InFamous: Festival of Blood PS3 Review

Publisher – Sony Computer Entertainment Europe – Developer – Sucker Punch – Genre – Action – Players – 1 – Age Rating – 16+ – Other console/handheld formats – N/A

Gaming spin-offs are far too rare in my opinion. After spending years producing all these assets, glorious worlds, and titles that we all adore to tinker around with, why not maximize the cash coming in by giving us a few spin-offs from time to time? GTA IV did it brilliantly. Red Dead Redemption succeeded too. But why haven’t we had an additional tale from the Mass Effect universe yet?

Obviously Sony took note of my vague ponderings by bringing us this short dip into the InFamous world. As a standalone download only title priced at just a fraction of the price of the full InFamous 2 experience, Festival Of Blood is enticing to both fans and potential newcomers to the series.

As it doesn’t require the full InFamous 2 game to actually work, it’s a cost effective leap into the series for those uneager to splash out for a full-price title that they might not be too enthralled by. Considering it contains the same production values as it’s full-priced brother – though obviously with a much smaller time to complete – it’s an excellent way to either get your first glimpse of the InFamous world, or an additional bit of bonus content for long time fans.

Playing as the same old protagonist Cole McGrath, you find yourself taken hostage and bitten by a vampire queen. With only 8 hours until you fall completely under her control, you’re tasked with driving a stake through her evil dark heart to free yourself of her clutches, and the vampire curse flooding your body. It’s a campy tale, and one that is pretty well judged for a crazy kind of spin-off like this.

Obviously, this vampirism inflicted Cole has quite a few new powers to offer outside his usual electricity wielding skills.  The best – and most useful – of which allows you to swiftly travel through the air as a flock of bats, rushing across the city to new objectives in epically quick time. His electricity based bits and pieces remain fully intact, allowing you to swiftly frazzle enemies, use lighting to boost you back to full health, and toss electric based grenades. In Festival of Blood, Cole is one powerful chap.

All the good versus evil stuff from the main series has been removed, streamlining the experience and allowing you to get on with the task you’ve been set. Standing at little more than a couple of the hours for the standard single-player campaign, you’re probably just about getting your monies worth. But there are no worries about accidentally frying the odd member of the general public here, with absolutely nothing affecting how the world perceives this new Cole.

The new enemies are varied enough to require different methods in order to dispatch them from the world, but none particularly stand out as overly creative or exciting. That’s not say they’re poor by any stretch of the imagination, but they never raise much above the usual cannon fodder you’d find in any video game out there.

As it’s using a lot of the assets from the second InFamous title, this remains on of the better looking PS3 titles out there. Although it’ll not wow anyone in this post Battlefield 3 world, it’s not only a fairly large playing area, but also one that’s crammed with detail and things to blow up and destroy. The perpetual dark helps create an atmosphere that fits perfectly for Festival of Blood too.

If you’ve any real interest in the series, then you owe it to Infamous: Festival of Blood to at least give it a go. While it doesn’t attempt to reinvent the wheel, it provides a brief tale that will keep you hooked for its few hours’ worth of gaming pleasure. And while it won’t help turn the heads of those who despised the main games in the series, anyone with any interest will find plenty of exciting gaming thrills to make it worth their while.

8/10