Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Sucker Punch delivers inFAMOUS or inFAMOUS delivers sucker punch?

So developer Sucker Punch's latest game inFAMOUS is about a week away from release now, close enough for it to be getting review scores from some of the bigger gaming publications (both print and digital) and if Metacritic is any indication, Sony has nabbed itself another slam-dunk exclusive for it's Playstation 3.
For those of you that haven't been following the game, inFAMOUS gives you an open-world city (Empire City) in the vein of Grand Theft Auto 4 while adding the "climb whatever you want" headline of Assassin's Creed and a dash of electricity based superpowers for protagonist Cole.
The story goes like this: Cole is a bike messenger, just a regular guy, until one of the packages he's delivering goes "BOOM!" As in a city-levelling "boom." So the city's left more or less destroyed, the government's quarantined it (I wonder if that took as long as it did to get water to the Superdome?) and Cole's left in a coma. That is, until he wakes up with more electricity at his fingertips than someone wearing wool feety pajamas in house made of shag carpet.
The game then sets off to let you fill your superhero/supervillain fantasies in pursuit of an answer to the question "Do you save it all, or destroy what's left?" that was asked in the inFAMOUS debut trailer. What this means is you'll spend the game facing morality choices determining if you're a good witch or a bad witch...I mean superhero. Some of these choices are obvious ones that the game points out to you by actually pausing things and asking if you want to be good or bad, others just depend on how you act throughout the game; do you drain passerby of their body's electrical energy to refill your own powers or maybe use your hands as defibrillator's on the heart failure victim laying on the sidewalk? The bigger morality choices that the game points out to you are in fact handled slightly better than the choices offered in other games where morality is a factor in gameplay; there's actually realistic justification for the "bad" decisions. In fact, "selfish" or "benevolent" are more accurate desciptors than "good" or "bad."
All in all inFAMOUS sounds like it fully delivered on its awesomeness quota. With the PS3's recent ability to pump out truly AAA exclusive titles one after another the only thing that really seems to be holding back the system's success is Sony's refusal to drop the price low enough to not require a payment plan. Oh well, there's always "surprise" E3 announcements. And here's to hoping God of War 3, Heavy Rain, and Fat Princess keep up the current trend.

No comments: