Against this, it's left up to your enemies and the level design to
keep things interesting, but neither does a good job. You often simply
trawl through typical locations (warehouses, tunnels, and mazes of
shipping containers) blasting bad-guys from behind the cover system
until there are no more. Basic enemies have guns, others have tremor
attacks, and there are scuttling, crab-like enemies, Serious Sam-style
suicide bombers, and turret guns. Loads of them.Despite the fact
your adversaries are identified as former addicts and tramps, they also
have dead-eyed projectile skill from vast distance, and often require
more than one headshot. The adequate checkpointing is little comfort as
you bounce off the kind of run-and-gun scenarios that Gears of War and
others have done a lot better, along with torturous protect-the-bus or
protect-the-engineer sieges, which are not only weighted heavily
against you, but repetitive and overlong. The need to find new sources
of electricity to rearm means you're too often left with the zap attack
and nothing else, and there's none of the invention you might expect
from the electrical context: you seldom get to use the conductivity of
your surroundings to your advantage, and nobody on the other side ever
thinks to pick up a Super Soaker.One place you do get to do this
is in the one-off sewer levels, where enemies sometimes fall into the
water where you can fry them by zapping the surface. You head down a
manhole occasionally over the course of the game to bring power back to
new sections of the city, and these levels play out more like the
linear platform-and-combat challenges of Sly Raccoon, introducing and
focusing the design on a new ability each time (hovering, or an energy
shield, for instance), and it's within these gloomy depths that Sucker
Punch showcases its most confident work.
Chaining
hops, skips, rail-grinds and free-climbing feels loose and fluid,
although it feels more like hard work when the mission quality
nosedives in the middle.
But just as the trouble on the
surface threatens to wear you down, inFamous finds a second wind, and
begins to throw up a variety of interesting and engaging missions that
reign in the turret guns and enemies spammed into corridors, and focus
on more dramatic encounters that make use of the superior platforming
alongside a few more impressive new powers. There's a massive tower
ascent, a dramatic prison break that puts you up against colossal
robotic energy monsters, and some interesting pursuits - helicopters
and hot-air balloons best among them.It's by this stage that the
previously stumbling narrative also regains your attention, as key
players reveal themselves, and double-cross one another, and the
mystery of the initial explosion is made plainer. All along you have
been making good-or-bad decisions that feed into the karma system,
conferring particular ranks (with a few different powers available at
either extreme), and although it's rather forced, it also comes good in
the end, finally evolving beyond save-myself-or-save-everyone junctions
informed more by your preferred upgrade path than morals, and asking
you to choose between a couple of clear and personal rights and wrongs.
The beautiful, hand-painted story sequences thrown across the screen to
bookend the more dramatic narrative pivots and confrontations take on
greater resonance as Sucker Punch plays its final hand beyond an
admittedly rubbish final boss battle.
There
are a few good baddies in inFamous, although only Alden manages a
decent boss fight - formulaic, but relatively satisfying.
With
plenty of hours behind you at that point, you may even be encouraged to
start again and explore the other face of the moral divide, or to
return to the city in search of more of its secrets. Along with the
many side missions, there are 32 'dead drops' to locate - audio
recordings that fill in more of the back-story, which you can fish for
with your mini-map and GPS - and hundreds of blast shards that boost
your power bar. As a material benefit it falls some way short of
Crackdown's agility orbs, but as with Assassin's Creed, there is always
something tempting about a shiny object lurking at the other end of an
interesting climb.But then you may also
have had enough. There is more charm to inFamous than Cole's face and
voice suggest, but basking in the glow of the end credits, there are
also a lot of painful memories to recall; of too many missions that
funnel you into shooting galleries, of difficulty spikes and
enemy-spamming, and of staring at the upgrades page rather glumly,
aware that for the most part you're only being invited to make things
strike harder or across a broader range. But most of all, there is the
realisation that by the end of the game you feel like more than a man,
and the power is arresting, and yet for much of Cole's quest, you have
been running out of ammo, hiding, and firing back with a popgun. The
flaw is that inFamous overcomes Cole's lack of invention, but,
damningly for a story about an electrical superhero, it never quite
overcomes his lack of power.
7/10
por FILIP_FB Qua Dez 05, 2012 11:20 am
