inFamous

The open-world exploration I did was a little forced, though, and the city itself somewhat empty, since I was deviating from instanced missions and the game's world wasn't available in its natural, open state. The detail packed into the city and your freedom to climb across any of it is impressive, although its relentlessly grim and broken state seemed a bit oppressive and not all that inviting. Nonetheless, properly cutting loose with Cole in Empire's "playground of destruction", as Fox puts it, is undoubtedly the most exciting prospect in inFamous.

The four missions presented were a good spread of the kind of action you can expect from inFamous. In the first, the game's mysterious villains - cloaked and hooded and kind of mechanical, like cyborg wraiths, but bearing very real firearms - are polluting water towers with tar, and Cole's feisty paramedic ex-girlfriends tasks him with tracking down their devices. This was slower-paced exploration and platforming with pockets of combat, and moral choices to be made when choosing how to deal with the citizens and the threat of the tar.

Another had Cole apparently siding with some of the hooded characters - in white cloaks this time, and with teleport powers - in an unexplained attack on a police station. This was a fast platforming run followed by intense combat. Cole's combat powers are all electrical, but blend standard "shooting" and "grenades" with shields and a very satisfying "force push" which, on rooftops, often offers the quickest kills. Melee doesn't seem that useful, it's mostly a ranged combat game. Once he has the appropriate power, you can zoom in with up on the d-pad for a high-power, sniper-style focus kill, which is somewhat slow and fiddly to execute.

The third level was a boss fight on a ruined bridge. It's dramatically staged, with Cole picking off enemies and leaping from girder to girder as the bridge groans, cracks and collapses underneath him, and eventually facing off against a giant monster that seems to be made of scrap metal. It's pure Zelda stuff, Cole using his force-push power to return chunks of debris hurled at him by the monster and landing attacks during openings. It's also, like much of the game we've played, quite tough.

The final had Cole and his comedy sidekick Zeke - a conspiracy theorist, Elvis fan and willing support with a revolver - ascending Transient Tower, a giant spire looming over Empire that's assembled from scrap. This was vertiginous vertical platforming (I should probably be using that "traversal" word instead) with occasional combat.

Cole would have to use his powers to electrify generators to get the elevator working so Zeke could follow, and the summit of the tower presented an enjoyable, arena-style skirmish with waves of enemies - mechanical spiders, snipers and rocket-launching thugs, and finally a giant robot. Visually it was exciting, as the ascent provided breathtaking views over a smoky, sunset Empire, but returning to checkpoints when you fall is an old-school trial-and-error platform-game dynamic that feels at odds with inFamous's open-world style. Does it prevent frustration or create it? It's hard to say.

Although it's finished and so close to release, it's still hard to get a feel for inFamous, because it's hard to satisfactorily demo any open-world game; the missions played well but felt out-of-context because, well, they were. Context is everything, and inFamous will stand or fall on the character and atmosphere of Empire City and its troubled inhabitants.

That being the case, it can only be encouraging that Fox and Sucker Punch are so keenly aware of context, so plugged in to the city on their monitors and the city outside their windows. If they get it right, inFamous will be an awesome riot.