InFamous Preview

inFamous has crept up on us somewhat. First-party platform exclusives tend to arrive with such a wave of hype that it's hard to see if the game itself is any good, yet Sucker Punch's first game since the excellent Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves on the PS2 had barely registered as a blip in the VideoGamer.com office. In fact, while we've seen Activision's similar looking open-world game Prototype on numerous occasions over the past two years, the GDC build of inFamous that popped through the letter box this week is the first time we've seen it in person, let alone played it. After spending an afternoon playing through a selection of missions, we're left wondering why we didn't see it sooner.

What this GDC build of the game isn't is a full on preview version of the final game. We haven't been able to start from the beginning, trying to piece together the story is nigh-on impossible, tutorial-like tips are thin on the ground and the good/bad Karma system is only touched on ever so slightly. What we have been able to do, though, is get a feel for how the game plays, which is something that wasn't all that clear. Surprisingly, despite the lack of guns for our hero (or anti-hero), inFamous plays a lot like a third-person shooter, with more than a few things in common with Xbox 360 exclusive Crackdown.

Our first mission introduces a few of the basics, such as aiming with L1, firing off a charge of electric with R1, and jumping with X. Main character Cole McGrath is able to leap around from rooftop to rooftop and ledge to ledge in a similar way to your character in Crackdown, and to some extent how Altair moved in Assassin's Creed. He's not quite as nimble as Altair though, or Alex Mercer from Prototype, meaning he's not a skilled free-runner, but he's more than able to scale tall buildings and leap from great heights without so much as grazing a knee.

Key to the whole game are Cole's electricity-based powers. The GDC build we played doesn't go into any detail about how he became who he is, but it seems to have something to do with a bomb that devastated the city, which in turn also created enemies called Reapers – these hooded nasties evolved from junkies that worked on the streets. It seems as though Cole was directly responsible for the bomb, although he doesn't remember how it happened, forcing him to become something of an outcast in society. Use of your electric powers isn't unlimited, with Cole's abilities draining as he uses them. Luckily he can recharge by standing next to electricity outlets and holding L2.

This idea of being a superhero who is also something of a social misfit runs throughout the game. We've only sampled what the full game will offer here, but the first mission tasks you with retrieving some air-dropped food parcels that are stuck hanging high above the ground. It's easy enough to get up there and release the package with a blast of electric, but once it's on the ground you have two choices: take it for yourself and friends or leave it for the many starving civilians. Your choice will affect your Karmic state, which in turn determines how people react to you, your available power upgrades and your appearance.

Our next mission saw us fighting against boss character Sasha, a rather strange woman who lives under the city. She's clearly not completely with it, constantly talking about how you're late for dinner. Her dingy sewer-like lair is flooded with water (not Cole's favourite thing to be in given his rather electrified state) and she's able to conjure up massive reapers to disguise her location. After pelting her with electric blasts she keels over and you're able to run up and perform a strange attack that sees you tapping a button and moving a target over some plugs attached to her body. Pull these out and she's a goner.

Another mission saw Cole having to take out a number of heavily armed buses, each packing enough automatic weapons to keep you at bay. Initial attempts to take it out with the various electric-based attacks (as well as your standard attack there's a repulse shockwave and something akin to a grenade) failed miserably, but soon enough we'd worked out that an approach from up high enabled us to get on top of the bus and take out the engine with our trusty electric blast. This is easier said than done though, with one false move resulting in near instant death.

Finally we took on a very tricky prison mission, which tasked Cole with protecting the cells while an onslaught of flaming boulders came flying over the prison wall. This stage was easy enough thanks to Cole's shockwave move, but a load of bad guys soon turned up too, along with some kind of scrap monster. Once defeated Cole had to climb up the tall prison building in order to reactivate the generators. While an exciting mission, being presented with it without knowing its context in the story meant it felt rather odd - why are you protecting the prison and how is there a scrap monster walking about?

We've seen a lot of open world games on current generation consoles and despite being a work in progress inFamous certainly looks like being one of the best. It's a dark game, no doubt inspired by the comic books that made super heroes popular in the first place. But the city is massive, the draw distance is superb and the effects look great. It's still lacking polish, particularly the frame rate, but PS3 owners are unlikely to be disappointed by what Sucker Punch has been able to do with its first game on Sony's latest hardware. We're not convinced by the lip-syncing, which is a tad puppet-like at the moment, but we are fans of the animated comic book cutscenes, which really do look great.

Having really only seen a tiny portion of what inFamous will offer when it hits stores we're left with many questions, but hopeful that we'll get an entertaining superhero game with a twist. How well the good/bad karma system is implemented will ultimately decide the game's fate, so look out for a more thorough preview of the game in the coming weeks.