By Review Date: November 29, 2011 Given the video game industry's growing fascination with digitally distributed content, it's a wonder we don't see more developers attempt to create separate, standalone installments for popular franchises. It's basically a more reliable form of downloadable content, since you wouldn't have to limit your customer base to those who own the original game.

Infamous: Festival of Blood from Sucker Punch experiments with that idea, delivering a brief, enjoyable standalone adventure on the cheap.Festival of Blood revolves around the city of New Marris being suddenly invaded by vampires. It all begins on a city even known as Pyre Night, New Marris' way of celebrating Halloween. The streets are alive with parades and bonfires all across the city, giving the place a darker, spookier tone.

Firstborns are large bat-like Vampires that appear in Infamous: Festival of Blood. Firstborns are seemingly ancient Vampires who were sealed away in the catacombs where Bloody Mary's body was kept. After Bloody Mary was revived, they were released to help her create havoc in New Marais.

Unbeknownst to the town's citizens, however, are the sinister events taking place underground.While making a run through the Church's underground after hearing about an accident that took place there, electric-powered superhero Cole MacGrath encounters something way unexpected: vampires. He's captured, the vampires planning to use his blood (it contains special properties being a conduit - that is, one capable of obtaining superpowers - and all) to revive their leader, Bloody Mary.

Upon awakening, she bits Cole and turns him into a vampire. Not being enthusiastic about the idea of becoming a blood-sucker, he has only one night to defeat Bloody Mary to free himself from her grasp, for if he doesn't kill her by sunrise, he'll forever be under her control.The tale is narrated by Cole's close friend Zeke. The set-up is that Zeke's trying to pick up a lady at the bar, and so he spins a yarn about Pyre night to grab her attention. It's a brief story, the main mission line clocking in at 3-4 hours, but an entertaining one nonetheless. It ends almost as quickly as it begins, steadily moving from the introduction to the conclusion with haste, especially if you only play the story missions and all but ignore the side-content. One moment Cole will be coming to gripes with his new-found vampirism, the next heading off to confront ol' Mary.At $10, you'll likely want your money's worth, so indulging in the side-content becomes more than a worthwhile pursuit.

There are no side-missions to take on (though the user-generated missions open up once you've beaten the game), so you're left only with scavenger hunts to partake in. Jars of blood to smash and glyphs containing back-story on Mary to find are what's available.

Neither are terribly engaging without anything to break up the monotony of searching, but the rewards make at least give them value.Mary's Teachings, as the glyphs are known, are the better of the two by far. Unlocked after harnessing Cole's new vampire senses (think 'detective vision' but more supernatural), these messages left by Mary explore her past exploits and flesh out her character slightly. Not in a way that makes her a better character, mind you (she always retains that 'evil person doing evil things for the sake of evil' shtick), but enough to keep her from being yet another faceless, throwaway villain.Canopic jars carry a more gameplay oriented use. You see, now that Cole's a vampire, he's obtained a few new abilities. Chief among them is the ability to transform into a pack of bats and fly. Using this ability, however, requires blood.

And to get blood, you have to feed on humans (or stake fellow vampires, but more on that later). The karma system's been done away with here, so there isn't anything stopping you from feeding, apart from you're own moral stance, of course. What the jars do is increase your blood meter, located in the upper-right part of the screen. You're required to break a certain number of them before you receive any upgrades, which serves as ample motivation to seek them out, if only to be able to fly about for longer than a couple of seconds.Flight is easily one of the best parts of this game. Though Infamous was already adept at making traversal a breeze and actually fun, the ability of flight is a huge boon.

Festival of Blood delivers one whole half of New Marris to explore. With all the tall buildings it harbors, having a quick and easy way of scaling the cityscape makes getting around a lot easier than simply climbing by hand would.

It still has its uses, granted, and for the majority of the game you'll still be relying on his own athletic prowess to get around, but once you get that blood meter maxed out, there's very little use in climbing around the old fashioned way.Combat remains the same as ever. Cole primarily throws bolts of lightning to attack, though he can also create grenades and rockets. Ranged combat has always been Infamous' bread and butter, the gameplay resembling that of a third-person shooter complete with a cover system. Your adversaries stick to ranged combat as well, the blood-suckers wielding crossbows and automatic handguns, making them hardly anymore menacing than the militia from Infamous 2 proper. About the only difference between the two is that these guys love to teleport about the environment, often hanging from the sides of buildings or other high spots, which tends to complicate things a bit and generally annoy.

For the most part, fighting them is easy. You already start the game with almost all of Cole's powers, albeit without any of the upgrades applied. (You have to earn those by completing certain conditions, like taking down a specified number of vampire packs.) Thus, you can easily take down a pack of vampires by launching a few rockets their way before they have time to react to defeat them, or at least knock them over so that you can stake them.Ah, that's another thing: In place of his 'amp' from Infamous 2, Cole's picked up a large wooden stake to use as his melee weapon of choice.

Staking foes is the only way to truly kill them, as pumping them full of electricity only disables them. They won't get back up if you pummel them enough, but they won't actually be defeated until you stab them.

Given the focus on ranged combat, however, having to run up and stab enemies to kill them can be a hassle sometimes. In particular, when dealing with the large, bat-like monstrosities known as 'firstborns,' whom already take quite a while to vanquish, having to stake them before they recover just unnecessarily prolongs already long struggles. The same problem existed with Infamous 2 and its own mini-bosses of sorts like that, and the same still rings true here.Still, as a $10 download, those annoyances are easily tolerated. If you've been starving for more Infamous, then Festival of Blood will more than satisfy. It's a fun retread, and a good entry point for anyone looking to give the series a shot.

I started and finished the Infamous vampire-themed DLC today, and was surprised by how much my opinion about it has changed since this morning. Going in, I was skeptical. It’s a non-canon side-story, it doesn’t use your Infamous 2 save data, and you don’t have access to Cole’s full range of abilities. That may sound damning, but now that I’ve completed Festival of Blood, I can say that it is among the best post-release additions to a game I’ve ever seen.What makes it so great? It all comes down to the fact that the team at Sucker Punch used this DLC as an opportunity to experiment and go off the rails rather than just give gamers more of the same missions found in Infamous 2.

In fact, you don’t even need to own Infamous 2 to play Festival of Blood; it’s a standalone game available for $9.99 on PSN.The story focuses on Cole transformed into a vampire by a legendary figure named Bloody Mary on Pyre Night (a New Marais-specific holiday that combines Halloween and Mardi Gras). You can get an idea what to expect by watching the, but I won’t spoil the sparse plot by giving away its few developments. I will say this: A dude with an awesome mustache is involved.Despite dealing with blood-sucking undead, the narrative is lighthearted. Since the events of Festival of Blood aren’t actually occurring within the Infamous fiction (it’s more of a story-within-a-story), it frees Sucker Punch from having to worry about whether something fits with the Infamous mythos. It doesn’t go totally bonkers, but the what-if scenario means that you can just say, “Yeah, okay.

Vampires exist,” and roll with the punches.Once he becomes a vampire, new horizons open up for Cole. Deviating from Cole’s normal abilities is initially what made me question Festival of Blood’s approach, but you gain more than you lose.

By sacrificing your full arsenal (you can’t even manually upgrade your powers), you get access to new vampire-themed abilities. The highlight is called shadow swarm, and it allows Cole to transform into a wisp of smoke and fly through the world.If you’re an Infamous fan, you know this is a huge development for the series. Cole has been able to glide and grind before, but actually flying from rooftop to rooftop feels like a perfect and natural progression of his abilities. It controls well and saves you the headache of having to scale up the sides of tall buildings if you miss a jump or get knocked of a roof. Given how well this is implemented, I can’t help but hope that Sucker Punch is testing the waters in this side-story to see how flight might work in the next full-fledged installment of Infamous.Because it isn’t a part of his electrical powers, shadow swarm doesn’t use the same source of energy. Your grenades and rockets still drain electrical nodes, but flight runs off of a blood meter that you need to keep charged by sucking blood from civilians. “But wait,” you may be saying.

“That sounds evil! What if I’m the good version of Cole?” Short answer: You’re not good. The blood meter replaces the morality meter in Festival of Blood, so you won’t be making any decisions.Even with these changes, the basic missions follow the familiar template. You kill a bunch of bad guys and disable some thingamajigs, but you’re not doing much repetition within Festival of Blood. Thankfully, the enemies are new, and they have some tricks that regular Infamous 2 thugs don’t. Most of them can teleport around like Cole, some can hang on the walls, and others will jump on Cole’s back.

Your ability to fly, use your vampire senses, and swing a cool new melee weapon make these encounters even better. The only disappointing fight is the final one, which is your standard “hold off waves of enemies while Zeke does something” affair.Festival of Blood integrates Move support. The less said about this the betterbut here are a few sentences: The only motion-based functionality is aiming and rotating the camera, which works terribly in combat. If you’ve already played an Infamous game, you will not want to use Move controls.

Strike force heroes 2 armor games. Also, if you have not already played an Infamous game, you will not want to use Move controls.Like Infamous 2, Festival of Blood provides tools to make user-generated content (which don’t mix with Infamous 2 UGC missions). As with all community creations, I found the content to be wildly inconsistent in quality, ranging from fun to playable to broken. Even so, the missions give you a reason to continue playing the DLC after you’ve finished its core plot.Sony and Sucker Punch’s release of Festival of Blood as a standalone game may seem like a warning sign, but the gameplay delivers.

By not being bound to previous data or mechanics, this expansion has me more excited for a new Infamous than ever. Incidentally, if you’re interested in what we’d like to see from Infamous 3, you can check out our. In the meantime, you should play Festival of Blood.