A POWER TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE
inFAMOUS is a Sucker Punch joint I almost like against my better judgment. On paper, it contains everything needed for a great superhero fantasy: an open-world sandbox, flashy electric powers, parkour-style movement, moral choices, and constant combat. The original story delivers a few entertaining twists and is framed in a fitting comic-book aesthetic.
Unfortunately, very little of it comes together in practice. The game lacks the fine-tuning, emotional weight, and immersion required to become the exhilarating blend of gameplay and storytelling it clearly aspires to be. By today’s technical standards it’s ugly as hell, and its mechanical shortcomings are nearly too numerous to list. Still, when I think about what the game attempts to do, I can’t help but admire its ambition—especially given its age.
Released in 2009, inFAMOUS shares a launch window with Batman: Arkham Asylum and Assassin’s Creed II, two games that effectively defined modern superhero design and open-world structure. In hindsight, inFAMOUS was doing something genuinely interesting by blending those genres—two years before Arkham City expanded on the formula. Its influence can still be felt today in games like Marvel’s Spider-Man.
The story itself is fairly boilerplate superhero fare: destructive powers falling into the wrong hands. It’s not bad enough to be laughable, but not memorable either. You play as Cole, a bland-looking protagonist who speaks in a constant gravelly whisper, not unlike Geralt of Rivia. The supporting cast consists of a few allies, a girlfriend, and several supervillains, most of them utterly forgettable—save for Zeke, your redneck best friend.
The game opens in medias res, with Cole waking up in the center of a massive explosion crater in a ruined city. Fires rage, power lines spark, and debris litters the streets. Zeke guides you out over the phone, and soon you discover that you’ve become a human lightning rod, absorbing electricity from damaged infrastructure. Cole is now a freak of nature—an antihero if you want him to be—capable of shooting lightning, grinding power lines, gliding through the air, and raising electric shields.
Progression is straightforward: drain power sources, unlock new abilities through story progression or experience points, and gradually expand your destructive toolkit. It’s immediately empowering, and at times genuinely fun.
Power outages have crippled the city, allowing criminal gangs to take over. Your task is to drive them out and restore order. The map consists of three major islands, each divided into districts that look like something out of an ’80s strategy game—grey hexagons that change color as you “liberate” them. The layout feels lazy, as if it was cobbled together during a lunch break.
Visually, the world reflects this lack of imagination. Brown and grey apartment blocks dominate the skyline, broken up occasionally by enemy bases or a taller skyscraper. There are few memorable landmarks. A railway system acts as a crude fast-travel option. The city is a perpetual war zone of cracked pavement, debris, wrecked cars, and hostile thugs. Civilians are represented by laughably crude character models, perpetually terrorized by the same handful of villains.
Traversal relies heavily on parkour, clearly inspired by Assassin’s Creed, but by modern standards the controls feel unreliable. Cole is fast but flimsy, overly automated, and prone to failure at the worst moments. Buildings are often tall enough to make climbing a chore. Missed ledge grabs and failed beam crossings caused frequent deaths, exacerbated by a frustrating lack of checkpoints.
Combat suffers from the same twitchiness. Aiming is imprecise, encouraging you to strafe wildly and fire in the enemy’s general direction rather than line up clean shots. At its best, you feel like a conductor of chaos—raining lightning bolts while detonating oil barrels and parked cars. Too often, though, frame-rate drops undermine the spectacle. Playing via PS Plus, it’s unclear whether this stems from streaming, PS3-era performance issues, or both, but the result is the same: some missions become needlessly painful.
Enemies infest the city from the outset, endlessly pelting you with bullets, rockets, grenades, and sniper fire. It quickly becomes exhausting. The only way to silence them is by liberating each district through side missions—of which there are 69. Completing one inexplicably causes all enemies in the area to flee. It’s a massive time sink, but the resulting peace and quiet makes it feel almost mandatory.
Mission quality varies wildly. Some are genuinely fun combat scenarios that reward creativity and awareness. Others are tense escort missions where you deflect explosives and thin enemy ranks to protect a fragile vehicle. Then there are the speed-run rooftop challenges, seemingly designed to convince you the controls actually work.
Worst of all are the stealth missions. Tail a criminal, get spotted, instant failure. Detection is absurdly unforgiving, which is baffling in a game where stealth is otherwise nonexistent. In every other context, enemies can spot you from half the city away the moment you sneeze, let alone unleash a lightning bolt.
Your moral choices feed into a karma system that mildly affects the story, NPC reactions, and available powers. As usual, I found the evil path unappealing. Do you want to murder civilians and fight the police, or help people and oppose criminals? In practice, it mostly boils down to whether you prefer blue or red lightning.
Despite all this, the game’s frantic pacing and sheer volume of ideas eventually won me over—partially. Some annoyances faded with practice, others I learned to tolerate, and a few I simply endured until they were over. I stuck it out long enough to liberate most districts, and the tougher enemies introduced later added just enough challenge to keep things engaging. Once my biggest grievances subsided, I started enjoying the sandbox for what it was.
I also appreciated the unobtrusive storytelling. The city’s chaos never pauses for cutscenes; instead, narrative context is delivered through radio chatter as you move between objectives. It’s easy to ignore if you just want to follow map markers and wreak havoc. The interface is clean and efficient, with powers mapped to intuitive button combinations. Menus are rarely needed beyond upgrades and navigation.
The dull world design even serves a functional purpose: collectibles like glowing blast shards are easy to spot against the drab environment.
The ideas may not seem remarkable today, but they clearly struck a chord at the time. This was my second playthrough, and I still see inFAMOUS as a promising first step into a new genre for Sucker Punch. It had the right ideas but failed to fully capitalize on them due to frustrating design decisions that clashed with its twitchy controls. Some missions are good, some are irritating, and some are outright terrible.
With more polish, tighter balancing, and countless small adjustments, inFAMOUS could have been timeless. Instead, it remains an ambitious, deeply flawed experiment—one I almost like, despite myself.
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