Critical Reception: Sony/Sucker Punch's inFamous

This week's edition of Critical Reception examines online reaction to Sucker Punch's PS3 action title inFamous, which reviews describe as "an exhilarating and incredibly fun open-world game." inFamous currently earns a score of 86 out of 100 at Metacritic.com. Giant Bomb's Brad Shoemaker gives inFamous 5 out of 5 stars. "Technically, the game is a little rough around the edges," he begins. "It's a little on the hard side in the first few hours, before you start building up your wild electrical superpowers and you can really fight back against the large number of enemies the game throws at you. Oh, and I guess your portly sidekick Zeke is kind of annoying from time to time." "Now that those minor complaints are out of the way," he continues, "I can spend the rest of the review talking about how much fun I had blasting, zapping, climbing, and flying around the big urban comic book world Sucker Punch created for this game." Shoemaker finds that inFamous effectively translates a compelling comic book story to a video game format. "It even starts out with a quick, outlandish origin story," he explains. "You're bike messenger Cole McGrath, delivering a routine package that turns out to be a mysterious, unusual bomb. After unwittingly leveling half of Empire City, you wake up in the smoldering crater with the sudden ability to control electricity and use it as a weapon." The result is a gameplay mechanic that remains fun throughout. "It's the quality of the central action in inFamous that I keep coming back to," Shoemaker praises. "Everything else would be fancy window dressing if Sucker Punch hadn't nailed the basic gameplay elements, the simple moving and shooting, as precisely as it did. inFamous feels like a game designed from the very ground up to be fun to play." Over at GameSpot, Tom McShea scores inFamous at 9 out of 10. "Moral dilemmas intertwine your fate with that of the city, but it's the amazing freedom that makes this experience so incredible," he writes. "From unleashing electrical blasts to corral your enemies, to scaling the highest skyscrapers with finesse and ease, inFamous lets you seamlessly control the powered-up hero you've always wanted to be." inFamous' morality mechanic offers binary choices in many situations, but still works out well in the context of gameplay. "The story is not just a static tale of vengeance and betrayal," McShea assures. "You have a choice in how it plays out, which gives you a strong connection to the events, sucking you further into the world." McShea continues: "Whenever Cole is faced with a moral decision, the action pauses and Cole spells out his thoughts to you. Should he let the hungry citizens eat the government-delivered food, or scare them off and take it all for his friends? The abrupt stop in the action lacks the immediate impact that a more organic choice would have given, but it makes you face the consequences head on, forcing you to consider both sides of the coin before brashly rushing in." McShea finds that inFamous' gameplay effectively conveys the feeling of being a virtual superhero. "Moving around the city feels almost perfect, given that the ease of climbing and leaping makes the whole world burst with possibilities," he says. "There's a slight stickiness to Cole's leaps, so when you jump close to objects that you can grab, you'll be pulled into their path. This simple mechanic makes sliding along thin wires or bouncing across tiny posts incredibly fun, letting you worry more about where you want to go rather than how you're going to get there." "The pacing is excellent. It doles out new abilities, introduces powerful story twists, and concocts exhilarating missions at a steady rate, which means the game never loses steam during the course of the lengthy adventure," McShea concludes. "inFamous is an exhilarating and incredibly fun open-world game." GamesRadar's Mikel Reparaz rates inFamous at 7 out of 10. "inFamous is fun enough as a free-roaming romp, but it's disappointingly full of rough edges," he explains. "Disappointing mainly because it comes from Sucker Punch, a studio from which we've come to expect great things after the mostly stellar Sly Cooper series. Maybe it's our fault for setting our expectations too high, but what we hoped would be a great game ended up being just good." inFamous' gritty setting proves to be repetitive after a few hours of gameplay. "Actual exploration is the weakest part of the game, mainly because Empire City itself just isn't that interesting," Reparaz writes. "Sure, it's pretty cool to bounce around on buildings at first, and once you've unlocked the second island, the number of fascinating and bizarre landmarks shoots up significantly. But in the main, it's often difficult to tell which part of the city you're in without checking the map." "And with cars off-limits," Raparaz continues, "there's no rapid way to travel from one end of the city to the other apart from grinding on power lines or train tracks, or climbing up somewhere high and then gliding slowly to the ground. While those are both a lot faster than walking, they'll still take a while to get you where you need to go." inFamous otherwise proves to be a solid effort. "Issues with exploration aside, inFamous still has a lot of cool stuff to offer, most of it in the form of its 40 story missions," Raparaz says. "These involve anything from the aforementioned sewer-diving, to defending a prison from a protracted siege, to hunting Predator drones and giant, shielded hot-air balloons. And then there are the boss fights, which are elaborate, memorable and fun, although the game really could have used more than three of them." "inFamous shows huge potential, but it's ultimately held back from greatness by too-sticky controls and its surprisingly bland ruin of a city," Reparaz notes. "It's still fun, but there's a lot of room for improvement in the strongly hinted-at sequel."