0verhyped

I’d make a pun about this game being infamous, but that’s actually giving it way too much credit…

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Seeing as we’re in a new year and possibly a new gaming generation, I figured now is a good time to look back on what games from the last few years really defied my expectations. Either because they went above and beyond what I was expecting of them or because they were horrible letdowns that made me feel stupid for buying them. Today’s disappointment is inFAMOUS, the oddly capitalized superhero/villain wide open sandbox game from Sucker Punch, which, appropriately, felt like a total sucker punch to me.

Here’s another situation where me giving something a chance came back to bite me in the ass. So I don’t know how many of you have heard of the company Sucker Punch. They’re one of Sony’s game companies and last generation they made the Sly Cooper series for the Playstation 2. I really liked the Sly Cooper games. They were fun, they had good characters and each game was bit different than the last so the series didn’t get stale.

So, as I mentioned in another post, when news of Sucker Punch making a new game called inFAmOUS started coming in, I sat up and took notice. A wide open sandbox game where you have super powers? I’ve been wanting more of those forever. And it’s being made by a studio who made a series of pretty good games I liked. Seemed like a smart choice at the time. And yet INfamous was a massive letdown.

The whole thing reeked of sophomoric writing desperately trying to be dark or edgy. Like a forgettable 90’s comic book during the whole anti-hero craze. I suppose that’s oddly appropriate since this generation in gaming has seen a lot of games suddenly strive to be “mature” and “art” in the clumsiest ways possible. InFaMoUs in particular is an embarrassing example since we have a company going from making a series of decent family friendly games to trying a make a dark and gritty superhero game with important moral choices. Like, do you want your posters to make you look like Electro-Jesus or Hitler Von Lightningstein?

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I’ll let you decide if I’m exaggerating or not.

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Yeah, this is another one of those games with pitifully ridiculous moral choices. Where basically the choice is either be evil for evil’s sake, or be good for good’s sake and it doesn’t really fucking matter what you choose. Sometimes you don’t even choose, the game just checks your Karma meter and changes the cutscene to reflect wherever you are currently standing in the stereotypical good/evil system. Why is morality in games usually defined as either being a genocidal sadist or an incorruptible paragon of virtue?

Crummy story aside, the gameplay also stinks. One of the fundamental flaws that plague most superhero games is the following dilemma: How do you give the player awesome and amazing power, yet still create a game that feels legitimately challenging? There’s no easy answer, but the shitty lazy answer is simply do one or another. You’re so powerful the game is too easy or you’re so weak you don’t feel powerful. infamouS decided to pick the shittier of the two lazy options and make your character so fucking weak that he might as well just buy a gun since his electricity powers suck. (Side note: The main character’s powers prevent him from using a gun…)

Your enemies, usually drugged up weirdos in masks, can snipe you with machine guns from a mile away. You, on the other hand, will be lucky to land a few measly lightning bolts. It gets crazier in the second part of the city where you’re fighting bag people using trash as armor and they still kick your ass. This all compounds the issue that the missions are your standard go here and kill this crap you find in so many of these sandbox games. And of course there’s crappy collectibles as well. The whole thing is just a cheap buffet of sub-par sandbox gaming elements.

I beat this game twice and got every trophy, and I honestly don’t remember much of anything. Just a lot of jumping around between buildings and shooting stuff with electricity over and over again until it actually dies. There’s some weird chick with like poison tubes coming out of her body, or something, at some point, I think. And there’s some other chick, who betrays you, all though she strong armed you into working for her, so I don’t think that’s technically a betrayal. I don’t remember. I seem to remember having more fun trying the Uncharted 2 Multiplayer beta than actually playing iNfAmOuS.

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Yeah, turns out letting other people shoot at you fixes one of the game’s bigger problems.

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Yeah, how’s that for pitiful? The multiplayer beta from another game, that I got for free without knowing it, which was from another game that I thought was a huge disappointment, was actually better than the game I bought. Oh well, live and learn.