Infamous First Light is a standalone expansion to Second Son, acting basically as a prelude for the side character Fetch. I havent played Second Son, immediatly drove into this one because I was looking forward to a short experience with a heavy discount, but I have played other Infamous games. This game has aged pretty badly, in a lot of ways, and it feels more like a PS3 game in terms of design than a proper PS4 title.
Visually the game looks really dark. I guess it was made to increase the contrast of the particle effects, but it gets to the point where I couldnt see enemies right in front of me. Animations are ok, though it feels a bit janky to climb structures normally , but the game really incentivizes to use the neon wave to speed up movement.
The story is highly predictable and you pretty much guess from the beginning what the outcome will be for Fetch's journey. Such is the case of a lot of prequel stories, but here in particular it never got me to care about any of these characters or factions. Its even worst because the game lacks cutscenes for the most part, and the interaction between characters is done though phone calls.
The game is set on a open world, filled with copy and pasted optional pickup upgrade points and race events, and some of the most banal mission design I have seen in a while. All missions could be boiled down to getting to a location and killing the enemies there. In some you are given a new power, others you get to snipe enemies, and some you rescue hostages, but its all very bland and repetitive. For such a short campaign, which only shows something different in the last act, the game gets really repetitive and a drag to play through.
What the game offers that is a bit better is its Arena mode, in which you must survive waves of increasingly difficult enemies and pursue high scores and challenges. I like the arcadey feel of this mode, not to mention that its the only place where it really allows the combat to shine. Unfortunatly, to really get the most out of the combat you need to get the upgrade points throughout the open world, which is a really dull task. This mode is not enough to really recommend the game.
The infamous series as a whole as never really lived up to its potential, and I think that this will be the last title of the series we will be seeing. At least its arena mode can offer some fun sesssions.
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I think I did Infamous: First Light a grave dis-service by playing it immediately after Saint's Row: Gat Out of Hell; as two open-world games where the protagonist has super-powers, the comparisons are inevitable, and First Light doesn't come off well when you make them. (This is also my first Infamous game, which I suspect contributes to this too.) It's hard not to notice that, for a character that can run at light speed and shoot neon fireballs out of her hands, Abigail Walker feels really under-powered; as a character for a plot, she's pretty good, but while playing as her you never quite get the feeling that you're particularly special or that you're doing anything all that impressive. The light running in particular feels almost too fluid, the world moving so smoothly that there's no real sense of speed to it, while outside of a few side-missions where you're forced to use them, there doesn't ever feel there's a huge advantage to using your powers as opposed to just fighting hand-to-hand.
Shame, because there's a lot of other things I enjoyed about the main story here. The map was the biggest reason I appreciated this - it's very small for open world standards, but that's definitely an advantage to somebody like me who usually feels overwhelmed by the sheer scale of open world games and even finds thinking about starting one daunting. More importantly, it's filled with detail and has collectibles literally everywhere, making it very hard to get bored at any point (the collectibles are used to level up your abilities too, so it's not as if they're only there for the sake of it - another occasional open world failing that this game dodges). So that's where I stood with this - a flawed game, but one that I felt could act as a blueprint for any future tight, concise open world games that captured the good bits of the genre without demanding 60 hours of the player's life to complete them.
At least, that's where I stood until I played the arena mode.
The arena mode opens up after you've finished all the main story quests in the game and acts to flesh out parts of the main story (Walker is regularly shown in conduit training in 'flash-forward' sections during the main game, and this is you playing through her training), but in reality it's a totally different game - pure combat, pure action, pure exhilaration. In a tightly-enclosed arena, enemies of various stripes are constantly generated and you just have to survive, fending them off any way you can. It's absolutely thrilling; towards the end of some of my runs through these stages, at around the 15-20 minute mark when the whole screen was just utter chaos, my heart was absolutely pounding. There's just one small problem - there's not even nearly enough of it. There are only three arenas, with two modes to play in each, the other one (a Rescue mode where you must collect civilians once you've defeated the enemies attacking them) not as fun. It looks like more arenas are unlocked if you have a save from Second Son on your machine, but I don't, so.
If this Arena mode was expanded out into a full game, I'd absolutely love it and would be recommending it to anybody within earshot. As far as sheer bloody-minded devotion to raw enjoyment goes, the only new games I've played over the past couple of years that match it are the 8-player online modes of Rocket League and #IDARB - it's just that you only get about 90 minutes of it before it starts to get repetitive. Shame.
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