As mentioned before, inFamous is an open world game, similar to Crackdown.  When I first began the demo, I did not expect the sheer amount of space that the demo offers.  Rather than confining the player to a small area, the game opens up a full island for you to play in.  Cole, the games protagonist, has about half of his powers available from the start.  You can wreak havoc using any number of powers.

Cole’s power is derived from electricity.  This means that you can simply go around to power transformers, street lights and even TV sets to drain the energy from them.  It’s oddly satisfying to pull all of the power from these things, as they each react.  Draining a TV will make the TV’s power fade out, but if you blast the electricity back into it, the TV will work again.  Most of the things you can drain do this, and it’s sometimes fun to simply see how they react to you draining them.  This, however, is not where the real fun of the demo comes in.  The real fun comes in using the abilities given in the huge open world.

Feel like blowing up a car?  Throw an electrical grenade at it and watch the chaos ensue.  Want to move fast?  Why not jump onto some subway rails and ride them.  Maybe you just want to destroy things.  Head over to the gas station, electrify the pumps and see what happens. These simple things are so much fun, that you quickly realize the sort of damage you will be able to do when you finally play the full game.

Another huge part of the fun of this demo is simply moving around in the environment.  Cole has the ability to climb almost any building.  Again, it’s simple fun, but trying to reach the top of a building is something that is oddly satisfying.  In addition, Cole has the ability to hover across large distances.  If you’re feeling a bit daring, you can hover from the top of a building to the side of moving subway car and then ride the subway to another point to jump to.  Yes, it is just as badass as it sounds.

Oddly, the downfall of the demo is its missions.  While they are fun, the demo doesn’t let you steer too far from the mission track.    After a set amount of time, the game forces you to the next mission by teleporting you to its starting point, regardless of where you are or what you're doing.  This will usually happen when Cole dies, as well.  They also serve to give you a sense of how the karma system will work in this game.

During the first and last mission of the game, Cole will be classified as a “Hero”.  This means that his attacks are less concentrated on pure aggression and more on taking enemies down non-lethally.  Using an electric grenade in this state will not necessarily kill them, but it will most likely chain them so that they can’t do any more damage.  However, when Cole is “Infamous”, his attacks will be much more aggressive.  Using an electric grenade in this state will cause the grenade to break apart into multiple, smaller grenades, which will likely kill anything near them.  Hopefully this concept will be expanded upon in the full game.

The demo, however, is not without flaws.  There were many jagged edges on different objects.  This was painfully noticeable when I destroyed one of the gas stations.  It seems to be an odd trade off, however, as the demo never once dropped its frame rate.  There were also times when it was hard to find enemies and on occasion I had some issues with the mini-map saying that there were enemies where there were none.  These, however, are small concerns in the overall picture of the demo.

If this demo is any indication of what the full game will be, then this is most likely to be one of the major selling points for Sony this year.  The flaws were few and far between and the demo gave off the feeling that there was some intense care put into creating this. While we will have to wait until May 26 to see how the full game shapes up, if you have any chance to play this demo, you should. This demo alone was some of the most fun I’ve had with my PS3, and that’s saying a lot.