Thoughts on Infamous

Having finished Infamous twice now, once good and once evil, I have to say that I both love the game, and at the same time I'm disappointed by it.

It is a great game with great gameplay, an enjoyable story, and is a great experience for any gamer. However, my complaint comes from the moral choice system. I have already said in this post what my idea moral choice system for any modern superhero game would be, so I won't go into that.

Infamous's moral choice system makes the common mistake of "Good" or "Evil", no real middle ground involved. However the vast majority of the story ignored which choice you made. The only impact your goodness or evilness had was the power upgrades available (which, of course, is gameplay rather then story), a couple of brief mentions, how the public reacted to you, and one or two cutscenes. The entire rest of the game's story ignores the fact that you're either an asshole or a saint and reacts the same way. The only real story factor that is influenced by your good or evil nature is how your girlfriend reacts to you.

That to me was disappointing. I wanted to feel some kind of difference on my second play through, when the only appreciable change was there were more explosions, evil-side.

Building on the explosion factor and moving in a completely different direction for point 2: Something I found unusual is that the evil side had a genuinely easier time with the final boss fights. Indeed most things, with only one real weakness at all.

You see, the common theme among comparisons between good and evil characters is that good characters get little bonus' to health, healing, etc etc, and evil characters blow shit up. That is followed to the letter in Infamous, with the good upgrades all being about precision attacking and with every hit of your basic lightning bolt attack giving you more energy and health, and all the evil upgrades consisting of "Here is an explosion".

I'm not exaggerating, pretty much every evil power upgrade adds an explosion somehow, or makes a pre-existing explosion more likely to happen and stronger. Basically this means that evil characters do a great deal more damage at the cost of getting less energy and health. However seeing as Infamous takes place in a city chock-full of electricy and you can drain the stuff for health and energy, this really doesn't matter much. In fact, the only time the evil side is weaker then the good side is when there is no electricy to drain, which happens very rarely and usually is only so you feel threatened while getting from point A to point B, rather then actually fighting things.

When I fought the final boss as the good side, precision meant jack shit all since he was genuinely tougher then an armoured truck, and the health and energy boosts are rendered irrelevant by the excessive amount of energy drain power cables conveniently sticking out of the earth. So it took a few goes but I beat him.

Fighting the final boss with the evil side rolls around and suddenly the excessive amount of explosions are ridonkulously useful. In fact I got through the fight in a single go. And I don't attribute this to me being better the second time through, since I don't believe I had appreciatably improved since finishing the game the first time. Apparently being able to stick 7 miniature explosive electrical charges on someone's face was enough to slow them down appreciatably, as opposed to the good option, where I was able to precisely put a single explosive charge in their face, which made them scratch their nose but otherwise had little impact.

Long story short: There needs to be more difference between good and evil for it to really be a selling point for the game. And the game is too easy for evil people.