"An electrifying experience!"

As the Three Amigos eloquently put it in their classic, The Three Amigos, being infamous is even better than being famous. You know, cause your in-famous. This holds especially true for Sony’s PS3 exclusive inFamous. It is good to be inFamous.

As I have outlined earlier, Sony is in desperate need for some sweet exclusive games and Sucker Punch has delivered a knockout blow with inFamous (forgive the pun). I would go so far as to say that this game vaults Sucker Punch right up there among Naughty Dog and Insomniac as one of the premier PS3 exclusive developers.

Sucker Punch is best known for the Sly Cooper series, which is excellent, but geared more for kids. Much like fellow PS3 alums Naughty Dog and Insomniac, Sucker Punch has turned away from the kid stuff for a decidedly more grown up tale. You take on the role of Cole McGrath, a bike messenger who unleashes a massive explosion when he attempts to deliver a package. The explosion gives Cole crazy electricity based super powers. The explosion also plunges the city into chaos and it is up to you to decide if you are going to be a hero or a villain. Gangs have taken over the city and you can actually clear out each district of the city by completing side quests. These quests vary in length and in quality. Completing each not only nets you experience, but will actually remove the enemies from that section of the city.

I am going to unofficially add this one to Jonah’s list of good open world games. The city is open to you, although certain sections have completely lost power so you are in deep trouble if you try to start a fight with no way to replenish your electricity. You maneuver your way through the city like Altair on steroids. Cole will leap up and grab onto ledges, windows, drain pipes, and pretty much anything else he can get his hands on.

By the game’s end, you will be able to float through the air with static electricity, send out electric rockets, throw out electricity grenades, or use a half dozen other nifty powers. That’s right, nifty. The coolest part is stringing your various powers together into your own strategies. I found a healthy mix of electricity grenades coupled with some precision electric rockets to be brutally effective.

The story starts slowly, but picks up a bit as the game progresses. The only thing is, it is up to you the player to find all the dead drops which give you the background info. If you want to just jump around the city shooting dudes with bolts of electricity, you can ignore the story if you want. But if you take the time to piece together all the little bits of information they provide, the end rewards you with a mind blowing twist.

There are the requisite collectible doodads strewn about the city. This is pretty much a given for any sandbox game, but the items are actually marked on your map, so if you want to find them you don’t need to spend $20 on a strategy guide. I love this. Every game that wants me to collect 500 little things flung about everywhere should include a little map with the knickknacks and doodads marked down. That way I don’t have to waste hours searching all over creation for the collectible whatzits.

My only real issue with the game is in the karmic decisions that you are forced to make. There are no real gray areas to any of the moral dilemmas. All of the choices are completely clear. You are pretty much either a bastard or a saint with no in between. After playing through some recent games with a more nuanced approach to moral decisions, it is a little strange to have to decide between feeding people or taking all the food for yourself. I can see why the developers chose to present things in this way, it is simply a small annoyance in such an amazing game.

In the end, the game does a great job of making you feel like the savior of the city or a terrible bastard. One path grants you the power to heal while the other path nets you force lightning. The choice is up to you, but either way you go you’ll end up a super powered electrical storm of rad. And yes, I did get permission from the National Council of Rad to use that sentence.

If you had told me earlier this year that the guys who make Sly Cooper would make one of the best games of the year, I would have laughed as hard as when The Three Amigos defeated El Guapo with the power of sewing. However, Sucker Punch has come through with a very well crafted game that stands tall amongst the PS3 giants and has me excited to see what they have cooking up next. In defiance of reason and Metacritic, I give inFamous a Captain America high fiving a Tiger, then turning to the camera to do the Three Amigos salute… for justice.

Tags: Captain America, inFamous, insomniac, naughty dog, ps3, sucker punch, The Three Amigos, three amigos

This entry was posted on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 5:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.