One last thing that bothered me about the side missions was the fact that not all of them showed up on your GPS “" sometimes you had to be lucky and kill a gang member who would have the memories of a hidden package stored within him. While it was fine to stumble upon this as you made your way through Empire City to do something else, hunting down an enemy that may not even exist at that time is a chore. If there is a sequel to inFAMOUS, they could improve the game significantly by varying the side missions more, separating them from the main quest even more, and maybe pacing them better so that it doesn’t turn into a countdown of percentage points until the city is clear. The good news is that if the side missions bother you, you can always just stop playing them and focus on the wonderful main quest, maybe peaking in on the ones that sound interesting on your GPS from time to time.
Graphically, inFAMOUS has moments that will impress you. For one, your powers are an excellent display of the PS3’s graphical capabilities, as you can cause some serious damage to entire city blocks and loads of citizens, enemies, and cars without any slowdown, with all the explosions and electric blasts looking wonderful as you do so. Buildings have a ton of detail put into them, so you can see all of the places you can grab on to, and the style of the game fits well with the theme, and look good to boot. The graphic novel cut scenes, for one, are a joy “" I just wish there were more of them.
For every moment that will please you though, there may be one that bothers you. Animations can be very stiff at times, particularly with the NPCs. Facial movements in cut scenes are downright awful on occasion, especially when the characters are speaking “" this is even more noticeable given how brilliant the graphic novel cut scenes are. There are some smudged textures around the city that do not belong in this generation on this hardware, and there are loads of collision detection issues with pretty much every object you can touch, be it people, enemies, cars, buildings, dumpsters, and even the sidewalk. I got knocked off of a building at one point, went through another building, through a car, through the sidewalk, and somehow ended up drowning in the river.
While this is annoying, and takes away from the game as a whole, given its unpolished feel, you can’t help but willingly ignore those problems for the game underneath. I guess in that sense it has a No More Heroes vibe to it, in the sense that you know its very flawed, but also know that you don’t care that much, because damn it, there are enemies that need to be fried with your awesome array of abilities, and you’re not about to let a bit of collision detection get in the way of their imminent demise.
inFAMOUS is far from perfect, but that doesn’t stop it from, at times, being a masterpiece sandbox game that will have you coming back for more, regardless of its problems. The good far outweighs the bad, but it’s the perfect candidate for a much improved sequel. What inFAMOUS does well is give you a fun game that will last longer than many titles, even if you just play through once; you’ll want to play it more than once though, given the amount of things you can do as you save or enslave Empire City.
inFAMOUS is available exclusively on the Playstation 3 and retails for $59.99
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