Infamous: Festival of Blood

Instead of picking up where the previous game left off, standalone DLC Infamous: Festival of Blood starts with a pick up line. The game begins with the lightning-shooting superhero Cole McGrath's longtime best buddy and sidekick, Zeke, hitting on a girl in a bar. In an attempt to woo her he begins telling a tale about himself and Cole taking on a legion of vampires, led by the cruel and ruthless queen, Bloody Mary. Setting the game inside a cheesy, probably fictional come-on works pretty well - the vampiric goofiness that follows doesn’t really need to make sense or fit into the Infamous plot anywhere, and it allows Zeke to narrate.

This time around you’re confined to a single island of New Marais, but it's had a visual makeover, with demonic balloons, fireworks and costumed festival goers drunkenly wandering the streets.

Combat is largely unchanged from Infamous 2 - you still blast bad guys with electrical shocks from your hands, and slam them in the face with a charged-up melee weapon. The main changes are the new vampire abilities, which are few but powerful. At the start of the game you have access to a few of Cole’s classic powers such as electric grenades and rockets, although you won’t be carrying over any unlocked abilities from Infamous 2 saved games (you can upgrade several of your abilities by completing specific tasks, however).

Early in the game you acquire the ability to transform into a swarm of bats. This allows for quick travel around the city and can be upgraded to a powerful one-hit kill attack, at the cost of draining your new ‘blood meter’. Vampire Vision works a lot like the ability in Infamous 2 to detect conduits. In Festival of Blood, it is used to detect disguised vampires and find vials of blood which increase the amount of time you can stay airborne in bat-mode. You can also drain civilians of their blood for health and a blood meter boost, and since the morality meter of the previous games is gone, there’s no penalty for stopping mid-battle to snack on a tasty human morsel.

Although the new powers are few, they do change up the game considerably. You’ll do most of your travelling through the skies of New Marais instead of sliding around on powerlines. Plus, rushing between enemies in bat form, only stopping to suck the blood from innocent bystanders, is a lot of fun.

The main thing that lets down Festival of Blood is that it’s very easy to run out of things to do. Between Vampire Vision and the ability to fly, you can easily find all the collectibles in the game within half an hour or so, and the campaign is only three or four hours long. There is a mission editor in the game which allows you to create and share your own missions, and even campaigns, complete with comic book-style story panels, but at the time of writing the majority of user-made missions available are a little lacklustre. It’s early days, however, and there's potential for some great fan made levels. As it stands, Infamous: Festival of Blood is very much like Halloween - a lot of fun, but you’ll be done with it after a night.

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