Even when a game looks really good, so good I'll reserve it weeks in advance, there are little worries. It just might not turn out. There are exceptions; I had no doubt that Metal Gear Solid 4 was going to turn out as excellent as it was, but I also haven't set hands on a game by Hideo Kojima that I didn't enjoy. /rambling on



Having reserved inFamous at Gamestop, I wasn't given a demo code (apparently those were for Best Buy customers). The employees, on the other hand, were; they got a set of three, for their top three employees. I got one, despite not working there, because my local Gamestop is awesome and one of those top three didn't want theirs. It turns out that inFamous is exactly the game I want it to be.

The demo opens with the mission of freeing people trapped inside a train by the reapers. The train must be moved to a station so the people can be unloaded carefully, yadda yadda, escort mission with an apparently indestructible target. Works for me. To begin, I needed to get past two enemies and knock a couple cars out of the way. My first attempt had me leaping down and trying to zap the pair. It worked, but I took a lot of hits. Having three or four of them there would probably have killed me through a combination of quick damage and my general unfamiliarity with the game. Upon playing the section again, on another trip through the demo, I hopped to a power/telephone pole, slid along the wire, climbed a water tower, jumped over an ally to another building, then to one of the supports for the suspended train tracks. From there, I threw a grenade down at them which, since my alignment was “hero”, automatically hit them with arc restraints. Neither hand the chance to acknowledge my presence, let alone fire a shot. More importantly, both approaches worked. Here's a bunch of super powers, go to town.



The locomotion has an impressive amount of freedom; imagine Assassin's Creed, but without such obvious environmental ladders built into everything. I could climb on just about anything with a rendered ledge to grab, but they seem to have made a point of not making anything stand out so it actually feels like you're freely able to climb things instead of having specific climbing areas.

I could also activate any* power at almost any time (the only time I couldn't was sliding along a power line). While standing, climbing, hanging, or jumping, it was just a matter of hitting the aim button and going for it. I've bounced back rockets while hanging over an edge and detonated explody barrels while jumping. It doesn't seem like there's any limit to when you can use each power, but they're all given pretty strict parameters for what they do. Those parameters change depending on my alignment, which the demo showcases at its extremes of “hero” and “infamous”, but the game feels like it's more about clever application than having a list of powers like War and Peace. On top of that, they're all unique. There's not four kinds of zap or grenade (something I'm less than impressed with in regards to Prototype is that you can have claw hands or a big knife arm, but both seem to slice guys up. Why is there more than one “slice guys up” power?).

Special mention goes to the lack of “hot spot” button prompts that you'll want or need to use in the middle of combat. To drain power from the environment, you just have to be near something electrical, which happens to be anything that looks electrical and those objects can be identified with a press of L3, and hold L2 to drain it. Thank you, Sucker Punch, for having the wherewithal to skip making us stand on the appropriate pixel to save our lives in the middle of a fight. If there is one thing I objectively call shit in Gears of War 2, it's that idiotic square dancing that's required to pick up a weapon you can't quite see, or find the right spot to activate a button. Nothing says fun like shimmying around trying to find the right place to stand to pick up a sniper rifle or grenades instead of half a dozen hammershots while the locust horde advances. InFamous doesn't have that, and that's awesome.



Cole's fragility makes the game suitably intense. It's great to be completely unstoppable; that's one of the things that made Hulk: Ultimate Destruction and X-Men Origins: Wolverine fun. In those games, you win by a little or win by a lot, but in a game like inFamous, losing becomes a possible outcome and then foe-crushing victory is that much more satisfying.

Now what I'm not sure about is how my inner gamer, who will die if he does not get to play this right now, is going to survive for a couple more weeks.

*Ok, so there's a super move thing called “Lightning Storm”, with which you can empty your power meter completely and blast the hell out of an entire street and it doesn't seem like I can activate it doing anything other than standing on the ground, but it's hard to say because it's unlocked for the last 30 or so seconds of the demo, for one mission, and because of the huge number of enemies and moving target to destroy, there really isn't time to experiment with it.