Demo Impression: InFamous.

InFamous is a third person action game in which you take control of Cole, someone who somehow suddenly posses these unexplainable powers of electrecity. It is now up to you to either help Cole save the city, or make him destroy it.

The demo starts off with a little introduction explaining pretty much what I said above. When it’s time for your first mission, you’re slung out in the world of Empire City. And since you start on a rooftop, you get the feeling that this is going to be an open wordl game with a lot of climbing and/or flying involved. And you’d be very right to think so, because that’s just what you do, aside from electrifying your enemies of course.

Navigating trhough the environment is a breeze, the controls feelss very fluent and they’re very easy to learn.  Cole will automatically grab on to edges and ledges when he comes in contact with them and jumping from rooftop to rooftop is a lot of fun. He can also fly for short amount of time and slide on wires coonected between buildings. He does these things with the help of his electrical powers, using them as thrust in both cases.

The Empire City we see in the game seems to be that of a decaying one, where gangs have taken over the streets and it’s pretty much total anarchy all over the place. With that said, the environment looks great, it’s got a very gritty feel to it and everything feels weathered, even if the events making it that way didn’t take place too long ago. Which begs the question, what really happened? I guess we’ll have to buy the game to find out eh?

As I said, the game looks great, but when looked at from a purely technical angle, it can seem a little dated in its graphics. Still, Cole’s powers look great, as does the world he inhabits, but it’s a little rough around the edges at times. I’ve gotten occaisional framerate issues and so on, but it’s nothing that detracts from the overall feel of the game.

The mission in the demo has you escorting an old train, filled with refugees to a safe location. Of course the route to that location is filled with enemies, the reapers. This only provides you with a great opportunity to try out your electrifying skills, which is a ton of fun. It can be easy to think that Cole’s powers, being based entirely on electricity, would become repetetive. This is not the caes, he has a lot of different things he can do with them. Using it to push cars and whatnot out of the way or into enemies, throwing electric grenades and shooting it out of his fingertips alá the emperor from star Wars. He can also do this cannonball thing where he jumps off a high ground and dives into the ground, blowing pretty much everything around him out of way as he lands.

The game also has a whole good/evil thing going, which doesn’t really show itself too much in the demo, but what I can say is that being evil does affect what people think of you and your status to them  About the only other noticable difference is that when performing evil tasks, Cole’s powers will turn red instead of blue and vice versa.  He’ll also change his appearance and look more… You know, Evil.  I’m fairly certain there’s more than that to it in the full game, but that’s what I could gather from the demo.

The game feels and plays great, it’s got kind of a Spiderman meets Assassin’s Creed thing going on, which I like. It runs smooth enough and as I’ve stated it is a ton of fun navigating Empire City. I look forward to playing the full game when it hits shelves on June 27th

The demo is available now on PSN.