inFamous Static Cling

In having finally finished inFamous I feel the need to rant about one more aspect of the game; Cole's inFamous case of static cling.   First however, I feel like I've only been conveying bad things about inFamous after my last entry which went after its broken morality system.   So I just want to say it's a good game, it lasts a lot longer that Prototype and not in an unnecessary manner, as well it has a flushed out story with well done cut scenes.   As far as sandbox games go it keeps you focused and makes the side missions accessible and even fun.

However.   Apparently being electric has its down sides, and not one which can easily be solved with drier sheets, or perhaps there are no more drier sheets in this post apocalyptic playground!    Cole has an annoying tendency to stick to everything and I really do mean everything.   Cole doesn't have super jumping powers so he has to scale buildings, telephone poles, train support beams etc to get around.   The problem is for him to scale buildings there have to be realistic things for him to grab onto and climb on and there are almost too many: pipes, floor ledges, intermediate ledges, window ceils, window tops, pillars, grates and random little knobs I'm sure were installed just for him.

This is super useful when you're trying to get up a building but almost infuriating when you're trying to get down, which it turns out is kind of necessary from time to time.   It's even worse if you are even slightly near something when you're free falling.   Your awesome static cling ability kicks in automatically and you get sucked onto anything you can possibly grab onto!   A case in point.

The blue thing below is a blast shard, basically if you collect enough you can hold more power which means you can do more power moves before recharging.   I think there's about 350 in the game.   Now in this case Cole is climbing up and it's easy enough to get, but if you're on the top of the building coming down, you'll grab onto every damn thing along the way.  In this case I think you end up having to 'drop down' 3-4 times, and this is one of the easier ones to get to.

This really isn't that bad though, you hit the drop button a couple times and you're there.  I also discovered a bit too late that if you hold the drop button you don't grab on to thing, though I found that kind of annoying to use also.

Let's address the next situation though!   In this case the shard is hanging over the edge of the pier.  No worries, we'll just walk up to the edge and drop off, only in this case this is as close to the edge as you can actually walk!   I imagine this has to be a bug, but damn if it isn't annoying.  So here you do a jump and just nudge yourself to the edge to find that Cole now won't just hop off and grab the edge, you have to push against the edge and hit the drop down button, only in a lot of cases it actually will not let you in these situations.  I can only imagine this is the games false sense of helping you out.

So now what we do is jump and nudge ourselves off the edge a tad near the shard and hope we grab the edge.  And we do! but the edge we end up grabbing is somehow of that white pillar.  Say what?   So yeah, we jump off that, nudge ourselves a little further away and end up just falling in the water. :(

This wouldn't be so bad except for the part where water kills Cole.   Thankfully not too many shards are in this kind of annoying predicament, but it is very frustrating to simply have to give up as dying ends up reviving you at a whole different part of the map.

In Conclusion: In a sequel I would highly recommend Sucker Punch ( a local company in Bellevue! ) to revisit this as an area to polish.   Additionally, towards the end of the game I often found myself walking through some of the more oddly shaped environment pieces and in the above example I think the engine thought I was at the edge already.   I realize these things aren't easy to do, but sometimes not making the user deal with the worse of these situations (shards which involve jumping around right above water) is the better move.

Water Really?

I have quite a problem with water killing Cole too.  I think you could argue that the water is draining Cole of his electricity and he needs it to survive except this isn't stated or reinforced anywhere else.   When his body is in the water it never stops sparking electricity, and he doesn't die if he grabs his own head or ties his shoe so it's not a completed circuit thing.   When you exhaust all of Cole's electricity he doesn't start dying he just can't use his power, and when he's being shot being full of power doesn't help you live any longer.    Further more, if anything it's electricity in water which kills other things ( which it does in the game )

But whatever :)

p.s. It is theoretically possible I mostly wrote this just for the title.