This game plays very well; that might be the crowning achievement of inFAMOUS, actually. The controls are tight, as it feels like a third-person shooter where all of your weapons are electricity-based. The button combinations that make up your powers also make sense, so you should have no trouble remembering what buttons do what late in the game when you have a slew of abilities at your fingertips. Climbing and jumping around the city is also a breeze, thanks to an auto-targeting system that finds ledges for you. Simply jump and aim with the left analog stick in order to direct Cole towards the ledges you want to grab, and he’ll hook on, assuming you made the jump correctly. This allows for a neat parkour feel, and when you get to the parts of the game where you can grind on rails and shoot or float around and shoot as you fall, you’ll learn to love the fluidity of the system and its ease even more.
While the game controls fantastically and the main missions in the game are, generally speaking, well thought out, well structured, and a blast to play, the side missions are a major letdown. These are a great source of experience for upgrading your powers, and are also a good way to practice combat and your parkour skills while also shifting your karmic alignment further up or down the good/evil scale. There are loads and loads of side missions, and you’re going to need to do them all if you plan on completing the game fully, collecting all of the blast shards (essentially inFAMOUS’ version of Zelda’s heart containers, except for use with his skills rather than health) or if you want to have enough XP to unlock and upgrade all of Cole’s potential.
Sounds like a great way to add some replay value to the title as well as extend the life of the main game, right? While it does just that, and the reward for playing them is worthwhile, I wish Sucker Punch had put a bit more variation into the side missions. There are so many of them in total, but there will be times where you will play the exact same mission “" just in a different area of the city “" three or four times in a row, and usually this happens right after you completed a similar task in the main missions. There are also just plain boring side missions, like the ones where you hop around the sides of buildings looking for surveillance equipment that the local bad guys have installed “" tedious is the word that comes to mind. Escorting prisoners to jail was fun the first time, and maybe once after that, but after it happened much more often than that, it felt like work and not fun. Finding hidden packages was also a chore, especially given the wide range of possible locations for it on your GPS. The only side missions that didn’t eventually bore me were the satellite uplink missions, as they were races against the clock, parkour rooftop style. Those were loads of fun, as you needed to find a path in a limited amount of time that spanned across the islands.
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