inFAMOUS for PlayStation 3 Demo Impressions

As demos go, Sucker Punch's PS3-exclusive inFAMOUS feels a little short, but awfully promising. It propels you -- an electricity-spitting semi-clueless super-dude -- off a rooftop and through an urban debris field toward a dusk-lit public square, up a tower of sorts, then down again to do battle with a gang of gun-toting, mask-sporting bad guys in red hoodies. Along the way you'll charge batteries, watch cartoons, demolish mannequins, leap from tall buildings, spray electricity like a busted transformer, lob vehicles like Hot Wheels racers, and listen to your redneck pal Zeke describe pizza with the intensity of someone eyeballing everything but the staples in an adult magazine.

Grand Theft Superhero? Maybe. It's hard to tell scanning around the map, since you're only allowed to explore a slice of it here, but I'd estimate you'll eventually have free run of roughly half Liberty City's breadth. Also, while you can ostensibly go anywhere in the full game, its fictional three-island "open" city setting still has a few conventional lids screwed tight. You can scale buildings, but not punch through flimsy paneling or storefront glass and crawl around the rooms inside. Battered junk litters the streets but only a fraction of it's interactive -- no smashing crates or kicking cans or punching holes through the sides of abandoned semi-trailers. Sure, that stuff doesn't really matter once the story kicks in, but while you're testing the length of your leash, you'll find it quicker than you might have been hoping.

The upside? Getting vertical in this game's a breeze. In Grand Theft Auto IV, you tripped with vehicles from point to point. Here you use buildings, and by use, I really mean scale, leap, and lunge. You don't enter into, you scurry over, or leap between, rooftop to girded lattice to crumbling rooftop. Someone at Sucker Punch obviously knows their Assassin's Creed. Per the latter, what goes down must come up, by way of grips, grabs, nooks, crannies, ledges, rails, and other sundry protuberances. You're visually less Altair, more scrawny urban David Beckham, but if you did time exploring Jerusalem, Acre, and Damascus, digital muscle-memory kicks in and jogs your sense of "been there, can't wait to do that again." Most notable difference? Instead of climbing surfaces mostly at parallel angles, you'll follow the shape of a given thing, whether straight or crooked, part of a rigid superstructure, or wagging like a power line in the wind.

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As demos go, Sucker Punch's PS3-exclusive inFAMOUS feels a little short, but awfully promising. It propels you -- an electricity-spitting semi-clueless super-dude -- off a rooftop and through an urban debris field toward a dusk-lit public square, up a tower of sorts, then down again to do battle with a gang of gun-toting, mask-sporting bad guys in red hoodies. Along the way you'll charge batteries, watch cartoons, demolish mannequins, leap from tall buildings, spray electricity like a busted transformer, lob vehicles like Hot Wheels racers, and listen to your redneck pal Zeke describe pizza with the intensity of someone eyeballing everything but the staples in an adult magazine.

Grand Theft Superhero? Maybe. It's hard to tell scanning around the map, since you're only allowed to explore a slice of it here, but I'd estimate you'll eventually have free run of roughly half Liberty City's breadth. Also, while you can ostensibly go anywhere in the full game, its fictional three-island "open" city setting still has a few conventional lids screwed tight. You can scale buildings, but not punch through flimsy paneling or storefront glass and crawl around the rooms inside. Battered junk litters the streets but only a fraction of it's interactive -- no smashing crates or kicking cans or punching holes through the sides of abandoned semi-trailers. Sure, that stuff doesn't really matter once the story kicks in, but while you're testing the length of your leash, you'll find it quicker than you might have been hoping.

The upside? Getting vertical in this game's a breeze. In Grand Theft Auto IV, you tripped with vehicles from point to point. Here you use buildings, and by use, I really mean scale, leap, and lunge. You don't enter into, you scurry over, or leap between, rooftop to girded lattice to crumbling rooftop. Someone at Sucker Punch obviously knows their Assassin's Creed. Per the latter, what goes down must come up, by way of grips, grabs, nooks, crannies, ledges, rails, and other sundry protuberances. You're visually less Altair, more scrawny urban David Beckham, but if you did time exploring Jerusalem, Acre, and Damascus, digital muscle-memory kicks in and jogs your sense of "been there, can't wait to do that again." Most notable difference? Instead of climbing surfaces mostly at parallel angles, you'll follow the shape of a given thing, whether straight or crooked, part of a rigid superstructure, or wagging like a power line in the wind.

As for weaponry, that's all derivative of you. Literally. Okay, so the part where Cole's electric powers cook guns, not his clothes, and he can't ride in cars (he'll purportedly blow 'em up) but he can surf on their hoods no problem-o may be silly-science. Hey, at least it's an attempt at an explanation, and more than we'd get from most. Oh yeah, he can lunge off structures without fear of pancaking. How that has anything to do with electricity beats me, but it's still pretty cool.

You can charge up stuff by zapping it, which means you'll probably have to at various points as a puzzle tactic. You aim with L1, which slides the camera down just over your left or right shoulder and pops a circular crosshairs up. R1 fires quick blasts that don't deplete your underlying power store, while X emits more powerful vortices of energy that do. You can recharge at power boxes and light poles (and pretty much anything with a battery or electrically powered) distributed around the city.

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