Videogame review: Infamous

Cole MacGrath acquires superpowers and must decide what to do with them.

Infamous is a frustrating game, it get so many things wrong that it’s difficult to appreciate the good stuff.

This superhero has been created specifically for the game and so there is a nice amount of freedom on choosing how to develop him. Every single action influences his karma and makes him more good or more evil. Sadly the AI of the civilian is terrible, in every single fight I got some civilian who blindly walked into the line of fire so I quickly stopped caring about that.

This is an open world game, you are basically free to roam the city and do stuff, the game system even randomly generate things to do like armed robberies and stuff like that, nothing really that interesting I must say but I imagine that fan of that kind of stuff will be delighted. There is also a good amount of side missions. Probably this is what I appreciated most because they are all extremely varied and never boring. After each side mission you liberate a sector of the city.

The actual game play is so and so. The city is entirely climbable, Assassin’s Creed style, but the climbing is too arcade and unrealistic. It boils down to a lot of jumping around while trying to find ledges. This is not bad per se, the problem is that they didn’t implement it very well, a lot of obvious ledges aren’t climbable and this was annoying. Moreover our hero is strangely attracted by ledges and walls so I often jumped somewhere only to find myself attached to a wall halfway trough.

Your powers are electricity based, there is a fair number of long range attacks which to be fair are nicely implemented but simply didn’t worked very well for me. On the other side there was the possibility of going hand to hand with the enemies which was more to my tastes. This is another thing that this game got right, there were a lot of choices on how to do things and complete the missions. Sadly on this regards a couple of main quest act like bottlenecks because in them you are literally obliged to use some specific power to progress the story.

The graphics are bleak and generally not well polished. The city was simply not interesting at all to explore and the game was plagued by a lot of minor glitches like enemies stuck in walls and stuff like that.

The story was mildly interesting, there are a couple of nice plot twists but It was never really that gripping, probably the main problem is that all characters were really unlikeable, not even the sidekick.

In the end there are a lot of nice ideas but playing trough it felt too much like real work and so I can’t advice doing it.