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Festival of Blood begins with Cole's best friend Zeke sitting alone in a bar. When a busty woman sits down next to him, he attempts to impress her with a completely made-up story about how he and Cole vanquished vampires from New Marais. Zeke narrates the story as you play through as Cole, who finds himself bitten by a female vampire named Bloody Mary and turned into a vampire himself. Infamous' humorous slant has returned, and the tongue-in-cheek story is entertaining but poorly fleshed out. It admittedly comes off as rushed and half-baked.
Regardless of the subpar nature of the story being told, Infamous: Festival of Blood still plays extremely well. Cole's moveset is generally the same as you remember; he can shoot electrically-charged bolts, grenades and rockets. He can grind on rails or hover in the air. New moves have been added in, too, giving Cole something called Vampire Sense and allowing him to fly all around New Marais as a group of vampire bats, giving you mobility even a parkour-heavy series like Infamous has never provided before.
But as I played through the main story, I came to realize just how short the narrative is, and how Festival of Blood gives you no compelling reason to play it again. I beat the game, beginning to end, in 80 minutes. There are no side quests to distract from the main quest, and one of Infamous' great pillars -- choice -- is nowhere to be found in Festival of Blood. Cole automatically leans evil in the game because he's been turned into a vampire (which forces him to do things like drink the blood of New Marais' citizenry to stay alive), but what if I wanted to play as a different sort of Cole? Isn't that what Infamous has always been about?
If you want to play beyond the main story, you can. There are 100 Canopic Jars to find strewn around New Marais, and these will help raise Cole's blood meter, a new addition introduced in Festival of Blood that primarily governs his ability to use the aforementioned flying ability. Bloody Mary has also left some more cleverly-hidden rune-like collectibles around New Marais itself, but these items are easy to find due mostly to helpful in-game tools and the small nature of Festival of Blood's map. Don't expect to see the entire city. You won't be able to explore the northern island at all, which is essentially half of New Marais.
Festival of Blood reintroduces the notion of Infamous UGC -- or User-Generated Content -- that was first revealed in Infamous 2. You can again create your own missions, this time with some new tools that help you tell the story you're weaving just a little bit better. Playing other users' UGC will help prolong Festival of Blood a little bit more, but UGC wasn't really my thing in Infamous 2, and the same can be said here (mostly because the tools are too complicated for me to wrap my head around). But if you enjoyed it in Infamous 2, the toolset is more robust and you're likely to enjoy making missions even more.
Then again, if you focus on doing the main quest, finding all of the collectibles and grabbing all of the non UGC-related Trophies in lieu of building and playing missions, you should only expect to sink about three hours into Festival of Blood before you've seen and done just about everything.
Infamous: Festival of Blood is also PlayStation Move-enabled, and it works fairly well, but -- surprise, surprise -- you'll definitely want to stick with your DualShock controller. Infamous: Festival of Blood's gameplay-tight mechanics shouldn't be mucked up with motion controls.
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