It’s finally here, folks, and, if you liked the demo anywhere near as much as I did, you’re not going to be disappointed. Whether that will hold true with those who weren’t so crazy about the demo, however, remains to be seen. You see, inFAMOUS nails the gameplay almost perfectly, barring an issue or two, but there are a lot of technical issues that, although minor, are more prevalent than we have come to expect from a first party Sony game. Still, we’ll get to those, right now, let’s begin the review.

As you probably know, inFAMOUS is a superhero game. It uses comic-style cutscenes to tell the story, which look phenomenal, they’re very well designed and, whilst they seem to move a little quickly, tell the story very effectively. The in-game cutscenes tend to be much less impressive, however, with awkward animation at times on certain characters (Trish, Cole’s girlfriend, being an example you can see in the demo). There’s another issue, too – in the demo, in the mission in which you must defend a food parcel for Trish. You’ve probably played it – well, in the cutscene at the end whilst I was playing the full game, a barrel flew it’s way over to where she enters the scene from at the beginning of that cutscene, blocking her from moving in, so the cutscene essentially showed Cole talking to a disembodied voice. Which is creepy. Cole’s animation is superb at all times, though.

The graphics are not revolutionary. In fact, the city itself, the textures on walls and floors and some of the character models are pretty pedestrian. There are some great effects in there, like heat hazes from chimneys on roofs, that look damn good, as well as all of Cole’s powers. In motion, however, the game comes to life – with explosions everywhere and cars bouncing around, gunshot trails all around you, the game looks great, especially since I didn’t witness a single stutter in the framerate in my 16 hours of play. Other reviews have mentioned framerate issues, but I didn’t even see one.

Every once in a while, you’ll see a character flickering between two stances for no apparent reason, or that a dead enemy has landed with his upper body inside a building with just the legs sticking out, vehicle and pedestrian pop-in and pop-out (at times, vehicles and civilians just disappear, as well as appear and, though the pop-in is always at a decent distance, cars can disappear directly in front of you).

The soundtrack is composed by Amon Tobin, the musical genius behind Splinter Cell 3: Chaos Theory’s soundtrack, so you know it’s going to be great. And it is, of course. Voice acting is mostly great where it counts. Cole, whilst he may sound a little gravelly for some, is very well acted, as are all the major characters short of, well, Trish, maybe. Dialogue is mostly good, though certain lines, like ‘you’re the only person I know with superpowers’ are just badly written or voiced badly (the only way that line could possibly work is if it was dripping with sarcasm). Explosions and electricity sounds and all of those things all sound great, of course. 

I have to admit, after playing the demo so much (easily 30 hours on the demo alone), when I transitioned to the full game, it was rather jarring to start with almost no powers. Once you get control of yourself properly, you have Lightning Bolt (the standard attack) and, after a few minutes, you get shockwave. And that’s it. Obviously, this is more of a problem with my religious replaying of the demo than the game, but it is still quite strange. You unlock new powers by charging substations, which, inaddition to granting you a shockingly good new power, powers up a section of the city, so you can explore it without suffering from electricity withdrawal and fighting everyone you see.

Gameplay itself is fantastic. The combat is intense and, at times, frantic, and you only ever die because of you. The controls work very well, they’re mapped out perfectly to the controller and, as you get a new power, you easily welcome it into your arsenal with open, electrically charged arms. The freerunning is, for the most part, great, but it does fall short every once in a while. Sometimes it grabs onto something you don’t want it to grab onto, and sometimes it does the opposite – completely fails to grab something it should have. There have been times when I’ve fell directly through a pipe I was jumping onto and died in water below, all through no fault of my own. 

For the most part, though, it works very, very well. It’s also a lot of fun. That 16 hours I spent on my first playthrough weren’t all storyline, the story is more like 10 hours (which is good), I have easily spent 6 hours searching for collectibles, which doesn’t get boring for me in this game and this game alone, all because of the parkour. It’s great fun and works fluidly, you can get about the city much quicker than you might expect when you get used to finding the quickest paths and jumping between rails to grind along. 

Bosses are fun to fight, but there are rarely any moments that make you go ‘woooaaah’ and immediately tell someone about it. The storyline, however, may well do that. It calms down a little in the middle, but at the two ends, the story is quite amazing, and will definitely surprise you at times. You might see a twist or two coming, like I did, but I didn’t see the end coming at all.

Overall, inFAMOUS is a great game. The gameplay is just outstanding, but with some voice acting problems, less-than-stellar graphics and animation, quite a few minor technical issues and a little niggle or two with the freerunning aspect pull the score down from the 9/10 it would’ve gotten without them.

8/10

Filed under: Games, I, Review, inFamous