Infamous is now 11 years old, that's an old game. Is it still good? Why don't we take a look back at it and see if it is truly as good as we remember? In this InFAMOUS critique and analysis, I'll be explaining the story and a lot of the general mechanics while giving my thoughts on them. This is the 3rd video in my Infamous retrospective and I plan to follow it up with an InFamous 2 analysis. I also have an InFamous Second Son analysis that will be linked below. I really hope we get a new Infamous PS5 game or at least an Infamous collection, perhaps an Infamous remastered?

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- Chapters -
Pre Script: 0:00
Intro: 0:22
Presentation: 1:53
Traversal: 6:05
Powers: 8:24
Level Design: 11:00
Karma: 14:23
Boss Fights: 21:16
Story Summary: 22:09
Story Thoughts: 23:35
Conclusion: 25:50
Outro: 26:48

I remember waking up one morning in 2011 and seeing that the PlayStation network was down. It was a frequent occurrence at the time and while I don’t remember much from the time as I was 10 years old, I do remember just thinking, oh that’s weird, guess I’ll play COD tomorrow. Another day passed with PSN being down and then a week and it turned into months. Obviously, I wasn’t the only one who was upset at this and when the network came back online I was greeted with the gift of two possible games. I saw Little Big Planet, Dead Nation, and InFamous. I had never heard of InFamous despite the game coming out a few years prior but oh boy was I interested. I essentially saw it as if there was a game surrounding electro from spiderman. I downloaded it and holy hell was I hooked from start to finish. I found the karma system to be something I had never seen before and the gameplay was a symphony of bolts and electrified blasts.

Since I’ve been returning to the InFamous games I was really excited to relive this experience as I haven’t played it since I first did over a decade ago. Coming back around I found the rose tinted goggles wore off pretty quickly and playing through this jagged borderline slideshow became more of a chore than anything. I found that the mission design was pretty repetitive and the whole game felt pretty padded. The moment to moment gameplay while being good enough to carry the game, suffered from contradictions that made it quite often frustrating even on the easier difficulties. This doesn’t mean it was all bad though as it had some great characters and the game had so much potential.

InFamous 1 is a very rough game. Now don’t get me wrong it’s fun at times but looking at it today is just, yeesh. Now of course this game is old and I get that but overall my playthrough of InFamous was not only a bit of fun, but also mind numbingly annoying. I’ll get into all my reasons throughout this video so with that being said let’s get into InFamous, 11 years later.

Fortunately not all cutscenes are in game and in this case we get a comic like animation that looks iconic and these animations were so well received that they became a staple in the series. I also really like the UI here as it doesn’t take up too much space yet gives you all the information you need.

Of course the most important part of a games presentation in my eyes is how it looks in gameplay. For me personally, it was easy to look past or at least laugh at the animations in some of the cutscenes but the gameplay animations are still good to this day and they make the gameplay much better. The lighting that comes out of your hands illuminates dark sewers and the way it fries the many enemies looks awesome. It also looks good when cooking civilians if you swing that way. Seriously, some of the effects are top notch and it helped to keep me entertained. I also really appreciated that despite the blasts of electricity going just about all over the place, I never found myself being disoriented and I never felt like there was too much going on.