Infamous: Festival of Blood is over quickly, but it's more than worth the price of admission.
The game takes place in Infamous 2's New Marais, but here it's wearing a costume. The New Orleans inspired city is now dolled up for a Halloween like event called Pyre Night, where people dress in costume, create giant, demonic looking balloons, and have wild parties in the streets. Oh, and there's fire. Lots and lots of fire. There are tons of little things such as a fire wheels, torches, and you'll frequently see a random citizen shooting off fireworks. Seeing New Marais lit up during a particularly dark night is quite the sight to see. Especially for fans of Infamous 2, it's just a cool addition and makes the city feel more alive. The streets are generally more crowded, and admiring the detail Sucker Punch added to their city can be distracting.
The story is pretty simple. Zeke, the lovable side kick to superhero Cole MacGrath, is at a bar one night where he meets a woman he immediately takes a liking to. After she ignores his initial advances, he name drops Cole and she starts listening. He then tells her the story of how on one particular Pyre Night Cole was bitten by a vampire and had a single night to defeat her and regain his humanity. From there, you once again take control of Cole MacGrath and start this story.
The story is broken up with Infamous' typical comic book cutscenes, and these function greatly for what Festival of Blood was trying to accomplish. The dialog and voice acting is appropriate, and the game never takes itself too seriously which is a good thing. Despite the story being about a vampire trying to destroy a city, the game just wants you to have fun and succeeds.
The game isn't very long. Depending on skill and difficulty you start the game at it can last anywhere from 3-5 hours. There are, however, collectibles to be found, like the blast shards in the first games, and there are other little secrets you can find that expands the story of the antagonist Bloody Mary.
At the very beginning of the game, Cole is turned into a vampire which offers up some new powers. Primarily the ability to drink blood and turn into a flock of bats and fly around the city in a first person perspective. The powers upgrade and expand that make them fun to use, unfortunately it doesn't function like previous titles.
In the other Infamous games, you gained experience points that allowed you to unlock powers at your leisure and select which ones you thought were more important to your play style. Here, your powers upgrade as you complete random objectives. Stake so many vampires and your grenades upgrade, for example. You can't switch powers back and forth which a bit disappointing, but you don't get a huge arsenal anyway.
Another downside is that there is no more karma options here. There's a single story, and you can't choose to be good or bad, you're just bad. Granted, this is explained in the fact that you're a vampire and you need blood to survive and defeat Bloody Mary, but for a series that offered two story lines depending on your karma, it's a bit odd seeing it absent.
Despite these concerns, Festival of Blood is a lot of fun. The writing is witty and the story is very entertaining. The new enemies are also a breath of fresh air into the franchise. Vampires can teleport, hang on walls, and take hostages while you fight them. Trying to get a good shot on an upside down vampire as she shoots at you is awesome, but it's more exciting when she vanishes into bats and perches somewhere else. Enemies also don't die simply by defeating them. As they fall to the ground you have to stake them to permanently put them to rest. Later, you can upgrade your bat flying ability to bump into an enemy and stake them. Throwing lightning one second, then back flipping over enemy projectiles, turning into bats and slamming into an enemy and watching the cool animation of Cole manifesting back into human form while stabbing someone is just pure fun.
There's also the addition of vampire mode which allows you to see in an X-ray fashion if someone is a vampire or not. If you see someone walking in the crowded streets without veins, you can sneak up on them and execute a stealth kill. As the vampire burns to ash the surrounding crowd reacts and screams appropriately. If you try to bite one of these hidden vampires, they'll turn into a large enemy and before you know it you have a big fight on your hands.
As an added bonus, Festival of Blood comes with Infamous 2's User Generated Content feature which allows you to create your own missions and play anyone else's. It's a cool feature, and brings a bit of replayability to the table seeing what crazy stuff the community comes up with. Each mission has a rating and review function, so it's nice to find the good stuff and be able to ignore the garbage people randomly throw together.
Festival of Blood is just a cool addition to the Infamous line up of games. If you love the open world play style of the other games, there's little reason you won't like this, especially with the new enemy types. If you're not into the whole vampire/Halloween thing, then you might as well stay away. For what it offers though, Infamous: Festival of Blood is completely worth the $10 admission price.