inFamous

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Originally Posted by Del Murder

Downloaded this for free with the Welcome Back campaign so it's on my list to play. I'm excited to hear the combat doesn't get tedious like it does with most action games.

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I meant to comment on this when I originally saw it but then I forgot. I have to agree with Dreddz that none of the enemies are all that interesting to fight and that the gameplay is pretty weak overall. In fact, the longer the game goes on the more combat becomes a huge pain in the ass. From what I recall it never really gets far past being a simple beat 'em up and the only change that occurs with the enemies over the course of the game isn't that fights really get any harder or require many changes in tactics, but rather that they just take longer to finish than they do earlier in the game.

Infamous was an ok game but not something I would have been happy to have paid for if I got it before it was a Greatest Hits title. Outside of combat and the story missions there isn't a whole lot to it as far as variety, and like I said, I wasn't very taken with the combat and the story wasn't as great as people make it out to be if you ask me. It's a game that I feel was dramatically undermined by the inclusion of the morality system, and it relies on a lot of superhero tropes that I'm overly familiar with at this point having read superhero comics for more than 20 years now.

If you read 20 years of comics, I'd be stunned if there are any games where you are a superhero that aren't things you've read/seen a dozen times before. Let alone your next comic.

Combat hasn't become a pain in the ass for me as you can easily avoid "pointless" combat in the game. If you only want to do the missions, you can quite happily outrun the enemies if you really want to. But yeah, the ease of combat and "difficulty increases" in combat are no different to any other shooter. You have your standard gun (bolt), your grenades, your sniper. So I wouldn't say that the combat was somehow much worse than other third person shooters out there.

I definitely wouldn't associate the game with a beat'em'up. Definitely would associate it with the Uncharted style of gameplay, ie a third person shooter where you can climb on walls and stuff.

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Originally Posted by Loony BoB

If you read 20 years of comics, I'd be stunned if there are any games where you are a superhero that aren't things you've read/seen a dozen times before. Let alone your next comic.

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It does happen more often than you'd think, but even the stuff that's been done before can be presented in an interesting way. But I found that because each plot point in Infamous rarely amounted to much more than an excuse to give the player a good or evil thing to do, any sense of pacing was kind of lost and the presentation left a lot to be desired. Part of it also had to do with the fact that I just really didn't feel Cole was very well developed as a character. Again, I think too much time was spent figuring out choices to give the player, but not nearly enough on the actual presentation of the character.

I wouldn't really compare combat to Uncharted at all though. Uncharted was almost a straight up shooter with excellent movement and cover mechanics. While Infamous does involve more shooting than I may have let on, aiming always felt too touchy to me, and melee combat was far too one dimensional for my liking. Especially when I ended up using it almost as often as shooting. While we're comparing it to Uncharted I'll also say that I hated climbing in this game. Far too often I found myself going off in a direction I didn't want to, or taking ages to climb a building because Cole climbed so slowly. Games like Uncharted and Assassin's Creed 2 made climbing practically a joy unto itself though.

Again, I'm not saying Infamous was terrible. It had a lot of good gameplay ideas in it, but just like the original Assassin's Creed, I think it lacked a lot of the polish and variety needed to make it a truly stand out experience. I hope the second one is better in that regard, but I'll be waiting until the price drops to find out.

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Originally Posted by McLovin'

Gameplay is smurfing phenomenal. You never get tired of fighting in this game. Most games you always avoid fighting after sometime, but Infamous makes you wanna kick some ass with lightning godliness. And the power to fly/hover was a completely awesome and welcomed surprise.

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You're kidding, right? I was trying not to throw the controller after I had to fight yet another of the same useless henchmen again and again.

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Originally Posted by Dreddz

I have the first Infamous and didn't care for it. Played for maybe 8 hours and stopped. The gameplay was weak and none of the enemies were interesting to fight. The city was dull and terribly interesting to explore. The missions were very routine game missions like protect this guy or collect this and that. The story didn't really go anywhere from the 8 hours I played,although I've been told it gets better near the end of the game.

As you might expect, I have no interest in Infamous 2.

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Basically this. Nothing about the game was standout. It was Spider-man without the webbing. The only upside was the 'shock' ending that had already been spoiled by every videogame community. The storyline was dry and uninteresting and I couldn't give a rats arse about Cole. Personally, I enjoyed killing him in the hope that his poorly structured, emotionally devoid character would stop coming back.

I'm surprised about these negative comments. It was one of the most wonderful surprises I've had in all my life.

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Originally Posted by I Don't Need A Name

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Originally Posted by McLovin'

Gameplay is smurfing phenomenal. You never get tired of fighting in this game. Most games you always avoid fighting after sometime, but Infamous makes you wanna kick some ass with lightning godliness. And the power to fly/hover was a completely awesome and welcomed surprise.

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You're kidding, right? I was trying not to throw the controller after I had to fight yet another of the same useless henchmen again and again.

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I thought the Reapers looked cool and hit hard enough that you had to actually take cover and think about what you're gonna do. Sometimes you gotta get the hell out of there and climb a roof to snipe. It's fun. That's all that matters. Killing Reapers and the others in this game is fun and it's not hard since you've got a lot of fun powers at your disposal. I don't have to change weapons like in other games; I can just press a button and BAM. You're standards are too high for this FREE game. I play for like an hour and fight some baddies and it's enough. Definitely not a spectacular game but it's fun. :D

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Originally Posted by McLovin'

Killing Reapers and the others in this game is fun and it's not hard since you've got a lot of fun powers at your disposal. I don't have to change weapons like in other games; I can just press a button and BAM. You're standards are too high for this FREE game.

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The combat was actually the worst part of the game if you ask me. And the game wasn't free when it came out, so saying anyone's standards are too high for it is a little silly.

Anywho, I just got around to playing the demo for the second game. First I'll retract my statement about Cole climbing too slowly. Not sure why I had that in my head, but it has been a year since I played the original. My problem with climbing in that game was largely the very sensitive and frustrating inaccurate controls. And low and behold, those controls haven't improved at all in the demo. I'll give melee combat credit for being less of a pain in the add then before, but that was really the only change I even noticed. It really seemed like instead of spending the last two years tightening things up and really polishing the gameplay they decided to leave it largely unchanged on the controls front.

That may be fine for fans of the original, but the controls were one of my biggest gripes, with combat being up there as well. Neither has been improved nearly enough for my taste duo I doubt I'll keep up with the series. It's a shame since I liked the sly series and am a big enough fan of superheroes that I do want to like infamous more.

It's definitely unpolished and feels very raw. I think that's what makes it pretty cool, though.

I'll concede on the climbing controls as there have been frustrating moments. Having said that, I've had frustrating moments with climbing in nearly every game I've ever played. Uncharted is undoubtedly the best of them, though. I'm not sure if it's harsh or not to consider that if it's not the best climber control in the world then it's not good enough. I mean, yes, they should strive to be the best, but only one game can achieve that, so... yeah. But the problem with climbing is probably that it's a 3D affair and you use 2D controls to achieve that movement. Personally, I actually have more problem with the dropping mechanics than the climbing. xD

People keep bringing up the "same, same, same" opponents but... every game is like that. You fight the same guys over and over. This is normal. Are there actually games where every other enemy is that different? I wonder how many different enemies there are in, say, Uncharted or Batman: Arkham Asylum. Even in games like Call of Duty, which I've personally not played. I'm trying to count the types of enemies (bosses excluded) in the game and there are two standard enemies in each zone (the smaller and the bigger guys - I think the bigger guys might take one more shot to kill, but for me the main difference is that they're just easier to hit ;)). The weapons they can hold are miniguns, shotguns, standard guns, grenades and the standard gun holders can also have a shield (and grenade?). Then there are the conduits, of which there are at least four different ones (reaper conduits, the big dustmen conduit and the even bigger dustmen conduit, the 'invisible' conduit and the weird conduit that is operated by a first sons thing). And of course the annoying crab-dog-things. So... I'd say when you come up against an enemy, it can be any of around twelve or more non-boss variants. Which isn't terrible.

Maybe people don't notice how same-same-same enemies are in other games out there because they look a lot more human than in inFamous, or maybe I'm not noticing that there are actually a lot of variants.

I brought up the point of the same opponents because of the fact that they started to grate on me. My strategy, which worked 3/4 of the time, was jump up, throw a smurf load of grenades, keep running. None of them really posed much of a challenge. And they were more of an annoying hinderance stopping me from finishing the game. I have very little love for the game, which is heightened by my confusion in why everyone finds it some kind of masterpiece.

For me, as I said before, the game was just a rip off of previous Spider-man games, but with lightening. You can have lightning fists (Web gloves), fire balls of lightning (Impact webbing), climb walls, glide (webswing). Even the game mechanics and poor storyline co-incide with that of the Spider-man games. Everything felt like I was back on my PS1, which (for once) wasn't a good feeling.

I wouldn't call it a masterpiece, but I would say it fits somewhere around 7.5 to 8.5 in how good it is, which is easily on the better side of average. And in a lot of games there is a fairly cheap way to win, I guess, but I wonder if you could have done that on hard difficulty. Also, for some reason, despite there being more grenades in 'Evil' than 'Good' for inFamous, I found that the good grenades were far, far more effective at destroying enemies. But that's probably mostly down to me playing my 'Good' game in Normal mode while my 'Evil' game has been in hard mode. Grenades haven't helped me nearly as much, though, and I find myself using standard bolts more than anything else. Grenades are still ideal for most conduits, though, especially the huge ones that throw rocks.

Yeah, I did Evil on Hard mode too. They weren't as effective, but I still found them the most effective way of clearing out enemies due to exploding cars and the like

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Originally Posted by Loony BoB

Having said that, I've had frustrating moments with climbing in nearly every game I've ever played.

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This is certainly true for me as well, but I found that far too often while climbing in Infamous that Cole wasn't doing what I wanted him to do, or even what I thought he should be doing based on the direction I was holding. A lot of the time it seemed like it was almost over correcting for any slight inaccuracy in what direction I was holding. And this drove me absolutely bonkers by the end since climbing was such a huge part of getting around all of the time. On the other hand, I went through Uncharted 2 and Assassin's Creed 2 with the controls failing me so little that I could probably count the number of times the game misread my intention without running out of fingers to count on. I don't expect perfection, but I do have some really high standards when it comes to controls, and they especially get on my nerves when I'm still putting up with the same mistakes and problems at the end of the game that I was dealing with at the start. Controls are the players connection to the game world and their character after all, and I shouldn't have to be fighting them for the entire game.

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People keep bringing up the "same, same, same" opponents but... every game is like that. You fight the same guys over and over. This is normal. Are there actually games where every other enemy is that different? I wonder how many different enemies there are in, say, Uncharted or Batman: Arkham Asylum. Even in games like Call of Duty, which I've personally not played.

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I will readily admit that the number of enemies in games like Uncharted or Call of Duty aren't very high. I think they do have more variety than Infamous did, but we may be talking double that at most. The reason that low enemy variety isn't quite as important in those games though is that there is a lot more variety to the environments. Granted, this is largely because they're not sandbox games, but the levels in each can vary radically, and while they may utilize many of the same basic gameplay mechanics in each level, they put them to work in a lot of different combinations, and usually try to throw in something that will make encounters later in the game somewhat novel compared to earlier levels. So rather than relying solely on enemy variety to vary the combat experience, they can vary the level design.

To take the original Modern Warfare as an example, you move from levels made up of very tight enclosed spaces (such as the opening tanker level) to wide open farm fields dotted with small villages, to half destroyed urban warzones and even some fairly intact but deserted cities. And within the spaces of these levels you may end up in situations where it's better to take cover and open fire on enemies as they come at you in waves, provide sniper support, or in some cases use stealth to make it through unseen. And on top of that, many areas have multiple possible paths through them. When fighting in urban areas for instance, you're sometimes left to choose whether you stay at street level with your squad and deal with enemies firing at you both from the street and from the top floors of buildings, or you may choose to duck inside the closest building, go up to the top floor and take the high ground.

The problem with combat in Infamous is that the majority of it takes place either at street level or on the roof tops, or a combination of the two. And combat plays out in almost the exact same way every time because of it. There are no grand strategies to employ because combat in itself wasn't that complex and terrain was rarely a factor in it. The only time I'd usually find myself considering it was if I had to run away for a minute, but even then it was just a question of do I run around the corner, to the next building, or climb? So while enemy variety in Infamous may be somewhat comparable to other games, it's level variety isn't. Now for the record, I think this is a problem with almost any sandbox game out there, but I'm not sure it would have to be if Cole had more combat oriented powers that let him use it to his advantage.

Yeah, I can see where you're coming from in that regard. The vast majority of battles take place in the same environments. They certainly could have done with better cover skills and perhaps even better AI / stealth skills that would make the game a bit more realistic. I found on some occasions that the AI could be too wise to your position, sometimes enemies on the other side of huge walls (ie, the crates that are stacked on top of each other) would follow my position as I ran past on the other side. Obviously they were set to "direct line towards player" mode and that can really be boring. I think if the AI and the cover systems were adjusted then things could have been a lot better. But in sandbox games, I can only guess that it's a rare thing to see such qualities.

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Originally Posted by I Don't Need A Name

Yeah, I did Evil on Hard mode too. They weren't as effective, but I still found them the most effective way of clearing out enemies due to exploding cars and the like

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Evil on Hard was a pain in the ass simply because I all I wanted to do was finish the game. I did the mission at the end with the helicopter 80 times to get the exp to get all the abilities though. smurfing infuriating.