There is nothing sweeter than getting a hold of a new game. Unwrapping the package with vigor, hearing the crack of the game case while being enveloped in the sweet smell of new plastic as you pop the center of the disk holder and place the game in your hand for a split second. Soon your machine begins to glow just  like how your face is glowing right now. Your hands grab the controller in anticipation while the game company logos start up. But something is wrong, the game will not start instead the game is so large that it needs to install some files before it begins. This sets you back, and feels like hours will pass before you even get a chance to play it. Before you know it, the game has be installed and the first logo pops up, you smile. The game starts and a new feeling takes over.

If you don’t know that basic premise of inFamous, your a man who (after the destruction of the Empire City) realizes he is able to control electricity. Because of the destruction, the government issues a quarantine and places up walls around the city to prevent people from leaving. You can either help the people in making this city a much better place or you can reek havoc and be evil,

When I had first heard about inFamous, I was watching a game play video of it and right off the hop I thought this game looked horrible. Everything from how the main character moved to how the city looked really bothered me. I thought in the back of my mind “This game is gonna suck”. Well a few months later the game is released and all I can hear is that it’s been getting rave reviews. Knowing that when game developers release video game play of a game while it’s still in production, they normally show an incomplete version of the game.  So I set out to get a copy of the inFamous to see how cool this game really is .

Well I had problems with it from the very beginning. When you get to take hold of your character, you wake up just after the destruction of the city. Assuming that you are injured due to the fact you are bent over holding yourself, I would expect that you would be moving very slowly, like someone who had suffered from a great injury, well not in this case. You get to run around (not free roaming yet mind you) at your normal running speed, and since your “injured” you look like a freaking zombie while doing it. What blew my mind even farther is that you can jump over a full length of a car! Thinking that it might because of your new ability and that the ability is just beginning to manifest itself, I shrugged it off. Until you actually get to play the game and the first person you meet can run just as fast as you can.

The power of controlling electricity has been done before in so many other games and movies, which really I don’t have a problem with too too much but I would have liked there to have been something else you could use instead of just electricity,  it gets really repetitive.  Another power you seem to get is the ability to fall from heights and not be hurt. Hm… interesting, that you can fall from any height and not get hurt, but bullets, punches, and other people with electric abilities can do damage, I don’t think someone thought this one through enough.

One thing I did find cool was the ability to parkour. It’s ok if you have no idea on what that is, but I’m sure you’ve seen people preform these stunts. What it is, is people climbing, running, jumping off of things while normally not touching the ground at all. In the game, you can climb almost anything even buildings by climbing and holding anything with a ledge or anything that you can wrap your hands around to help one up. If the player is on a ledge or near a cable you can run on, they made it so you could never fall off. Nice! I’ve always hated games where I need to watch out how close I needed to be before I fell off. This is where the coolness of this ends. While climbing a building all I could think of was that I was playing Spiderman 2. I played that game into the ground, why did I want to play it again? Sure the parkour worked great if you wanted to climb something but it was super irritating if I didn’t want to climb anything at all. What if I wanted to drop down? well you would press the circle button to drop but you would only drop to the next level before you get stuck on the next grab-able surface. Like a magnet you get attracted to these surfaces, and can really screw you up if you’re trying to run away from anything or anyone. I once was trying to dodge the gun fire from these gun mounts on the back of some trucks. I wanted to go through the trees to block their fire only to jump through them getting stuck on the first tree. I jumped off hoping to get off of it and back onto the ground but nope, another tree. Grrr.

What also made me feel that I was playing a Spiderman game was not only the abilities to climb buildings but it’s when your forced underground. If anyone had played the first Spiderman game on the PSX, you would remember the level where you have to climb on large sewer pipes underground to hunt down Venom. Well the level in inFamous was almost the same and being able to “stick” to some of the ledges underground only made me cringe even more and feel these people really wanted to make a Spiderman game.

One last thing that I truly truly hate, was running around the level and having people shoot at me. Well just the Reapers, but they seemed to be everywhere. As soon as you clear a small group of them you can literally spin yourself around and the system would spawn more of them in the same spot. I wouldn’t mind if you got to see them come out of a door,a car or something, but just to spawn, not very pleasant. This sucks especially if you need to heal yourself which can be done by sucking the electricity out of something that has power flowing through it.  But you need to bail out of there and run if there is nothing around you that you can use to heal. You may have to run a fair bit until you find a spot that isn’t occupied by enemies so you can suck the juice into your body so you can walk around without worrying about dying.

There are so many more problems with this game, but I hate ranting on too much, so I will hold it off here, and hope that you find this helpful in your decision to either buy or even rent this game. I had it for all of a day before I wanted to get rid of it.

3.5 out of 10.