InFamous Review

Developed by Sucker Punch Productions

Intro

InFamous is the long awaited release by Sucker Punch, the last game they released was the sublime Sly Cooper 3 way back in 2005 for the PS2.

The game is a open world adventure in the vein of GTA and Assassin's Creed, the platforming elements and visual style reminds me of Jak and Daxter 3 also.

Overview and Story

Players control Cole, a bike messenger caught in a mysterious explosion which simultaneously destroys the city while giving him electric superpowers. Here SP explores a Hobbesian world heavily influenced by the "No Man's Land" arc from the Batman comics. Gangs run rampant and the cops are helpless to do anything as basic necessities are taken away from the city. It is up to Cole (or Batman?)to decide whether to use his powers for good or evil. Along the way he meets several NPCs including his best friend Zeke and FBI agent Moya who gives him missions to complete.

Meanwhile Cole battles for control of the city with the 3 gangs that run each of the islands in the city while trying find answers to the catastrophe that happened to Empire City.

Graphics and Style

Sucker Punch opted for a darker, gritty and more realistic palette to their game this time round instead of the cartoonish Sly Cooper series, however the animated cutscenes and the animation of the 3D characters retain the classic SP signature. The animation uses the same cardboard cutout style seen in the Sly series, while Trish, Cole's girlfriend has animations that imitate a certain raccoon. The most telling clue is Cole's jumping, climbing and falling animation strongly resembles Sly's.

Morality, a new theme in the game allows good and evil actions to affect the city and Cole himself, turning the sky darker or lighter or giving him strange tattoos.

The environments consist of a city scape that resembles early 80s buildings in the US, everything is toned town from a high tech/modern look to easier fit in with Cole's powers. As he can't swing from building to building like Spiderman, he has to climb each individual building floor by floor, however it takes longer compared to Assassin's Creed, which had a easier time with shorter buildings and unique towers. This makes it difficult to include skyscrapers ala GTA.

Also, kudos to the team for making a almost completely lag free and slowdown free game even when there is tons of stuff happening in the background

Gameplay

Getting around

One of the most important aspects of an open world game is traveling, GTA had their cars, Spiderman had his webs and Altair had horses. Cole has superpowers which conveniently allows him to travel via rail grinding Ratchet style on electric wires in between buildings and rails on the train tracks which go around the city. This decision makes sense thematically and allows a convenient way for the player to travel quickly. A smidgen of suspension of disbelief is required to explain the electrical wires attached randomly from building to building, but considering that your hero can shoot lightning from his hands, it is easily achieved. Cole can also glide after jumping.

While InFamous owes Assassin's Creed for introducing climbable cities, it does it a little different here. Almost every building and surface is climbable in someway, but instead of the realistic way where Altair jumps from beam to pole, Cole seems to have a magnetic tendency towards the surfaces, he will orientate himself in the direction and 'slide' towards it, instead of grabbing it when he reaches it. While not a major flaw by any means, it does distract from the immersiveness quite a bit. Again the code here seems similar to the way Sly Cooper used to do it.

Water as a boundary, for once, water as a invisble boundary makes sense, as Cole gets instantly electrocuted if he touches water, it also explains why he cannot sit in cars or pick up guns in the game, leaving it all for the superpowers.

Combat and Enemies

Cole has several powers that he will gain through the course of time, from the basic lighting shock to grenades and projectiles and shields, each of the powers are constantly useful against different types of enemies or situations, a rare observation in games, upgrades are also available for all powers which is gained by using experience points from killing enemies. Cole also has a basic melee attack for close ranged encounters.

During the game, Cole will face off against any of the 3 factions in the City, each of the factions will have their own distinct look, they usually have a good mix of troops, from the basic footsoldier, a stronger shotgun wielding thug and a miniboss type called a conduit. Each of the conduits from different factions will have their own unique abilities, such as shockwaves, or building a giant robot out of trash parts. There are also smaller mechanical units that take less damage, but are harder to hit and generally offer a nuisance.


There are in game 'stunts' which challenges the player to defeat the enemies in certain ways and reward with extra xp.

Collecting

As with all platformers or open world games, collecting items from around the city provides a great way to encourage exploration. Sucker Punch excels in this by providing in game rewards in terms of unlocking greater energy for Cole when he collects blast shards and additional story details when he picks up dead drops.

Main Quest and Side Missions

Completing the main storyline and doing side missions along the way is relatively easy in InFamous, the mission locations are always marked on the map, and there will be specific NPC pedestrians that offer you a side mission. Aside from gaining additional xp or blast shards, side missions are also a one time thing that clears out a section of the city from enemies. While this prevents you from being shot at and killed as you travel across the city, it might not be such a good thing for players looking for a fight. But the game makes it quite easy for a person to maintain a section for xp farming. Clearing up the city also gives players a sense of accomplishment as well as working towards the trophies

The side missions also provide variety in terms of gameplay, racing across the city, following a spy and looking for hidden packages are some of the non-combat quests that you can pick up

Morality

A hyped up feature of InFamous is the ability to affect the city by your actions, Cole has a meter for good/evil, starting from Hero to Infamous, a drawback is that only either of the extreme moral choices opens up the later upgrades for the skills. So this means that people looking to play a Neutral character will have a much harder time getting through. People gain karma in three ways, the small gains can be made through normal gameplay, Cole can choose to bind an enemy to the ground or heal a wounded person. Medium sized gains can be made when Cole encounters a random event in the city. Lastly big gains can be made in choices offered in the main missions.

Again, Cole's lightning changes between two colors and the world is affected graphically, however there really isn't much to this feature, except to provide some replayability to some and allow some interesting insights to a player's style of play.

Thoughts

Another excellent and fun outing from Sucker Punch, after waiting so long, I do hope that Sly 4 gets out quicker. InFamous does a lot of basic things right, every action you perform in the game has a sense of purpose and a tangible reward to the player, from fighting enemies, to collecting items to side missions. No action is just there for the sake of being there.

There's a bit of gripe about repeated environments and the lack of distinct look for each of the city areas. Several times I jumped off a train track to land near a gas station, only to realise that there is an exact setup on all 3 islands. A bigger focus on the landmarks that already exist within the city could have helped with the identification.

One improvement I would like to see is the easier visibility of the enemies, basically during a firefight it is hard to differentiate between the innocents and the bad guys leading to civilian deaths which takes away karma points for the good side. Enemies also tend to blend in to the background when they are far away due to their color and small size. SP does entertain this notion with giant characters and harder characters that glow brightly. However they did not think it necessary for the smaller goons.

Overall an enjoyable game, it's more like an action platformer with an open world feature, but as time goes along, I'm guessing that genres will break really quickly.

Game Review: Plants vs Zombies

Plants vs Zombies, by PopCap games.

PvZ is the latest release by the makers of the addictive BeJeweled and Peggle casual games. Basically, it's a stripped down tower defense type game with charming graphics and tongue in cheek humour. Here the themes of a typical zombie invasion ties in with ...gardening? and it does so very well indeed. There are 3 distinct areas which require slightly different strategies, plants are your 'towers', there are attack, defence and support towers. Zombies are the 'creeps' which range from weak cannon fodder to a hulk-like behemoth that destroys your plants in a single hit.

The zombies will try to invade your house from the right and eat your brains, your plants will shoot from left to right and try to destroy them. Let the planting begin!



Thoughts

- Content packed, high replayability, gradual learning curve

PzV has an Adventure mode which is basically a giant tutorial in itself, over the course of 50 levels a new type of plant or two is unlocked every round. Even so, Adventure mode is only about half the game itself.

There are 3 other modes, Mini games, a forte of PopCap, features quick spurts of fun with Bowling and BeGhouled a variation on their popular Bejeweled. The mini-games tie in with adventure mode, allowing you to use the unlocked plants. The second mode is Puzzles, featuring several stages of two puzzle type games, one even letting you play as the zombies. The third and probably most lasting would be survival mode, letting you fight against endless hordes of zombies after you've completed the main quest.

On top of that there is a side game called 'Zen Garden' where you can collect plants from the levels and take care of them with various gardening tools. This gives you mostly a chance to take a break, earn some cash and unlock cheats.

-Made for pick up and play

On paper, PvZ looks like a quick casual game to spend a few minutes of your life. However it features an insidious autosave that doesn't display itself, this leads to two things.
1) Immersiveness, you never realise that the game is doing something in the background like when a "Saving" icon pops up, you just fight zombies.
2) Addictiveness, I usually use the saving icon as a means of gauging time when I am playing videogames, this fits in with the common game design of 15 mins or so per checkpoint to fit in with the attention span of a normal player. Without cuts to the menu or anything that disrupts the 'flow' of the game, you'll be tempted to just play until the end of the round, or the next and the next...

-Resource management and constant interactivity

Alot of tower defence games basically give you a standard resource at the beginning and let you manage that for the rest of the round, like the recent 'Savage Moon' on PSN which lets you get money to build towers from killed creeps. PvZ increases your interactivity in two ways,
1) you have to plant 'mana farms' in this case Sunflowers for 'Sun' their form of mana, the flowers will generate some Sun icons every few seconds and you have to manually click on it to pick it up.
2) Coins, coins allow you to purchase upgrades among other things, Zombies drop coins, since the Suns are usually on the left side of the screen and Zombies on the right, you don't simply plant your towers and watch the action, you have to click on the goodies before they disappear and since your towers are at risk of being destroyed all the time, you have to be on hand to build new ones and replace old ones.

-Variations and Mastery

The idea is simple, there are three main stages, the lawn, the pool and the roof, and these feature variations like fog, graves and 'special' zombies. These add a false layer of complexity into the game, essentially forcing you to use the new tools for the new level, your old towers become obsolete.

On the other hand, there is some thought here into increasing the difficulty of the game. Some plants are only useful against certain zombies while being less useful against the rest, as part of the gameplay mechanic, it uses up valuable slots on your lawn and forces a tactical decision. There are other typical strategic choices, offense vs defence, allocation of resources etc,all which comes in in the final Survival stage where all the plants and zombies come into play.

- Exploit free, Loot Theory

Generally, the economy in PvZ is well balanced, you can always get what you need by playing a couple of levels, but never to the point of needless grinding. A cool feature has your happy plants in the Zen Garden pop out coins, a snail you can buy will collect dropped coins automatically, however it falls asleep after an hour or so to prevent people from leaving the game on while they go outside. The number of unlockables are pretty satisfactory, upgrades, plants to fill your entire gardens with and a tree of wisdom that gives advice and unlock costumes. Hardcore players might want to grow their tree to incredible heights, spending a huge amount of time to get the final costume cheat codes. A small complaint is that certain plants tend to drop rarely, which I suppose encourages people to play more.

- Art Style, Theme and music

The theme of gardening, plants and zombies are integrated very well throughout the game, your crazy neighbour in the time of crisis charges exorbitant prices for plants and fertilizer. References to zombie movies are well done, zombies love to eat brains, they chant "braains" every now and then, when you lose a level, a 50's style game over message shows up "The Zombies have eaten your Brains". The menu itself is a grave with flowers on it with the interface worked into it. The music is catchy without being too intrusive, kinda like enjoyable muzak, simple tunes that matches the rhythm of the game.


The plants posses different expressions suited to their class, a Sunflower or Marigold will smile while a the fiercer of your peashooters have a helmet and a angry expression. Your Wall types will have a resiliant expression before shedding tears as a indicator of low hp.

The zombies come in all shapes and sizes, from the typical suit wearing to a simple variation of cone head and bucket heads to indicate different hp. Special zombies include the digger, the pole vaulter, the 'zombini' driver and a huge one that carries signposts or other zombies as weapons. The unlockables add mustaches or silly glasses to them for comic effect.

All in all, Plants vs Zombie is one of the best designed game that I've seen in a long time, it appears to appeal to all demographics from the casual to the hardcore. It takes a simple concept, adds enough variation on it to increase tactical choices and adds tons of casual addictive gameplay on the side. People will be playing this for a long time to come.

Further Thoughts
PvZ was apparently made by only 3 people, a programmer, an artist and a musician with a support staff of course. Does that mean I need programming or art skills to enter the industry?

Introduction

Hi to anyone who happened across this blog, I'm an aspiring game designer/writer and the purpose of this blog is to chronicle my journey towards getting a job in the videogame industry and beyond. A few basic things I'd like to do here.

- Review games critically from a design perspective
- Write plots/scripts to improve my writing skills
- Make a demo reel/game good enough for my Resume