While playing inFamous, a new game that puts you in the shoes of an electrically charged bike messenger with ambiguous morals, I continually flashed back to Bionic Commando.

Both games cast you as a gruff antihero in a ruined city, where you use superpowers to climb skyscrapers, leap around ruins and take out swaths of enemy soldiers. Besides the fact that the somewhat lame Bionic Commando is linear while inFamous plops you into a Grand Theft Auto-style open city, the two games are quite similar in style.





So why is inFamous, released Tuesday for PlayStation 3, engaging where its competition is merely frustrating? It’s not about peculiarities of the games’ control schemes, details of their level design or the difficulty curves encountered by first-time players. It’s because inFamous keeps you engaged, never dumping you out to a long loading screen if you die, always making you feel like you’re progressing even when you’re struggling.

Yes, inFamous suffers from a host of little problems, but all those minor missteps get smoothed over by the fact that you never want to stop playing the game. The makers of inFamous obeyed the cardinal rule of good game design: They kept everything fun.

Let’s back up a bit. InFamous is the first PlayStation 3 game from Sucker Punch Productions, creator of the Sly Cooper action series for PS2. In InFamous, you play Cole, a bike messenger who finds himself delivering a package that explodes in a massive ball of electricity, wiping out a whole mess of people, throwing the city into chaos and imbuing him with electric superpowers.

Besides giving the player a chance to spend 20 hours or so frying the inevitable waves of bad people that tend to descend on post-apocalyptic cities, inFamous‘ central conceit is that Cole can choose whether to be good or bad. In real life, making decisions that are selfish versus generous tends to be a gray area. Not so in inFamous: Choosing between the game’s good and evil story branches revolves almost entirely around a dozen or so critical points in the story, at which you can choose to either do something nice (help a stranger defend his stash of helpful goodies) or mean (kill him and take them for yourself).

If you choose to do good, Cole will be loved by all the people of the city; if you choose to be a jerk, they’ll run from him. Otherwise, the story doesn’t change much — good or bad, you’re still trying to face down a mysterious enemy and figure out why they set that electric bomb off in the first place.

The story kept me interested, even if the telling was a bit choppy. The big plot points occur during comic book-style cinematic interludes with no dialogue — just narration from Cole. These are much nicer to look at than the uneven 3-D gameplay graphics, but they’re so stylistically different that the two don’t mesh well.

If you just want to keep the story moving, you can take on the lengthy “story missions” that are scattered about the city. But I found it more beneficial to tackle the game’s wide range of side missions before advancing the plot. Playing the side missions, which generally only take a few minutes each, allows you to clear out bad guys from the city and earn more experience points, which you can spend on new powers.

While the powers you earn as a good or bad character are slightly different, most of them involve producing electricity from your fingertips in various forms: from little balls of lightning that act like grenades to big ol’ lightning storms that mow down rows of bad guys at once. The downside to this unique concept is that it never really makes sense why one ball of blue lightning works on certain enemies when all the others don’t. Why do I need to use grenades to kill one enemy, but not another? Aren’t they all just … balls of blue lightning?

The powers that you’ll be most happy to unlock and upgrade are the ones that let you travel around Empire City in style. By the game’s end, you’ll be grinding on telephone wires and train tracks, flying for short distances and generally moving from place to place quickly without having to touch the ground.

The city is a modern metropolis with the exception of the fact that it does not bury its power lines; this is excellent for Cole, as he can ride them from building to building. Some of my favorite missions were built around line-riding: You’re given a set amount of time to race between satellite dishes on top of buildings, and you have to use the wires perfectly to make it in time.

These missions are largely about trial and error, as you find the perfect path between the dishes. This is precisely the sort of thing that could get frustrating, but inFamous makes the discovery process compelling. How? When you miss a dish, you’re instantly jumped back to the beginning of the course to start again — no loading screen, no laborious backtracking to the start of the race. It’s not like Prince of Persia, where there’s zero penalty for failure: You must learn from your mistakes and execute the run perfectly to win. But it’s a pleasant learning experience that feels great when you finally nail the task.

This is how nearly every mission in inFamous feels. There are a great variety of them: escorting prisoners to jail, clearing out a gang of enemies, finding hidden packages, riding electrified buses, destroying electrified buses, etc. Some take two minutes, some might take 20. But generous checkpoints are scattered throughout each, so that you rarely get that feeling of repetition. And even if you do fail over and over, you’re still earning lots of experience points by slaughtering enemies. So it’s never a total loss.

By making sure that you’re never beaten over the head with frustrating, difficult moments, inFamous renders what in other games would be major problems into minor, almost trifling annoyances.

So what if your enemies have ungodly accuracy, meaning that most of your deaths result from five simultaneous headshots from five guys on five different buildings half a mile away in five different directions? So what if the game falls victim to “kitchen sink” game design, throwing everything at you all at once because it can’t think of any other way to boost the difficulty level? You’re never more than a few moments away from another try, and you can always try a different strategy.

The only area in which I was truly disappointed by inFamous was the boss battles. There are only three, and they’re uninspired — rather than having to puzzle out a strategy or use your weapons in thoughtful combination, you’re pretty much just dodging bullets and rapid-firing anything you can think of.

InFamous is often compared, especially by me, to Microsoft’s Crackdown, a similar game about a superpowered enforcer in a GTA-style open city. The similarities go beyond the superhero trappings. What makes both games great is the carrot-and-stick design that keeps you playing “just one more mission,” until it’s way past your bedtime.

WIRED Addictive action, clever characters, enjoyable open world

TIRED Ho-hum boss fights, jarring storytelling, uneven graphics

$60, Sony

Rating:

Read Game|Life’s game ratings guide.



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