inFamous

Living in Infamy: Choosing Good Versus Evil

By Jacob Moore

CBN Game Reviewer

September 16, 2009

Sucker Punch Studio's first foray away from a thieving raccoon leads them to Empire City.  Cole, the protagonist in inFamous, gets caught up in an explosion that devastates the city leaving him with electricity based super powers.  The game gets interesting from there because the world opens up and allows you to decide what kind of person Cole will become.  You can have him become the savior of the city and a hero in everyone’s eyes, or you can choose to live in infamy and be a tyrant and have people fear and hate you.

Which Path Will You Choose?

The decisions you make end up giving you good or bad karma which feeds into you becoming a hero or a villain.  It's an interesting concept for an open world hero game, but as Christians the moral choices in the game are obvious ones that people should make and the immoral ones you can chose to make at times are upsetting.

Sucker Punch took an interesting approach to the hero path. They made it much more difficult to make the moral decisions than the infamous ones.  For example in your first chance to make a decision you have to help the people of the city get food. 

Once you get to the crate with the food you have a decision to make. You can shoot it down so everyone has a chance to get some, or you can keep it and not share it with the rest of the people.  If you choose the right thing to do and share the food with everyone you gain positive karma and the people see you as a good person.  But then televisions begin to broadcast that you are the reason for the blast and the people turn on you throwing rocks and anything else they can find.  

This is where you really have to make your decision do you blast your way to freedom leaving a wake of injured civilians or do you run for safety leaving the civilians unharmed?

A Dangerous Breed

inFamous is a game full of interesting concepts of cause and effect. 

The parallels to life are very intriguing but this game leans a lot more to the Mature (M) rating than the Teen (T) rating that it has.  

There is a lot of foul language that younger gamers, but especially Christians, shouldn't willingly seek out.  As you take damage blood begins to fill the screen to let you know that you are dying and need to find an electrical outlet to drain energy from the cities grid to heal yourself.  One of the female bosses in the game is dressed in  next to nothing and is a bit to risque for the games rating.  

Ultimately inFamous should be on your watch list for parents and older players should use their discretion.