In Infamous you play as a Cole McGrath, a guy who has electrical superpowers thrust upon him in a Marvel-esque fashion, acquired through the activation of a device known as the “Ray Sphere” which also causes a humongous explosion destroying a large portion of the city. You crawl out of the crater as the sole survivor and dust yourself off.As if that wasn’t bad enough the whole city becomes quarantined due to a plague outbreak. In a ridiculously short period of time the sociopolitical power within shifts to three factions or gangs which operate almost like they’re in some kind of urbanized version of The Road Warrior.
The main focus of the game is to reacquire the Ray Sphere and either destroy it or use it to make yourself more powerful.
The first cool thing you notice while playing, (well, besides being able to electrocute things,) is that no matter how high of a building you jump from, you don’t get injured.
You run your first mission and then get introduced to the first gang. Then you make enemies with them. Then suddenly for the rest of the game you can’t go anywhere or do anything without being shot at. Seriously, if you’re running down any given street and there’s less than two guns shooting at you, it’s your lucky day. Needless to say, it gets really old really fast. You’ll be minding your own business trying to climb a building to reach a blast shard or a mission start point and the bullets will be pelting you, slowly chipping away at your sanity. People on rooftops from half a mile away with impossibly perfect aim. It’s like trying to play World of Warcraft, (or really anything,) with someone sitting next to you poking you hard in the ribs every ten seconds. And it always has the potential to just keep escalating and escalating. You’ll end up having to reenact the entire hospital climax from Hardboiled just because you took a slight detour to grab one blast shard.
There are primary missions and then there are side missions. All missions give you experience points which you use to upgrade your powers. The side missions also help you take over territory in the city which will clear areas of gang members, significantly reducing the amount that you get shot at in that area and believe me, you will want to do every single one. You will want to launch a genocide. One can only take being jabbed in the ribs for so long before one wants to rip the person’s finger off and ram it through their eye socket.
Some missions are good or evil and some have choices that you must make along the way that will help either align you as evil or good. It’s a long process becoming totally good or evil. The different results are the game ending, your powers, your appearance and things that happen as the story progresses. The city changes somewhat accordingly. If you’re evil, people will shout threats at you on the street and even throw rocks or take a swing at you which is silly because if you play the game anything like me, hitting you with a rock is going to be the last thing they ever do.
The problem I have with the missions is that they get repetitive sometimes. You go into the sewer over and over to restore power to parts of the city. Out of like the forty side missions there are only about six different scenarios which just get copy and pasted.
Your motive to go into the sewers, besides being able to recharge yourself in the city with the power back, is getting new powers. Every time you go in the sewers you get a new power, all of which use electricity in some different way. You can throw shock grenades, ( yeah I don’t know how they work either.) There’s something which is basically the equivalent of a lightning ball rocket launcher. Both are very fun to use if you don’t mind blowing up every car and pedestrian within a two block radius.
There’s a psychokinetic push but it’s not called that because it’s electrical again… somehow. My first time playing through, I practically forgot this move even existed. My second time playing through I learned just how awesome it was. Why waste time shooting someone on the roof when you can just shove them off. You can even kill someone by rolling a car over on them. The weird thing about it being a fairly short ranged attack is that you might try to push an enemy who’s a little too far away and they’ll only stumble backward slightly. The car behind them however will be ripped from the ground like a styrofoam cup in a hurricane. What’s with that? If I’m trying to use my powers to defeat an attacker, it’s difficult but if I use them to make a pointless spectacle, then they work great? 
There’s a precision electrical bolt which is basically just a sniper mode. Time slows down and the camera zooms in over your cursor which has suddenly adopted some kind of head repelling power. Anything that’s not a headshot might as well have been shot at the ground. The other reason you don’t want to miss is because it uses a stupid amount of energy. Three or four shots and you’re about depleted.One of the more interesting powers is the polarity shield which is basically a transparent shield that you make in front of you. You can steer it around like the camera at where the gunfire is coming from. It doesn’t block explosions or RPGs or melee attacks or even point blank gunfire which blows. But what’s worse is that while you’re desperately trying to steer the shield in between you and wherever the bullets are coming from, Cole is trying to die. He stands with his head and legs completely unprotected and doesn’t even try to shield them. So if the enemy’s above or below you with a non planar trajectory you’re screwed. There is also no good way to run while shielding your back and that out of every possible scenario is the one you want most of all.
When a mission effects your karma negatively or positively it sometimes seems random with no relevance to what the morality factor actually was. If you’re evil, restoring the power makes you more evil but if you’re good, restoring the power makes you more good. Eliminating crime throughout the city is considered neutral. Healing wounded pedestrians makes you good but if you bio leech an enemy, (kill him to completely recharge your own energy,) it makes you bad. But at the same time if you beat the enemy to within an inch of his life, (AKA on the ground and no longer a threat,) then kick him off of the roof, killing him out of spite, it has no effect on karma. The good counterpart of bio leech on an enemy is arc restraint… which doesn’t do shit to help you.
At one point in the story you have to make a decision to either save your girlfriend or five doctors.
So which one is the evil route? Well it turns out that saving your girlfriend is evil. I have a problem with this. Maybe saving her was not in the interest of the greater good but I don’t think it makes you evil. The first time I played through, I was trying to save her but I accidentally climbed the building with the doctors and she died. Funny how such a stupid mistake can be made when it’s night and you’re being shot at while under stringent time constraints. The second time I played it, I chose the correct building and… it wasn’t her. It was a decoy. The bottom line is that you can’t save your girlfriend. Well that’s a load off of my mind.
To get around the city, you basically run everywhere which is fine most of the time since you can run pretty damn fast. You can climb almost anything which has its own set of annoyances. In Uncharted your parkour exploits are always fraught with extraneous and confusing bullshit. Where do I go now? Is this a ledge? Is that a ledge? Do I jump to that jumbled mass of vines? Okay, I’ll try. Oh no, it was just scenery. Now I’m dead and have to do the whole thing over again for the eleventh time. Man, I love this!
In Infamous you have the opposite problem. If you press the X button you jump into the air. It also activates a super-powered neodymium magnet inside you, making you gravitate to the nearest edifice where you become molecularly bonded to the architecture. Sure it makes climbing a building easier but inevitably when you have three semiautomatic RPGs and a gun turret pummeling you mercilessly, you’re going to want to get off of the damn wall. Pressing the O button is supposed to make you drop and it does… two feet down to the next ledge. Then you press it again and again and again and again, slowly working your way down until you eventually die from the gunfire. The other option is to try and jump away from the wall which either produces similar results or causes you to attach yourself to something else like a telephone pole or the building across the alley. When you’re trying to dodge bullets in the street, you always end up ducking behind a car or grabbing on to shit when all you want to do is just run the fuck away. Why is it so difficult to let go of a building or run?
Occasionally at super critical moments you will fail to grab on to something you were clearly close enough to grab. Sometimes you go to an edge and press O and you can’t drop down. Sometimes you can’t walk over a slightly convex surface or in between two random objects. Sometimes you need to climb an object which was obviously forgotten about when they were handing out climbing protocols.
Whenever you enter a new area, you get a bunch of new assholes with new guns and basically have to start from square one. It’s frustrating because your new enemies will always be much stronger than your old ones which greatly diminishes your sense of growing power. As you grow stronger, things just get harder. I know there is supposed to be a difficulty curve in video games but at no point do you ever feel powerful. You always feel like the underdog.
Now that you’re in the new area the people take three precision lightning bolts through the head to kill, plus they’re invisible half of the time, plus there are flying grenade launchers which also turn invisible, plus random proxy mines on roof tops. The more powerful you get, the weaker you feel. If you want to feel powerful you basically have to beat the game and turn the difficulty on easy.
At least the gangs in the Neon District and Historical District have heads to shoot. The other jackasses look like amorphous piles of garbage ambling down the sidewalk.
Water kills you. I don’t believe they mention this at any time in the game or even the manual so you just sort of have to figure it out the hard way. I don’t really get *why* it kills you. You’re obviously immune to electrical shock already so why would water make a difference? Maybe it makes you short circuit like a toaster in a bathtub or something.
Sometimes when you die in water, the controller has to vibrate full throttle for half an hour before you can play again. I hate this. The controller is vibrating about sixty percent of the time while playing. It vibrates when you’re hit with bullets or explosions or landing on the ground or shooting lighting or having hallucinations or a train’s passing by or you’re riding on the train, or you’re electrical capacity is being upgraded or you’re grinding on a power cable or the railway, which unfortunately is about the fastest way to get around.
I don’t know what other people think of controller vibration function but I find that it irritates me more than… whatever the fuck it’s supposed to be doing. It’s kind of helpful sometimes to have a little extra feedback so that you know when you’re being attacked but for the rest of the time, it’s either annoying or I couldn’t care less. It’s not fun to hold the controller when it’s vibrating and fighting to escape my grasp. Maybe I’m weird that way but whenever I grind the railway for a significant distance, I just put the controller on the floor until I think I’m almost to my destination. It’s either that or hold it until my hands go numb. The worst part is that the game has no way to turn off the vibration. Trust me, I looked.
In the end everything is revealed to you about the plot involving the Ray Sphere and it’s one big spoiler. After you’ve watched the credits, you’re free to just screw off and do whatever you want, which is great if you’re a completion whore like I am. On a related and bizarrely introspective note, as I was slowly grinding for points so that I could get my last power upgrade, healing the same people and killing the same respawn bad guys, I realized something. Empire City is purgatory.
