inFAMOUS First Light

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.