Solid enough open-world super hero fun, but also a very flawed game that has aged incredibly poorly. The story is good, with karma choices that feel like they have a distinct effect on the world, and the moment-to-moment gameplay is very fun, with an enjoyable kit of super powers and parkour abilities that make platforming and combat a blast throughout. However, it suffers from an incredibly dull and colorless in-game art style, generally uninteresting side content, some very cumbersome to navigate areas such as the prison in the Warren, and copious amounts of the 7th-generation's specialty: terrible frame rates. Not amazing, but still worth a play.

Also, the fact that the 350 (!!!!!) Blast Shards scattered all across this big-ass game can only be found by clicking in the left stick (which is the most cumbersome button to map to this ability) to ping your mini map just so you can see the little blue dot that indicates its location for five seconds makes the process of collecting all of them absolutely miserable.

P.S.: Silent Melody is a banger.

I knew it was developed by Sucker Punch going in, but about half way through it totally clicked that this is the same developers as the Sly sequels. Maybe the game impressed me enough early on with its fun movement and unlockable not-so-super-hero skillset that I was ignoring the fact the side content was so repetitive, the story was so dull. I swear to god there is a mission in Sly 2 where you have to destroy/stop multiple busses just like there is in Infamous and I feel exactly the same about both missions - you do one bus and think, okay! that was fine. Then the game says ‘there are three more, by the way’. This is about as lazy as mission design gets, surely?

The story only gets interesting in the final cutscene when it ventures into territory that spoils the entire thing to write here. The characters are mostly unexplored and stereotypical. The music is serviceable but never given the chance to shine. The visuals are okay, but the performance is occasionally really poor.

The moment to moment gameplay is what makes you stick around; Even though Cole is very floaty, the climbing feels authentic thanks to so much of the architecture being accessible. The combat feels fast (as fast as you can spam R1) and the game feeds you with fun new abilities right until the very end of the fairly short story.

Infamous marks a pretty tame start to a currently dormant franchise that doesn’t do enough interesting to warrant a franchise being born out of this. Sucker Punch definitely make good games, but I’ve still never played a genuinely great game of theirs.