inFamous: Festival of Blood

I finally finished playing through inFamous: Festival of Blood, the the download only entry into the inFamous franchise. The original game in the series was one of the first games that I played all the way through when I got my PS3. I had gotten it as part of Sony's forgive us promotion after their massive blackout last summer.

I was really impressed with the controls and the massive city that you got to play through. I often found myself killing a few minutes by simply running around the rooftops and searching for some of the games hidden items.

When I finished playing through the game I wanted more of Cole's antics but wasn't ready to buy the second game, so this seemed like a good fix. It used the same engine as inFamous 2 so I'd be able to see the evolution of the series as far as graphics and control which I was quite interested in.


One of the first things you notice when playing is that Cole starts pretty much fully powered up. Unlike some other game franchises (I'm looking at you, Metroid) there was no cheap plot point that robbed the protagonist of all of his abilities, only to force him collect them one by one. While this was a great way to get the player to be able to dive right into the game, it did leave the game feeling a little shallow. There's a couple small upgrades, but really you don't feel like you're progressing anything. The first inFamous had a nice system of upgrades available and I just missed it in this game.

Another thing it fell a little short on in comparison to the first game is the amount of hidden items. There are hidden jars of blood (I'll get to that later) hidden around the city for Cole to locate. The problem is that there aren't too many of them and after a certain point early in the game, they all appear on the map. So you can easily just spend a few minutes flying around the city to fully power up and then there's nothing left to hunt for.

Apart from that though, the game was fun. The story behind it is that Zeke (Cole's BFF) is trying to impress a girl at a bar and tells this story of how Cole got turned into a vampire by the evil Bloody Mary and had to find a way to kill her before sunset or be trapped as her slave forever. There's some nice moments where Cole has to struggle with his newly found desire for human blood to continue to use his new vampire based powers. The blood jars I mentioned earlier increase this limit.

The atmosphere of the city really helped with the story and the theme. The game takes place during a Halloween type festival so the streets are covered in bonfires and people dressed up as demons and bats. It was a nice touch to keep the player feeling the darkness around Cole.

While this wasn't the deepest or longest game in the world, I think it was a nice value for what it was. There's still some replay value as the game features user-generated content in the form of additional missions. I haven't tried any of these yet so I can't speak of the general quality of them, but I'm hoping there's some good ones out there.