Well, I've played a good deal of the game now (I just acquired the rail/power line-grinding power), and so far I'm really enjoying the game. The story's well-told both through the stylish comic book-style cutscenes and through occasional TV inserts now and then when you pass a rack of TVs, and the voice acting is decent if a little over-the-top at times (read: your "best friend" Zeke's horrid Southern accent). There's just a great sense of immersion right from the outset, where you walk through the aftermath of the EMP blast that destroyed a large chunk of the city. Combat has been fast and furious, but the game rewards you for going the extra mile in dispatching enemies. For example, you may get 5 Exp. for just knocking an enemy out, but you might get 15 Exp. if you did it with a Sticky Electric Grenade (I'm really curious just how an electrical grenade gets "sticky" in the first place but I suppose that doesn't matter). When you start out, most of the city is blacked-out without power and the gangs have taken over, making traveling through the city very dangerous. However, before too long you start getting sent into sewer-based electrical substations (which are actually pretty cool since your electrical aura is used as your source of light walking through the dark, with you emitting red or blue light depending on your moral alignment) that both restore power to various sections of the city but also bestow upon you a special ability (leech/heal/cuff enemies/civilians; sticky grenades; grinding on rails/electrical cables; etc.). Once you've restored power, you can undertake side missions that should be familiar to anyone who's ever played a Sly Cooper game or one of the Open-world Spider-Man games, which admittedly can get tedious after a while due to a limited variety of mission types. Once you've completed one of those side missions, that section of the city becomes "safe" for you to travel through (enemies will not return) for presumably the rest of the game barring plot-related missions. Because of this, I highly recommend not methodically doing all these side missions early on, because you probably want to grind off the enemies a little bit for the Exp, as you use that Exp to purchase abilities and ability upgrades that range from powering up your Force Lightning Lightning Blast to increasing your defense. It's a very satisfying system that just keeps me coming back for more.
This all comes together to form the game's "Good vs. Evil" moral choice system. You might notice when you purchase upgrades that there are "Good" and "Evil" versions of most powers, each having specific strengths that play to the moral styles of that character. For example, the Good version of the Sticky Grenade doesn't have a huge blast radius, but you can usually guarantee when you throw it that you won't be doing too much collateral damage and involving civilians in your fights. The Evil version, on the other hand, is a cluster bomb that causes mass devastation in a wide radius of wherever you throw it for maximimum damage. Nearly everything you do in the game adds points to your moral alignment, and it is strongly suggested that you pick an alignment and stick to it or you won't have access to the best versions of your powers. What's interesting is just how closely the game keeps track of what you're doing: most story sequences have a moral choice, but the game also keeps track of whether you drain your enemies once you've knocked them down or simply cuff them Batman-style. It also keeps track whether you use your magic electrical hands to heal wounded civilians (wow, I had no idea electricity was so versatile!) or leech their life to restore your fighting strength. How you play through the game is pretty much up to the player, and I don't see a clear right or wrong path in this game like in most games that have a Moral Choice system (*cough*Bioshock*cough*). You're going to get rewarded just as much one way as the other, just that one choice will push you further down the Good path for better Good powers and the other will push you further down the Evil path for better Evil powers. I will say that just as in real life the Good path is the harder path than the Evil one, but I think a given player will find good enjoyment either way. In fact, I can already see myself playing through this game again for that second path later on.
Where the game stumbles is in the details. While the platforming is excellent, rapid jumping can feel floaty and imprecise (most notable early in the game where you're jumping from narrow beam to narrow beam, where it's easy to over-correct a jump and break the auto-snap on the platform below and fall to your death). This is especially a problem when trying to climb up and down structures, and Cole will get caught on the strangest things, and yet will have no trouble scaling seemingly smooth surfaces at times. And good luck trying to get at those EMP shards if they're below you along a wall, as Cole has an infuriating tendency to auto-grab the ledge you try to jump past to get down to the shard leading to a frustrating sequence of fighting the game's user-friendliness as you repeatedly bounce off the ledge of a wall. Also, the way the game uses Cole's Spidey-Sense Electro-Sonar power to cause shards; power sources; and enemies to appear on the mini-map takes a lot of getting used to. I can see why Sucker Punch went this route, as making map details appear on the mini-map only when the user asks for them does remove a lot of the clutter from the mini-map. Unfortunately, it also means you're repeatedly mashing that L3 button as you run around the city watching for specific blips to pop up on your mini-map, which gets old fast and will make you wonder why the game needs to tell you where power sources are when 75% of the stuff in the game is a power source. There's a particularly infuriating mission early on that requires you to do this because you have to track down some satellite dishes scattered on various rooftops, but the only way to find them is to use your Electro Sonar and watch for a gray-colored outline to appear in one of the quadrants of your mini-map. You think you made that hard enough to read, Sucker Punch? It took me the better part of 30 minutes to figure out that THAT was how you wanted me to find those damn things! Also, it can be very easy to get lost in the city if you aren't continually checking your map, because most of the city looks nearly identical with very few distinguishing buildings. And the game's difficulty is all over the place, though amusingly it seems Sucker Punch brought back their adaptive difficulty system from the Sly Cooper games, just a little more blatantly here (I completed the first mission, and was immediately told that I was such a badass that the game was bumping my difficulty UP to Hard. I immediately told the game it could shove it and reverted it back to Normal so I could just enjoy the game). But hey, that's a Sandbox game for you.
And speaking of details, there are some very strange inconsistencies in how the game treats electricity. On the one hand, if a civilian (or enemy) walks into a pool of water while you are walking through it, they get electrocuted (just as they should). But I can drain a car battery completely dry from a passing car, and it will just keep on roaring on. Wierd.
In any case, I like the game and will be sticking with this one for a good while.
Topic: InFamous (Read 17254 times)
