inFamous

Sucker Punch's action-adventure thunderbolt finally lights up our PS3s, but is it worth plugging in?

	Version PS3	Developer Sucker Punch	Publisher SCE	Genre Action

Page: 1  2  3 

Page 3

Where Sucker Punch goes wrong with the business of right and wrong is in the story. It's a bit rubbish, despite the dramatically ink-spattered comic-book stills used to communicate key plot developments. Cole's character - just your cookie-cutter grouchy roughneck, all "shut-the-hell-up" this and "you-just-signed-your-death-warrants" that - doesn't do much justice to the subtleties of combat and ability development, and Trish's yelping moral compass act gets irksome by her second line of dialogue.

But it's Zeke, who might be termed a 'lovable geezer' if he were British, that warrants the most censure. Words cannot describe how much I grew to loathe Zeke, with his 'irrepressible' pluck, 'charming' buddy-bonding antics and maddeningly contrived, homespun 'wit'. Some of my favourite missions in the entire game were those in which he came along for the ride, thus providing me with an opportunity to 'accidentally' ram a thousand volts up his tailpipe.

The game's three chief villains are more intriguing, as is depressingly predictable, but they're hampered by some unevenly paced exposition and an occasional startling absence of background detail. Some of the picture can be filled in by sniffing out "Dead Drops", 32 audio messages left tucked into far-flung satellite dishes by a government double-agent.

Not all the fuss is down to the writing, to be fair: though it excels at hazy angular cityscapes rife with incidental motion, Sucker Punch's engine does facial animations like a glam rock band playing Schubert. It's a regrettable blemish on what is, on the whole, a very fine looking game, some regular frame-rate drops notwithstanding. There's too much concrete grey around, perhaps, but a third of the way in the sun comes up and restores some blues, oranges and - yes - even greens to the InFamous palette.

The missions are both plentiful and a modest cut above the sandbox norm, though this possibly owes more to the brilliance of karma-driven electric fisticuffs than the objectives and obstacles. You'll do an awful lot of escorting things and protecting things, or going from A to B via scripted enemy spawn point C in order to save D from a curb-stomping.

Favourites include a mission in which I had to protect an armour-plated hospital bus from destruction as it crossed a broad bridge, only to find two of the factions having an almighty free-for-all halfway across. Around about the same point in the game, you're asked to shoot down unmanned aerial drones with slo-mo lightning, then free-run across town to recover their flight recorders from the wreckage before it self-destructs. Beyond the story, you can rid districts permanently of enemies by completing territory missions, marked in yellow on your radar, and to top it all off there are 30 rather arduous good and evil missions (15 a side), completion of which is required to unlock a couple of Cole's higher megawatt tricks.

If InFamous had a narrative backbone to match its well fleshed-out moral development pathways and mildly left-field, 360 degree, always-visceral battles, we'd be comfortably into 9/10 territory. As it is, feel free to bump that score up a fraction if storytelling and characterisation come last on the check-list when picking your purchases. Sucker Punch has been off-radar for years, but the studio still has plenty of zap. Sly 4 whenever you're ready, guys.

Page: 1  2  3 

MORE REVIEWS >>