TITTLE : inFAMOUS PLATFORM : PS3 DEVELOPER : SUCKER PUNCH RELEASE DATE : OUT NOW

When reviewing a Sandbox game that isn’t Grand Theft Auto you have to make allowances for the elephant in the room. With sucker punches first game in 2 years there are many, many elephants to allow for. If your going to take parts from games like Crackdown, Gears of War , GTA , the Force Unleashed , Assassins Creed ,Bio shock and Fable your either confident that your game has enough identity to stand up on its own or your well of ideas has run dry and you are squeezing creative juices from someone else game.

Infamous avoids the later...but just about.

The game begins with a great opening cinematic that’s told through stylised comic book panels. The protagonist Cole McGrath wakes up in the epicentre of a huge explosion with nothing but a few marks and brusises.The explosion that killed thousands of Empire city inhabitants has left Cole not only unharmed but also gifted with the ability to manipulate electrical energy and survive drops off buildings. unfortunatly for Cole the explosion also killed some people who were close to his friends and loved ones so when he is revealed to be a possible source of the explosion he’s left with some hard questions. This along with a ''mysterious plague'' and a bunch of awfully named baddies called reapers make for as good a superhero origin story as any.  

The story has lots of potential seemingly inspired by Graphic novel ''Batman No Mans Land'' where Gotham is cut off from the rest of the world by a natural disaster, its intriguing enough to keep you interested but is seriously hampered by the way sucker punch tell it. When are we going to move past junior cert level story telling in gaming?? At one point Cole intercepts an encrypted message and replays it to an FBI agent....the message is something to the affect off. The bad guys have something, Cole then asks the agent. Can you explain that in English??? What? Son if you can’t understand what the guy just said then its easy too sees why you picked couriering as your profession. What’s annoying is that this constant hand holding and anti - intelligence is used most of the way through the story. Its as if someone had a fantastic idea and then the big wigs came in and said ''I don’t think kids are going to get this, dumb it down please'' the result being that the story goes through patches of brilliants and the rest of the time it feels like someone in the HR dept of Sucker Punch got tasked with the job of filling in the gaps! Being a huge comic book fan this was one of the most disappointing aspects of the game, that said the story does pick up in the final few hours so avoids banality by a flea’s fringe.

So. So far so average. What sets infamous apart from other games is the combat. Cole’s electric powers are his main weapon. Guns are strictly off limits and and mêlée is available but not the preferred choice. Infamous is at its best when your navigating the nicely rendered City scape and fighting foes across rooftops and open areas. Depris, cars and dustbins fly as you force push, woops I mean electric burst enemies out of the way and fry them mid flight .Its a ton of fun and at its top level is the most fun thing in the game. The second feature is the Altair like park our or city exploring as Cole calls it, if you’ve played crackdown you’ve got some idea of what to expect. Crackdown features a climbing system where most buildings have ledges or window that can be used to navigate across the skyline. Infamous does the same but gives you more to work with. Everything in the game world can be used as a foothold or grab for Cole to jump, hop skip and pull himself around. It refreshing to see, as games like Assains Creed and Prince of Persia seem to lazily rely on the same pre rendered objects to use for grappling and climbing. Sucker Punch for the most part do a great job of making the city a play ground for Cole without dumbing down the architecture or blatantly putting Mirrors Edge type ramps everywhere, its totally at odds with the way the story is handled and makes for allot of fun times. Cole can grind railings and train tracks.Zip wires and poles with full combat functionality while he’s doing it. Its a great experience and credit to sucker punch’s work that the world is and combat are the best thing about the game.

Everything in the detail looks like its got love in it, the way Coles character displays a blue ''Echo'' when the camera is caught between him and the environment. His burdened stance and interesting static animations. The electrical powers themselves are very pretty and interact with the environment as Cole walks runs through it. Draining energy from city street lamps and cars feels natural and smooth, this really looks like a labour of love from Sucker Punch and there times when you think theve nailed it. 

That’s not to say it’s perfect. There are the very odd incidents where Cole won’t climb onto something, usualy in the middle of a fight. There’s also the really really annoying underground sections of the city. These dungeon style missions force you into the sewers to restore power to city blocks without electricity. As said earlier the game excels when you have the freedom to use the powers you’ve acquired through the game so why Sucker Punch constantly put you into tight dark environments with a cover system that doesn’t work at ALL is beyond me. Pressing O sucks you into cover..well kind off it makes you crouch about 3 feet away from cover even if the cover is taller then you. For some reason you still get hit even when enemies are on level ground and if there on roofs you mite as well just stand there and get hit because it’s more of a burden then any help. Luckily they don’t last the whole way through the campaign but there are still many sections that force you into tunnels etc.

While were on the subject off annoyances we mite as well continue, the powers themselves are very fun but for some incidents it would be nice to grab a gun....like when an enemy is behind a mesh fence for example. If Coles picked up one of the millions of guns dropped by the reapers he could avoid many frustrating sections of the campaign. Especially when you first acquire the sniper ability as you get maybe 4 shots of energy before your dry so if you don’t know that hiding behind chicken wire make enemies invincible you could well end up angry. Also why doesn’t Cole just have a few car batteries in his backpack??? he carries the thing everywhere anyway , surely they would be useful in times of emergency. Also Cole seems to be allergic to water? If you step into a fountain your nearly die and in the sewers if you hit the water you’ve got moments to get out before your fried. This mite explain
why he never changes his clothes, but it also raises the question of why the reapers don't shoot water at him and not bullets?? 

There’s a Karma system that doesn't really affect the story and is more used to give out new abilities then anything Mass Effect like. It’s an affective level up system as any but Fable fans have seen stuff like this done much better a long time ago. Side quests are littered around the map and are also used for unlocking abilities. It’s very hard to put your self through them though as they are far from imaginative, after spending 10 mins following a Reaper only for him to randomly see you can be frustrating and once you’ve spent ten minutes crawling around a building looking for video cameras you’re not going to want to do it again.

All these quirks don’t ruin what is a great console exclusive from Sony, doing more things right then it does wrong Infamous takes everything that you liked from Assassins Creed and Crackdown and expands apon it,unfortunatly it has to live with the consequences. Sucker Punches 1st game since Sly Cooper 3 is a zippy superhero yarn that falls under the category of you get out of it what you put in. At 18 hrs plus there’s plenty to be enjoyed here but with Radicals PROTOTYPE promising a different take on the same genre many may want to wait for that game before they decide what accidental hero to go with, Cole certainly seems more relatable then the angry looking Alex Mercer but that's just this reviewers opinion. 

The Good Great combat Story is interesting Urban Exploration is very well implemented Presentation is very solid The Bad Too much hand holding in earlier sections Missions can be repetitive Side quest are poor a best Cover system is poor Cole’s voice is too gravely