Game Play: inFamous (...and boss fights in general)

I'm not going to spend a lot of time about the virtues of inFamous - the game has gotten a decent amount of coverage since its initial release and largely lives up to the hype. The open world is well constructed and imaginative, Sucker Punch really nails the postmodern urban comic book thing. At the core of the game: blowing stuff up is a great deal of fun - chaining attacks against enemies and environment alike is engaging (though I would love to see a truly destructible environment in a game of this style).

For the core mechanics, I only have two real complaints: repetition and intelligence. Most of the missions devolve into run, run, run or blast, blast, blast ... or sometimes run, blast, run ... or - well, you get the impression. This is why the fact that Sucker Punch made both the running (be it the parkour style climbing or skate style "grinding") and blasting so much fun is critical. Intelligence wise - well, the AI is not exactly Einstein ... rather the game seems to really on every enemy having really, really, really good eyesight. You'll constantly get sniped from enemies from afar - which can be fairly annoying early in the game when your powers are limited in scope and you're trying to snipe back.

Which, allow me to nominate the floating cloaking grenade-launching robots later in the game as some of the most annoying enemies devised - they aren't particularly tough, they just buzz (literally, the noise is irritating as hell). And so glad they decided to show for the final boss fight.

And that final boss fight. I'll keep this spoiler free, but the final boss fight is representative of everything I hate about boss fights. Most of the game and missions are well designed, but the final fight goes right to every cliche every put out there: the boss is largely invincible except for a random period of time you need to keep an eye out for - all the while you'll be running back and forth avoiding a relatively random array of attacks.

The reason why the final fight was such a downer for me is this: for a game that was all about revealing the escalation of a simple bike messenger to city superhero the final fight made me feel pointless and weak. Pointless because it was quite obvious that the final boss could tear me apart in an instant if it really tried and weak because all I could do was run around a lot and wait to throw off a few shock grenades ... and then repeat.

And then repeat.

And then repeat.

And then repeat.

At some point - can't we just skip to the end? I can't count how many games have built up layers of anticipation only to have the end scene be the result of some kind of old school slugfest followed by a cinematic. Gaming evolution has given us emergent gameplay, open worlds, freedom from counting down player lives or even keep track of the score - but in many ways we're still stuck with the bonus level notion that everything should be capped with a button mashing showdown.

So that's kinda more of rant about games in general, of course. The other good bit about inFamous? A pretty decent story handled well by the comic style cutscenes. OK, I still have questions and general huh's about the ending in general, but at least it kept things interesting.

One last note: I think it is curious that inFamous, Assassin's Creed II and Uncharted 2 all have very similar core mechanics: parkour style movement, third person action, emphasis on unlocks and exploration. Yet UC2 is not an open world setup and, no offense to other two - I think easily the best of the bunch. Homework question: what exactly does an open world give players?

Anyway, if you haven't played it - you probably should. And it just recently hit Greatest Hits for the PS3 - so you can get it cheap.