Set in the fictional metropolis, Empire City, inFamous wastes no time getting down to business by immediately opening up with a massive explosion that devastates the entire city. Moments later, the game’s main character, Cole, wakes up at ground zero for the explosion surrounded by rubble and falling debris. As you stumble in a disoriented manner towards safety, it quickly becomes apparent that Cole’s previous life as an ordinary mail courier is over and that a new destiny more amazing then he could have ever imagined now awaits him.

As I moved through the rubble of Empire City and began testing out Cole’s amazing urban climbing skills, I was immediately impressed with the responsiveness of the controls. Cole moves with a smooth agility that reminds me a lot of Crackdown from a few years ago, except that inFamous is actually, you know, fun. =^_^;;= Within in minutes, I was leaping from rooftops, running along power lines and climbing walls like a monkey searching for free bananas. Considering that Cole can’t ride in a car or swim, it’s a good thing that that you can move quickly through the city via any path you choose as well as you can. The only thing that Cole seems to have a real problem with so far is making efficient use of cover. Sometimes he just won’t recognize a building wall as cover and hide behind it no matter how many times I press the cover button. This only becomes a problem though when I’m being attacked by turret gun or something where I really need to be able to shield myself from the hail of bullets raining down on me. Otherwise, the poor cover mechanics are fairly manageable.

The best I can say about the graphics engine used to power inFamous gets the job done, but it’s not what I’d call impressive. Like so many other sandbox titles before it, super high-end graphics are sacrificed in favor of large interactive environments with no obvious load times. That’s not to say the graphics are bad, I’m just saying that I’ve seen better. Although the environment is large and nicely varied in terms of building sizes and shapes, the same attention just wasn’t paid to the all content used to populate it’s streets. Walking the streets of Empire City, it seems like I can’t turn a corner without seeing the exact same four vehicles parked on the street every two seconds or bumping into the same five people everywhere I go.

Despite my complaints about the graphics not being as jaw dropping as I would have liked, the still manage to impress me from time to time. I love jumping off high buildings and watching Cole plummet to the ground only to land unscathed. Sometimes for added effect, I used the Thunderdrop skill to create a massive electric shockwave when I land. Stuff like this tends makes the geeky superhero-loving kid in me jump up and down with joy. Additionally, the environment sports a decent amount of destructibility that serves to give some of the more intense firefights in the game a much more action-packed cinematic feel. When your crouching being a car as broken glass and other debris rain down on you while you wait for a group of red-clad Reapers to experience the joys of the shock grenade you just dropped at their feet, you just can’t help but feel like you’re in a summer action film.

Unfortunately, inFamous also suffers from the same type of story problems that plague most action films, which is to say that the story seems to have been the last thing on the “to-do” list and is only there to shuttle the player from one action sequence to the next. Even then, most of the missions nothing more than “go destroy this” or “go turn on this piece of equipment” type affairs. Based on some of the in-game cinematics, I’d like to think that the groundwork for something truly epic is being laid, but right now I’m hard pressed to say whether when all of these various threads will come to fruition or if it will be in a satisfy manner when they do. For a dude with awesome superpowers, I feel more like the city janitor than anything else. I seriously doubt Superman or Batman ever had to put up with this crap.

All complaints aside, inFamous is actually a very addictive game. In fact, this article is almost a week overdue simply because I couldn’t tear myself away from the game long enough to do a write up. Considering the pace at which I’m burning through the game, I should know soon whether the game eventually grows beyond the confines of its lame mission structure and less than stellar storyline into something truly memorable. I’ll let ya’ll know as soon as I find out.

-LC1