Sucker Punch, the creators of Sly Cooper series, has a record of making great games, and Infamous is their latest masterpiece. But we're not exactly recommending the fifteen minute drive to your nearest game store to drop down $60 on it. Because, in these hard times we find ourselves in, sixty bucks is a lot of money. Infamous is an action adventure sandbox where the protagonist, Cole McGrath, is gifted with the power of electricity – gained by destroying a huge chunk of the city in an accidental nuclear-proportioned electrical discharge. But, don't blame Cole, he's just a messenger. Bam, you're in. Cole has no idea what he's gotten himself into, but he intends to find out – frying a couple people if necessary, or whenever you feel like it. The city has decayed within its own quarantine; it's now more complex and more simple at the same time; simply, the guns are the law. As much as the game tries to play out as if the city is its own character, the effect doesn't stand out that much. A player might just miss all the depth of the atmosphere, the intricate and almost-satirical environment, and what seems almost like a nation within a nation. It's all quite fascinating, but if you're interested, Infamous doesn't deliver beyond scratching the surface. While it lacks the depth of the political intricacies of an anarchist detention, Infamous realizes that most gamers really don't play games for a lesson in politics. Therefore, the city is alive so much as it pertains to the game. There are the bad guys, the Reapers, the good guys, the Feds supposedly, and you and the rest of the city. You're trying to figure out what happened, the Feds have their own agenda, and bugger the rest. First discovering the electrical power, Cole has the courtesy of passing through all the boring 'let me take hours to figure out how to use my power' introduction that some games opt for by just saying that he did all that, and now he's awesome. Unfortunately, the snappy comic book styled cut scenes does cut quite a bit of the story: your girlfriend loved in the first panel, and hated you in the next. But who cares? Who needs girls when you can to jump off skyscrapers, creating electrical craters upon impact? Right, to the playground then. Some would argue that the whole be a hero or a villain mechanic is just an excuse to make people play the game twice. The choices are always on the extremes like you either save a kitten and return it to some poor old lady who'd reward you with a smile and maybe a poster, or you eat the kitty, which somehow rewards you with the godlike power to turn the Reaper enemies into vapor with so much as a yawn. Nevertheless, the powers that are rewarded as a result of these moral decisions are the best part of the game. If you want to be boring, you can be good, and learn useless powers like a shield, which protects you as much as a cup in a rugby game [Americans: Think football without the pads. -Ed]. To play the game right, being bad is the only logical choice because a bad Cole really feels like he is a super hero who can overcome any and all adversaries. But it's not like the powers really stretch the horizons of creativity – not like the innovation of the gravity gun did of the Half Life series. At some points in the game, Infamous plays like a third person shooter with bullets and grenades dipped in electricity. Even the best powers feel somewhat mediocre and lack-luster compared to other, brutal super hero games like Prototype or even Hulk. But we can't exactly say the powers suck. They're just mediocre, run-of-the-mill, nothing really Youtube-worthy is all. Which is to say the same for the urban exploration mechanics. Infamous promises to let you adventure through an open city and 'climb and interact with anything', which sounds promising. You'd imagine the game will somehow emulate the trendy parkour runners on the internet in some sort of brilliant third person Mirror's Edge. You'd be wrong, unfortunately. Instead of feeling like you're free-running through this giant city in a way that places you as the Tony Hawks of the superhumans, utilizing the world like an oversized skate park beneath your board – Cole can basically do only two things: climb and jump. Sure, you've got your floating power, but that's hardly free-running, in fact, it's more like cheating. But, even though Cole can only do those two things, he does them very well. He really can climb on almost anything and jump quite high, which is the exact recipe for a burglar, actually, not an urban explorer as Cole would have you believe. Still, all Infamous has to do is to take everything that is done in Mirror's Edge, and make it third person; how can it screw that up? Our Verdict: But then again, we're nitpicking. Who really cares about the running and jumping and zapping and stuff like that, people play Infamous to have fun. And, thankfully, it is fun. The enemies are not entirely lacking AI, but dumb enough to make Cole come out looking like a real hero. The urban exploration may be, at its core, just mashing the jump button – but Cole still scales the tallest sky scraper without a hint of effort. The story, while being nothing to write home about, is still good enough to be a sweet little super hero summer flick, which is all this game was ever meant to be. Infamous ends up being a classic case of over-hype— so that the game itself not bad, average at least, but the expectations are so high, that many players will feel somewhat cheated out of their money. And, despite the dual morality paths, the game probably won't leave you with cravings to play it over (unless you're hoarding trophies), and in hindsight you'll question why you've had so much fun in the first play-through, but you soon realize that none of that actually matters because you've played through Infamous, and what an achievement it is.
