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| Source // PlayStation |
Comic book heroes come in many shapes and sizes, and they don't all have to be part of the Marvel or DC universes, as third-person zap 'em up inFAMOUS can demonstrate.
Courier Cole MacGrath awakens at the epicentre of an explosion that sees the city turned into a containment zone along the lines of something like Escape from New York, and the innocent civilians that are now stuck here fight amongst themselves for what resources remain.
You can help them out, or you can show them who's in charge. They do blame you for their problems. After all, you were the only survivor from the blast, and now you've got superpowers...
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| Source // PlayStation |
Fond Memories
I didn't pick up inFAMOUS upon its release, but two years later the PlayStation Network infamously went down for a lengthy period of time, and this game featured in the Welcome Back package of gifts as a means of an apology from Sony.
It was one that I selected and, if my trophy list is any indication, it was a good choice. I've gone through the game entirely as a bad guy, and entirely as a good guy, and picked up most but not all of the side stuff as well.
I got my money's worth, I suppose, but after I was done with it, I didn't touch it at all. Until now, practically 10 years later to the day.
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| Source // MobyGames |
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| Source // MobyGames |
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| Source // MobyGames |
Fun Times
inFAMOUS opens with you, the gravelly-mouthed Cole MacGrath coming to in the middle of ground zero. If you were to write an origin story for a comic book character, this would be one that you might pick, the only survivor of a weird electrical explosion that sent shockwaves through the city.
Controls are straightforward, though they do have a weird floaty quality to them that certainly threw me off when replaying the game. You're incredibly athletic, even if your animations don't quite look it, and the game will snap you onto climbable objects if you're close enough, so you'll have to get used to half-floating, half-snapping until you get the hang of things.
You don't do much climbing at first, though, as your escape efforts before the city gets shut-off from the rest of civilization on the grounds of it being a bio-hazard zone (yeah, I must have skipped that part too) result in you getting an almighty headache and accidentally summon lightning down upon the police, blowing up their cars and destroying the bridge out even more.
You don't know why you've got these powers, and you've just been labelled as a terrorist. Everybody knows your face, and they don't like you one bit. Welcome to infamy.
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| Source // MobyGames |
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| Source // MobyGames |
You're not alone, however. Zeke's still your buddy, and even makes use of your new powers to charge up the battery so that he can watch TV. You've got a girlfriend, too, but her sister was killed in the chaos and, well, you're to blame, so don't expect that relationship to go too well unless you put the effort in to uncover what happened.
What did happen then? All you know, told through comic-book cutscenes, is that your last delivery was a bomb and that instead of killing you, it gave you control over electricity. In fact, it's not too long into the story that you learn that you absorbed the electrical something or other from all of the people who died in the blast, but how and why and who would want to do such a thing is your quest for the foreseeable future.
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| Source // MobyGames |
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| Source // MobyGames |
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| Source // MobyGames |
The city is under the control of the Reapers, former thugs turned weird and crazed, terrorizing the remaining locals into submission. Help the locals on side missions that involve thinning the Reaper's ranks, and you push them from that part of the city entirely, allowing you to walk freely down the street without someone taking pot-shots at you from the rooftops.
Though they're not your only enemy. While the citizens don't have weapons, they won't hesitate to chuck rocks at you to tell you what they think. You might be dealing with the Reaper's, but you are still to blame for everything turning to shit.
But you don't have to take their rock-flinging if you don't want to, as inFAMOUS is all about being a good guy or a bad guy.
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| Source // MobyGames |
Don't bother trying to sit in between or judging each action based solely on the situation, as all the cool versions of your powers are locked behind progression down either the good or bad track. The more folks you help out, the more they'll let you go about your business. The more innocents you fry on the sidewalks for looking at you funny, the edgier your lightning looks.
The choice between good or evil is always a clear and obvious one. The first decision involves letting people eat, or zapping a few of them so that you've got more food for yourself. It's a no brainer, and you ought to pick a path and stick with it throughout the run.
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| Source // MobyGames |
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| Source // MobyGames |
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| Source // MobyGames |
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| Source // MobyGames |
As the game goes on, you'll be getting up to all sorts of missions to both help uncover who is behind all of this, as well as restoring some semblance of peace and stability to the city, but there are plenty of things to do outside of missions to increase your power.
Well, ok, maybe not plenty of things, more like hundreds of shards to collect, each batch increasing the amount of juice you have available to blast cars off their wheels, summon shields to block incoming bullets, or call down controllable lightning strikes to tear an area to shreds.
With an open city that is almost as climbable as that of Assassin's Creed and a control scheme that must have been borrowed at least in part to former Sucker Punch IP Sly Cooper, you'll be able to pull off many of these fancy attacks while dangling from ledges and drainpipes, or perched on cables draped from roof to roof.
It's a little fiddly to control, but it's a playground for you to add plenty of bright lights to.
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| Source // PlayStation |
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| Source // MobyGames |
Frustrations
That said, inFAMOUS can feel a little like a slog these days. I've gone through the game twice but can't remember any of the details of the story, more can I remember any annoying missions that I struggled with, though I did fall off into an instant death in the water far too many times as I was trying to get to grips with how snappy the auto-snap to ledges and pipes were.
Luckily, Cole can leap off anything and land without a scratch, so long as it's concert beneath his feet and not water. Put him into a firefight against the Reapers and the screen will turn bloody, and greyscale, without any clear indication beyond that of how close to death you are.
It's generally not too difficult a game, and by the time you play it for a second time to see things from the other perspective (by which I mean the powers, because the story doesn't really differ), you'll have mastered how it plays and won't have too many issues with it.
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| Source // PlayStation |
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| Source // PlayStation |
Final Word
Because of it being a tad arcadey, perhaps thanks to the comic book stylings, inFAMOUS quickly turns into a title that you can just pick up and have a blast with. If you see something to collect, you can swing by, clamber up the side of a building a collect it. If you pass a side-mission to help push the Reapers out of a corner of the city, a few minutes later will see another street devoid of enemies intent on shooting on sight. If you finish it as a bad guy, it takes no time at all to start again as the good guy.
I can't recall why I played it twice. Maybe I thought the differences between the runs would be more significant than they turned out to be, I'm not sure. What I do know is that having played inFAMOUS, I went on to get inFAMOUS 2, then Second Son, then First Light... I don't remember playing them in any great detail either, but clearly I thought they'd be worth a decent chunk of my time at least.
That kind of writing probably doesn't heap a ton of praise onto the inFAMOUS series - played them buy forgot them - but my point is that they're accessible and entertaining enough to stick with so long as you want to stick with them.
Explore the city, learn new tricks, unlock some trophies, or just see where the story takes you, you'll have a good time whatever you end up doing, and then you'll move onto the next thing to grab your attention. Presumably, that's exactly what I did 10 years ago.
Fun Facts
It might come as no surprise to learn that comic books like DMZ and Batman: No Man's Land were at the back of the developer's minds when creating their own superhero origin game. Spider-Man 2 was also an obvious game to take inspiration from.
inFAMOUS, developed by Sucker Punch Productions, first released in 2009.
Version played: PlayStation 3, 2009, also via memory.