So you're a bike messenger, ferrying mail and objects from point A to point B for little recognition or praise - but hey, a living's a living. One day you're given a package that feels like a heavy, round object. Maybe it's a soccer ball or something. Is it ticking? Oh man, maybe you're on a timer to deliver this thing! Better move fast! Okay, it's glowing now. This is weird. It's starting to shake and... - OH MY GOD! EXPLOSION! AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!

Cue the death, destruction, plagues, and kickass electrical powers, please.

   If that sounded like your little inside voice, then you just might be Cole McGrath, the protagonist of the PS3 exclusive title inFAMOUS. After accidentally setting off the bomb that you were unknowingly delivering to the middle of the city ($5 says the address was a P.O. box), you break all established rules of the universe by being the only person in a mile radius to NOT have been vaporized by the blast. In fact, aside from your hair and eyebrows getting flash-fried off, you come out of the whole thing pretty well: mostly unscathed, maybe a little weak in the knees and, - oh yeah! - you can now shoot lightning from your fists. With the omniscient eye of The Plot looming over you, you suddenly find yourself entangled in gang violence, government conspiracies, and the schemes of centuries-old organizations. Are you a bad enough dude to beat it all and come out on top? Of course you aren't, but you paid your $50, so you are going to try doing it anyway.

Speaking of being a bad dude...

So I heard you liked turrets.

   Let's move onto the real (not taco!) meat of the game: combat. Now, Cole has an impressive array of powers, from standard lightning bolts to shock grenades (don't even ask about the physics on that one) to, towards the end, calling down an entire damn thunderstorm on the unfortunate bastards that stand in his way. This all sounds fun, to be sure, but fighting in a game is only as good as the enemies that are thrown at you. So, how are the enemies in inFAMOUS?

   Just for the hell of it, let's make this into a little pop quiz. Question 1: Do you like opponents who can spot you from over two blocks away while perched on the top of a building, and shoot at you with near-impeccable aim? Question 2: Do you like two, three, maybe even four aggressors with rocket and grenade launchers firing on you at once? Question 3: Do you like finding turret guns in the most random of places (On top of a building? In the sewer systems?? ON ELEVATED RAILROAD TRACKS?!) that have a significant knockback, keeping you from jumping to cover if their fire is trained on you? Question 4: How about several enemies with shotguns knocking you on your ass at close range and then gathering around and continuously shooting you before you can stand back up? Do all those things sound enjoyable to you? Then, my friend, you might just love inFAMOUS.

   While this may seem like an exaggeration, fact is, anyone playing through this game will encounter those exact situations on more than one occasion. It became even more ludicrous towards the end, when the game threw in enemies that were invisible, with stronger shotguns that knocked you down and killed you in three or so hits. Some of these firefights ("muggings" is really more like it) were the reason that the term "ragequit" was invented. Running into bosses and minibosses instead of swarms of AK-wielding enemies suddenly became a relief, just because the bosses don't fire at you nearly as much.

The boy also climbs.

   Now to touch on another major gameplay elements: the open-world exploration. Empire City is basically a monkey's wet dream. You can climb almost anything you can see. However, "almost" is an important qualifier. The fine line between the things that Cole will latch onto and things he will just adamantly refuse to grab is simply insane. There is no reason at all for someone who can get his hands around a convex light bulb barely sticking out of a building's face to not be able to climb up a wire mesh grating over a window. And there is most certainly no reason why he can't climb fences. This guy finds it perfectly acceptable to jump from sewer pipe to sewer pipe with no objection, but he can't hop a six-foot wooden fence? Something is wrong here.

   On top of that, the amount of things that Cole CAN climb means that if you're trying to scale a building, you're pretty much just continuously tapping the X button over and over until you're at the top. This seemed very weird at first because the developer of the game, Sucker Punch, was the dev team behind Sly Cooper, which got climbing down perfectly. But after mulling it over, the reason that Sly Cooper does it so well while inFAMOUS falters is obvious: in Sly, the only things that you can scale have been specifically put there by the designers to be climbed, and exist for no other reason. The cartooniness of the series allowed them to do that without it seeming cheap or out of place. inFAMOUS, however, goes for a realistic approach, so every building is rife with moldings and pipes and other such things. With so many things to grab, it's no wonder that the rhythm of climbing is shot to Hell.

   Another weird aspect is how schizophrenic the grabbing/dropping system is. If you press circle to let go of whatever you're currently holding onto, Cole automatically reaches for the next nearest grabbable object and latches onto it like a parasite. The need for this is obvious, because you don't always want to drop all the way to the ground, but even if you jump AWAY from the building, somehow Cole will break all the laws of physics, managing to direct himself towards a light pole or something and hug it for dear life. What's worse, though, is that the few times you WANT to jump to something else and climb up on it, Cole will always just pass right by it and fall out of the air, nine times out of ten. I could almost swear that the game was deliberately doing the exact opposite of what I wanted, just to be a dick.

Meanwhile, at the Fortress of Solitude...

   Last, but not least, is the story. While suffering from a few clichés, the tale of Cole and Empire City is serviceable and even gripping at times. However, the narrative is bogged down by a few noticeable problems that can't help but be addressed.

   The first is that the dialogue, at times, suffers from what I like to call the "Redundant Recounting Syndrome." It works like this: two characters are reminiscing about an event that took place before the game started. Even though Character B obviously remembers what happened, Character A goes through his recollections in excruciating detail, as if Character B did not know what he was talking about. It's just a severely obvious way of trying to flesh the characters for the benefit of the audience. This happens in the very first few minutes of the game, while you're on your way to your first mission, with your friend Zeke telling you about the time you were both approached by cops while Zeke was taking a leak (heh, rhyme.) Even when Cole says out loud that he remembers what Zeke was talking about, the rotund sidekick continues to recount the entire story in needless detail. Bad writing.

   Another oddity is how some of the characters act in ways which are strangely disproportional to the events at hand. The main offender is Trish, Cole's ex-girlfriend who, for a significant chunk of the game, believes that Cole purposefully set off the bomb that he was unwittingly carrying in the introduction, causing the death of her sister. Yet, when you run into her on a few of your missions, she treats you not like a horrible mass-murdering terrorist who is personally responsible for her sibling's demise, but more like the two of you had a fight over the color of your sofa cushions. "Oh, it's you. What are YOU doing here?" she asks when she sees you, in a tone of voice that seems to say more "You know I'm right about the choice of babysitter" than "I hate you, you child-eating Satan-spawn!" Hell, she even helps heal you when you get a blast of toxic tar to the face! It just doesn't make any sense.

   Aside from that, the story chugs along fine, mostly. The plot twist at the end isn't necessarily horrible, but it's been done by a few other stories recently. It's been done by Naruto. I'll leave it at that.

Play me out, gents.

   All in all, inFAMOUS was a fun enough diversion. It didn't do anything groundbreaking or particularly memorable, and it feels like the things that it tried to do in terms of pushing the envelope ended up as the worst aspects of the game. Fear not, though - this was simply the first excursion, as the end of the story mode implies that there will probably be a sequel. Let's just hope the development team learns from their mistakes come inFAMOUS 2: Electric Boogaloo (which is the most appropriate application of that catch-all subtitle ever.)

       ... Jordan Gugliuzza