GDC: inFamous

There are no weapons in the game as such. Although the nice man doing the demo refers to "grenades" and "rocket launchers", it's really just different formations of energy bursts. But while inFamous might not look like a shooter, it feels like one to play; square for grenades, triangle for rockets, circle to take cover, L1 to target and right stick to move the camera... Familiar stuff.

You'll need to master it all the same to succeed at inFamous's boss battles. The first of those on show at GDC is set in an underground lair. It's home to a nutty lady called Sasha who has similar powers to your own. You realise she's bonkers as soon as you arrive, as there's some cheesy banter where she acts like you're late home for dinner: "Darling, what took you so long? I told you not to take the bridge, traffic's terrible..."

The lair is full of weird red neon light and there's black goo on the floor which drains your energy on contact, so you'll need to leap between the rocks littered about while Sasha fires bolts of energy at you. Victory involves pulling out the strange plug-like objects attached to her torso. Grabbing her cues a close-up animation where you can see Sasha's glowing red eyes and a dozen sharp scarlet tongues waggling out of her mouth. It's more comic book in tone than say, Prototype, with all its gory realism. As a result the effect is unnerving rather than horrifying.

The final level we got to play begins in the grounds of a prison and is extremely hard. You face off with a giant monster made out of trash, along with hordes of his minions. There's a constantly charged electrical grid you can stand on to keep your power meter topped up. All the same, it seems impossible to defeat the endless waves of enemies with just the grenade and rocket launcher moves to choose from. The nice demo man assures us there's still work to be done with regards to the difficulty level, and said 80 per cent of the QA team are also unable to finish this particular boss off. But he's probably just being nice.

inFamous isn't out for a few months yet so there's time to fiddle with the difficulty, and with some of the other elements that might need tweaking. The physics system, for example, could do with a bit more work. For the most part, objects explode, shatter, burn and scatter as you'd expect them to, but there are some inconsistencies. Firing a blast of energy at Zeke's table on the rooftop scattered all the objects except a carton of Chinese food, and firing another blast just made it vanish suddenly. The table and chairs exploded satisfyingly into pieces when firing directly at them, but again, the pieces just vanished.

In addition, the visual style seems inconsistent at some points. It's partly down to the over-the-top lighting, as seen in Sasha's lair. It suggests the design team has gone for a comic book look, but the high level of detail in the environments and the elements of gritty realism don't look so good under brightly coloured lighting. The cut-scenes, however, are highly impressive, perhaps because they feature stylised images that could be straight from the pages of a graphic novel and simple colour palettes.