You're not going to be disappointed. No, if you've been looking forward to inFAMOUS like we have, it will not disappoint you. You can get the demo by preordering the game (if you're American), or you can just wait until May 21st, when it will be released onto PSN.

Now, onto our impressions. The demo starts with a pretty great cutscene, featuring a large blue explosion, which is closely followed by another cutscene that isn't done in the game engine, but is, instead, animated. The cartoon-style cutscene is actually very well done and it looks is quite engaging.

You start with a healthy selection of powers to play around with - they won't all be available to you when you first star the full game but, since this is a demo, it makes sense. For killing the Reapers, a well placed Shock Grenade can take them both out, or a Shockwave can send them flying off the tracks, or you could just run up to them and melee them a few times or you could just Thunder Drop onto them (jump from somewhere high, press square, and Cole will slam down into the ground, causing a large shockwave). They're not necessarily original powers, but they work very well.

Powers such as Shockwave and Shock Grenade use power batteries, which are displayed next to your karma in the top left of the screen. You replenish this power by either waiting for it to recharge or by sucking power from an electrical source, like a street lamp, or transformer. When you're hurt, the screen loses colour like in a million FPS games - replenishing health works in the same way; suck in power or wait for it to recharge on it's own. Top tip: If there are no immediately available power sources to recharge, you can use lightning bolt, which doesn't sap your power, and shock something that conducts electricity multiple times. Then you can charge from that.

Freerunning in inFAMOUS is also something enjoyable. You can grind along cables that connect buildings (presumably power cables), use R1 to hover a bit to control your falls, scale pretty much anything you can see (including buildings, lamp posts, walls, etc), it's all great fun. Once you're proficient with the controls you can get around very quickly and, more importantly, in a way that is constantly fun. I've played through the demo more than twenty times now and I still haven't gotten bored of just moving around the city. It all works very well. It might lock you onto something you didn't intend to climb onto once in a while, but it's certainly not going to affect the gameplay, as it doesn't occur anywhere near enough for it to do so.

So once you've done that, the train shudders along until it stops, at which point you're instructed to find a transformer and charge it with Lightning Bolt (Hold L1 to aim, R1 to shoot). It takes 5 shots to charge the transformer once you've found it, then you just climb back onto the train and onwards you go. The next time it stops there are enemies around for you to kill, including a Conduit. A conduit is a Reaper that has acquired superpowers of some kind - the ones in the demo can teleport around abit and shoot shockwaves along the ground at you, which are pretty damaging. Once dispatched, you charge another transformer.

And so the mission continues until you get to a station, where you let the captives out of the train in another animated cutscene. It sounds repetitive, but each stop is sufficiently different enough to keep it fun and it doesn't last long anyway. Besides, you get to throw enemies into the air, then zap them. That's just cool, and you get XP for it (which is useless in the demo, but it will be used to buy powers in the full game).

There are 4 missions, of which two take place as Hero Cole and two as Infamous Cole. Your actions won't affect your karma in the demo, but at least you get a taste of the two. Infamous Cole seems to be most destructive, with Shock Grenades that break into 5 or so grenades when they hit something and a Shockwave that electrifies anything you use it on up-close, which will cause a car to explode, effectively turning it into a large flying metal grenade. The missions are all quite different, from moving a train to protecting a food drop from Reapers, it leaves the impression that the game may be able to keep itself from getting stale before hitting the end.

The gameplay really is great. It's like they removed everything that wouldn't be enjoyable and kept everything that would be. Getting around is fun, combat is fun, the powers are great fun. It's all full of little touches that you might not necessarily discover by yourself, too. For example, some of the enemies have rocket launchers that are pretty lethal, but did you know you could use a Shockwave to redirect these rockets back at them?

The graphics are not amazing. They're good, certainly, but you won't get any 'wow' from the screenshots, and the in-game cutscene animation on character is a little rubbish. It all comes to  life when you're playing, though. When everything is in motion, you've just Shock Grenade-d 3 cars into the air, which then all explode as they land, sending civilians and pieces of metal flying, and there isn't a single stutter in the frame rate, the game looks brilliant. It is definitely a game that looks better in motion.

So overall, the demo has actually furthered our excitement for the final game. Just 16 days left if you're American, and 19 if you're in the UK, and we really can't wait for it. You can expect a review when it's finally released, but until then, you'll just have to wait patiently. Or not-so-patiently, that's up to you, but in 11 days you'll get a demo which will surely help with the final stretch. Until then, you could go and watch our videos on Justin.tv, all recorded directly from the demo. You might even catch us playing it live and streaming it, if you're lucky.