ratchet and clank, another great platformer/shooter series that is underrated. You could probably pick up the first resistance for like 10 bucks at Gamestop. Play it, if only to get to the second game. I just started the third game last night and it seems to be a solid addition to the series so far. Pick up ratchet and clank future: tools of destruction while you’re at it and you can thank me later.

  10. I got mine for free wit my PS3 so it was the first game I played. At first i didn’t like it because I thought it was pretty boring, but then it got to me because of its great story and I really enjoyed it.
    Paul, you should try God of War 3 and MGS 4 (if u played the other games in the series). These are my favorite games besides Uncharted for the PS3.

  11. Glad to see you’re enjoying your experience; Heavy Rain and inFamous were two of my least favorite games I’ve ever owned, HR because of how far short of the hype it fell (all that “infinite choice, infinite possibilities” tripe, and it turned out only 6 scenes in the game had any effect on the rest of the game… on the second playthrough, I only hit a button if you had to to continue the scene. Failing the first two dozen quick time events with it having zero effect on the story killed it for me), and inFamous was painfully buggy on top of being tiresomely repetitive–after I arbitrarily attached to the side of a moving car for the fourth or so time, crashing the game and having to start over and play through the same “didn’t I do this in Spider-Man 3?” side mission from the start… never finished it.

    Uncharted 2, God of War 3, and Resistance 2 are some of my faves, and the wife loves the Disgaea and Shin Megami Tensei games (mostly PS2, but what else are you gonna play those on these days?).

  12. I grabbed the demo ages ago, but got bored. Sandbox games these days are a dime a dozen. After spending hundreds of hours in GTA and its successors, I didn’t find Infamous did enough for me to want to keep playing it. I felt the same with spider man and the hulk games. They are fun for a while, but ultimately get a bit boring after a while.
    Not sure if you have played it yet, but Little Big Planet 1&2 are actually really fun. I played it with my girl friend right through and she generally hates most games. Its brilliantly done and has moments of excitement and comedy. I never got into the level creation, but still loved the games.
    I have GOW3 but haven’t played that much of it. Its really good, but I get tired of games that try to be constantly intense mach action. Bulletstorm did the same thing and I had to force myself to finish it.

  13. tires don exits- I completely agree with your review. The controls are AWFUL. Combat is the worst. Prototype much more fun. And thats what counts kids. FUN FUN FUN.

  14. I agree with your review. The only think I don’t agree with is your statement that Infamous 2 is pretty much the same as 1.

    The combat system is roughly the same, but everything is slightly quicker/more responsive.

    Also the storyline makes a lot of sense and the locales in the game are FANtastic. The fake new-orleans is just a brilliant piece of design. Loads of water around with a character who’s allergic to water? Great stuff.

    I don’t want to tell you what to do, but I reckon your next PS game should be the god of war collection. HD remakes of GoW 1&2??? How can you not like that! The first one is fantastic, and the second one is the best in the series. Then you play the 3rd one and it blows your mind with scale and warps up the story nicely.

    I love God of War

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