New Marais gothic ambiance is second to none.
Like all good stories, this one is told in a bar from the perspective of Cole’s bestie regaling the tale of Cole spending the New Marais holiday of Pyre Day facing off against, you guessed it – vampires. While some may roll their eyes at the cheesiness of the whole scenario, the Southern-style setting of New Marais lends itself well to the story, giving the supernatural flavoured DLC a legitimacy which makes it feel like it was part of the infamous story arc all along. The premise behind the DLC is that our electric-powered protagonist, Cole McGrath, is captured by a group of vampires in order to be used as a human defibrillator to juice up the corpse of the ancient vampire Bloody Mary, and set her free upon the world once more. Of course, being a Conduit means that Cole’s blood is a lot more potent than your everyday human, and the hero finds himself playing the role of human straw as Mary drains Cole’s blood in order to get her vampire groove back. While Bloody Mary is now powered up and ready to unleash terror on New Marais, Cole finds that he now has an appetite for blood and if he doesn’t get the best of Bloody Mary by sunrise, he’ll find himself being another undead minion for Mary’s cause.
This chick is evil.
While Cole might not be happy with his new found appetite for blood, he finds that alongside the bloodlust comes a few nifty vampy powers. The coolest power of all has to be Shadow Swarm - Cole’s new flying ability which allows him to travel at high speed as a cloud of bats. This power coupled with Cole’s existing Static Thrusters power allows you to effectively travel great distances across the city without ever needing to touch down. Another one of Cole’s new powers is Vampire Vision, which works in a similar manner to Detective Vision from the Batman: Arkham Asylum/City titles as it allows Cole to locate hidden objects, as well as highlight surrounding vampire enemies for you to stake.
The combat mechanics of Festival of Blood remain largely the same to that of inFamous 2 – you charge up your combat meter to allow Cole to use his impressive array of finishing moves – and you’ll be glad to know that vampires are just as susceptible to being electrocuted as everyone else in the game. If there is one drawback about the title it’s that all of the health and combat upgrades of the core game are absent, meaning you need to be sure that you’ve got an electrical source close by to give Cole a quick recharge to ensure that you aren’t annihilated in seconds.
Try staking this beasty.
Aside from the core story of saving Cole from an inevitable existence of undead servitude, there are a number of side missions available in Festival of Blood to pass the time, such as collecting hidden glyphs to discover the back story behind Bloody Mary to collecting jars to upgrade Cole’s blood capacity to utilize his new found powers, you’ll find that this content adds some more playing time into the mix – however this isn’t that significant given that most will be able to motor their way through the title in a couple of hours. Given the short lifespan of the title, some may be hesitant to drop AU $15.95 on a whim.
Ultimately, those clamouring for an undead slice of inFamous shenanigans, will enjoy what Festival of Blood has to offer. It's a short, albeit fun diversion from the typical offerings of the inFamous universe - giving gamers another reason to play around in Cole McGrath’s sandbox for a while. But if you're looking at best bang for your buck, there are other titles around which will offer a lot more playtime for the sizable price tag.
Worth buying? Maybe
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Downloadable content ratings system
We've given a 'buy' rating of 'Yes', 'Maybe', or 'No'.
Yes means that the content is either great value or brings some substantial additions to the game, or possibly both.
Maybe means that the content may be fun while it lasts, but may either be too short or not enough to fully justify the price tag.
No means that we don't recommend downloading this insubstantial content.
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