Pseudo-review: Infamous (PS3)

Over the past week I’ve been playing through Infamous on the PlayStation 3. Infamous is an open-world, platformer, third-person shooter game with RPG elements (What a mouthful, eh?). The game centers around Cole, an average guy who is bestowed electric super powers in a post-apocalyptic, quarantined Empire City (sort of, kind of New York City). You’re thrust into this city and you have to save it from an evil secret society trying to… um… be evil and essentially kill a lot of people for something. I thought the story was kind of muddled and a lot of the plot points seem forced to just move you to the next area.

The game has a Karma system which has you make decisions as the story progresses which affect whether Cole turns into the hero of the city or an all-around dick. Save for a few story-altering decisions, most of these Karma moments seem insignificant. For example, in one of the game’s missions you have to turn off some valves that are poisoning the water supply. You can shut off the valves in two ways. One of these ways will “hurt” Cole (making him see blurry for roughly 5 seconds) and the other will leave Cole “unhurt” but kill a lot of people. Oh no, Karma moment! To the player, this is an irrelevant decision. There is no temptation or anything to gain by being evil, at least nothing tangible by the player.

Presentation-wise, Infamous is a mixed bag. The sounds effects sound great, and the voice acting for all the characters except Cole are good. Cole sounds like he’s constantly angry and in pain with his raspy, angst-filled voice. The music is apparently forgettable because I was about to write about it and realized I have no real recollection of it. In terms of graphics the game is very pretty, albeit from a distance. While you’re running around, jumping from building to building and shooting, it looks great. However, when you get to a cut-scene the characters look poorly detailed and the animations are pretty bad.

On to the important part: the gameplay. The platforming is very fun in a parkour kind of way. Something about jumping from rooftop to rooftop and grinding across power lines is just awesome. The “shooting” is well designed and ejoyable. The game is essentially a shooter where instead of guns you have electric energy. You have your mid-range normal bolts of electricity, you can snipe,  you have electricity “grenades”, and rockets too. The controls are simple enough, and aiming is easy.  A lot of Cole’s superpowers, however, are done with the controller’s face buttons; this makes it impossible for you to aim with the right stick while shooting them (short of finger gymnastics to do both). Now, the bad stuff: Despite how fun it is to run and gun through the city as a superhero (or supervillain), the game eventually became dull and repetitive for me. All the missions felt pretty much the same: Go to X location and kill X enemies, maybe press a switch or grab an object of interest. It’s worth noting the way that the game becomes more difficult. Most games follow a pattern of getting harder as you progress and gain skills. Infamous is not an exception to this, but the way it goes about it is what gets to me. With each story arc, the enemy soldiers change. First they were red colored, then an off-white with some greens, and now they’re just gray and brown. I have to squint and sit closer to my TV each time just to be able to spot them against the game’s muddy, city color-palette. Also instead of having them be smarter or aim better, they just throw more and more soldiers at you at a time, which is sometimes annoying.

The reason why this is called a pseudo-review is because it’s not a full review since I haven’t finished the game. I’m almost done with the game, but I can only play it in short bursts now because it just feels like I’m doing the same thing over and over. This frustration is what encouraged me to write my review early, if only to drive that point across. I would say this game is worth a rental or borrowing it from a friend, but not a buy unless it drops to $20 or $30. Many other critics have nothing but praise for this game, but personally, it just got old fast.