inFamous Demo - Initial Impressions

God, why hath thou forsaken me? Why did you not grant me the common good dose of self constraint you bestowed on everyone else? Why instead do I have this streak of sneaky bastage that runs through me? (Ok...enough of the blasphemy...) Yesterday, while I was out cancelling the pre-order for Batman: Arkham Asylum, I ran into Best Buy to double up my pre-order for inFamous. Why...when I already have the pre-order in at GameStop for the exclusive Gigawatt Blades power and can use up some stockpiled gift cards? Well duh...for the early demo access! For the uninformed, pre-orders via Best Buy or Game Crazy include access to the demo as of last night, rather than waiting until 5/21 like the rest of the general public. Soo...the ultimate question to be answered is - was it worth it? After an hour tinkering with the demo, I can say with absolute certainty that it was!

The demo weighs in at a little over a gig, and after a quick install you are off and going. While the game was loading, I was trying to contain any excitement due to the lackluster demos of the recent past...I'm looking at you Killzone 2. I won't lie - I'm not overly impressed by 3 minute demos that are nothing more than the intro cinematics and an initial part of the tutorial. I want to see a game for what it is at its best. That's how you sell me on a game. Well, I'm glad to say inFamous delivers. I won't go into any real detail, but you are treated to 4 missions plus the ability to free roam, which took me about an hour to get used to the controls and finish up. Length of demo - thumbs up!

So how is the game play? It's good. It's really good. The game has a feel like GTA IV, Crackdown, and Assassin's Creed were throw into a Cuisinart and put on puree. It has the same open world look of the first, mixed with Chuck Norris-esque kickass feeling of the second, and the monkey-imbued climbing of the third. Why the protagonist can shimmy up a light pole or up a building face I don't know...all I know is it's cool. You're treated to a handful of different powers in the demo, including the standard lightning bolts from the palms, to an electric grenade, to a force push that can send full sized sedans flying into the crowds. You can even call down a lightning storm on your location, lighting up anything and everything in your general area. Yeah...it's intense! But while your contact girlfriend calls you a superhero, you're not Superman by any stretch of the imagination. Even playing on the Easy setting, it doesn't take too many bullets from the enemies to get your screen to fade to grey, and for you to fall to the ground dead. I can only guess that at the harder settings, the game could be quite challenging. Gameplay - thumbs up!

How are the graphics? Well, I'm on an old CRT RPTV that isn't capable of 720p, so I'm stuck with 480p and the game still looked very nice. You won't get jaw dropping awesome like we did with Killzone 2, but for an open world sandbox game the graphics are perfectly adequate. The world has a gritty, gone-to-hell feel to it. I didn't listen to what back-story the demo offered up, but you can assume something bad happened - war, famine, disease - something to drive the city into hell. Cars are wrecked everywhere, trash is floating on the wind, store fronts are boarded up. You get the idea - this isn't your holiday destination. But it does set the stage for a place a hero can have plenty to do (or a villain for that matter, depending on how you play your cards). Graphics - thumbs up!

I'll be putting in some more time with the demo over the next few days (I'm out in Lisbon next week for business...oh the agony ) but will update anything else that I gleam from it between now and when the demo goes open to the masses. At the end of the day, the demo did it's job - not selling me on the game...I was already pre-ordered...but rather getting me even more excited about the 26th.