Wow, I haven't posted in a while.
Well, I did pick up inFAMOUS (the week before last actually). Some thoughts after completing the game:
- Overall, I really enjoyed it. Mostly because controlling your character is a lot of fun. He can climb virtually any surface and can fall huge distances and not take damage. Once you unlock the ability to glide across power cables, quickly covering ground by scampering on roof tops and grinding on cables is pretty exhilarating.
- The controls are also extremely tight. You can unlock a large number of powers and they are all easy to pull off. The game also features a sort of auto-lock for determining where you are trying to jump. This greatly assists you when trying to land on tight spaces, such as power lines. It works very well for the most part and the only time it becomes a hindrance is when you just want to descend quickly, since the game thinks you are falling and makes your character latch on to the nearest object. That can get a bit annoying.
- Visually the game is alright, but it won't make your jaw drop. As is the case with all open-world game, sacrifices in detail are made to render the large open environment. I never thought the game was ugly by any means, but I can't say I had one single "wow" moment graphically in my entire experience with it (I had like 14 of those my first 20 minutes with Dead Space for example). Cole (your character) animates well for the most part, but while climbing up surfaces his movements seem a bit too quick and erratic. They probably did that on purpose to keep the pace fast, but compared to Altair's ultra realistic climbing animations (from Assassin's Creed), Cole's come off as just a bit weird.
- The structure of the game is similar to many open world games, like the Spider-Man games. You can traverse the city however you want and there are certain points on your map that unlock story missions. Then there are usually civilians you can get side-missions from. Many of the story missions are fun and interesting, yet a lot of the side missions are pretty repetitive. But, since controlling Cole and dishing out punishment is so much fun, you don't notice as much.
- I'm a big fan of games that make you feel powerful and untouchable. inFAMOUS does that well. For the most part. See, Cole's powers are very impressive. Once you unlock them all you have a huge arsenal at your disposal, including raining down lighting from the skies (my favorite power). Yet for some reason, towards the end of the game, I didn't feel quite as powerful as I would have liked since enemies can take quite the beating before being defeated. Now, this might be attributed to two factors. First, the game automatically switched my difficulty to "hard" at the beginning of the game, I guess based on how I completed the first mission (pretty cool feature actually). Second, since I played as a "good" character (the game offers paths like KotoR, which determine which powers you unlock), I'm thinking my attacks weren't as lethal as they would have been as an evil character, since the good powers lean more towards restraining enemies rather than killing them. So, towards the end of the game my default lighting attack seemed to take about 15 shots to down one enemy!!! Granted, you should not play this game by just shooting everyone with your default attack, the best part is stringing together combos with all of your other devastating powers, but that was just an example.
- Overall, the game was just fun. I actually want to go back and play through it again as an evil character, so that says something about how enjoyable it is. I wouldn't mind a sequel too.
