Review: Infamous
He’s so famous, he’s INfamous!
So I finally blew the dust off of my Playstation 3 and tried out Infamous. I’m a fan ofthe Sly Cooper series (which came from the same developers, Sucker Punch) and definitely am having a good time with the game so far. If you liked Crackdown or are a fan of super-powered sandbox games in general then Infamous will be a game for you. The graphics are a nice, dark shade and the controls work pretty well even with all of the options the different abilities give you.
One of the big things I’ve enjoyed about the game is that you’re never so powerful that you don’t have to worry about dying. It’s not a game you can play like Grand Theft Auto even though it lies in the same general genre of gameplay. You constantly have to hide and attack from a distance or the enemies (which can become painfully annoying at times) will very quickly gun you down. This makes you think a bit differently about how to play the game and gives a different spin on a superhero that doesn’t involve invulnerability or bullet-proof skin. The story line could use a bit of work but still comes off as an entertaining, albeit cheesy, chunk of the overall fun of the game. The bottom line is that its just an entertaining game where it becomes fun to shock criminals and grind along power lines and train tracks.
Probably one of the main turn-offs is something that a ton of different reviews have already touched upon and that’s the climbing itself. While in 98% of the areas you can scale and climb to any point on the game’s three islands if there is a fence (of any type it seems, whether its chain link or a picket fence lining a ramp) Cole (the game’s protagonist) seems to just not be able to grasp it and climb. The idea of this is baffling since we see someone that can scale a building with nothing less than some water pipes and window-sills but can’t climb something that I could jump up when I was 10. It wouldn’t be such a problem if the majority of the game didn’t center around this concept. Another problem for me is that the array of powers that they do give you just really aren’t terribly necessary. As fun as they are to use and as great as they look I still spammed the default lightning power more than anything else I got throughout the game’s progress. This isn’t a horrible thing, and probably my fault more than the developer’s fault, but just something that irritated me a bit as I realized it more and more.
The game also suffers a bit of the same problem that Assassin’s Creed had, the side missions that you have to do while attempting to “liberate” the town get increasingly repetitive as you progress but th
