'Infamous' loses steam quickly

• By JOSHUA WASCOM
• Special to 2theadvocate.com
• Published: Jun 12, 2009

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After Empire City is rocked by huge explosion, bike courier Cole McGrath awakens at ground zero, mysteriously unscathed and newly imbued with the ability to control electricity. Using these new powers, you must guide Cole through the large, open world of Empire City, fighting off roving gangs, figuring out what happened to you and deciding whether to act for the good of all or for the good of you and your friends.

“Infamous” has a good premise, and it works hard to live up to it. Your electrical powers are well-realized, from zapping a pool of water, simultaneously taking out all three guys standing in it, to the strangely satisfying action of draining electrical devices to restore your health and energy. These powers, combined with the side missions and collectibles spread throughout the city, and Cole’s slightly less-unnatural ability to climb on almost anything, give you a lot to do and some interesting ways to do it.

For a while, anyway.

Combat manages to barely remain fun throughout, but as the sole focus of the gameplay, it really isn’t quite varied enough. Many of the powers you get from the mid- to late-parts of the game feel more like direct ports of standard weapons from other actions games, and despite the initial apparent depth of interaction between your powers and the world, it becomes clear there really aren’t that many creative ways these powers can deal with enemies. The boss fights are astoundingly unimaginative, almost entirely stripping you of opportunities to use your powers interestingly and instead relying on the old standby: Watch them for a bit, determine their simple pattern, then shoot, shoot, shoot until they’re dead.

“Infamous” also puts a heavy focus on its story, and this unfortunately also falls somewhat flat in the big picture. Twists that happen for their own sake, characters who do things that simply don’t make sense in retrospect, and intermittently terrible dialogue conspire to bring down some interesting underlying concepts.

A final failure keeping “Infamous” from greatness is the morality system that attempts to tie the gameplay and story together. As is so often the case in games, the moral choices are both contrived and far too clear cut. There are frequently choices between doing something unnecessarily stupid – like standing next to a tank of poisonous tar when you blow it up – and doing something unnecessarily mean – like dumping the tar into a water supply, even though this benefits you in no way. It’s much more often a mechanical choice than a moral one, and the absurdly analytical voiceovers by Cole only serve to underline how silly the system is.

The game has a high enough baseline level of fun to be worth a rent, but a few shallow and repetitive mechanics and a lack of real variety in the gameplay ensure that there isn’t enough here to make you want to revisit Empire City.