PS3 must-haves don’t come along very often, but when they do they strike like lightning.

When Infamous opens up you start out in a crater. A huge explosion has occured, and at the center of it is one bike messenger by the name of Cole McGrath. As a result of the prior explosion – caused in turn by a glowing device known as the Ray Sphere – powers have awakened in certain people throughout Empire City, where you’ll spend your adventure. That includes Cole, who suddenly has bolts of electricity jumping out of power sources, into him. He eventually gains basic control over his newfound ability, and that ability will evolve as you gain experience points to distribute throughout the game. More on that in a bit.

After a couple of weeks in the hospital recovering from his blast-induced injuries, Cole grabs his best friend Zeke and tries to leave Empire City, now under quarantine, but is met with fierce opposition that results in them being separated. Cole finds himself captured in a prison cell outside the city and is approached by a shady lady called Moya, who enlists his help to find her husband, an agent sent into the city undercover. Cole, left with the choice of prison badness or going back into the city to reluctantly help, sorta-badness-too, picks the latter and essentially becomes Snake Plisken in Escape from New York.

Once reunited with his friend Zeke, the search for Moya’s husband and the battle to restore the city from chaos begins. The tale plays out very much as an origin story, and by the end you’re essentially only just fully realised as a super hero. Or anti hero.

Fused into one game, mechanics from almost the entire history of videogames play a part here, and they play their parts perfectly. There are elements of classic platforming, modern Tomb Raider style platforming, classic sidescrolling space shooter like button hammering, cover mechanics ala Gears of War, all the guns and weapons you know and love wrapped into the theme of electricity, all playing out in an open world that marries GTA style mission structure with old school boss encounters and a power acquiring progression akin to something like Megaman X. You can probably switch out all the things this game evokes memories of based on your own gaming experience, but you’ll find that the elements of this game are more distinctly era specific than most games today, largely because it winds up such an action game genre blend.

The powers play into the combat primarily but also into the movement of your character. Combat consists of free third person aiming, and you start out with a basic “gun” like ability to zap things. This eventually levels up to become stronger, but to inflict more damage you simply hit the button faster, which is what gives the basic combat a Metal Slug like quality. You eventually gain new abilities, each being electric representations of your action game favourites. There are equivalents of bazookas and grenades, all of which have a really satisfying oomph to them and avoid the pitfalls of using what you’d imagine would feel like a weak, flimsy kind of power. All I could think of prior to playing this game was the Emperor zapping Luke at the end of Return of The Jedi and how turned off I’d be by powers like that.

The weapons themselves have different attributes too that you gain by powering them up with the experience points you collect by completing missions and beating guys up. Bazooka for instance can attain a homing function used by firing your rocket, then zapping something or someone with the standard bolt and the projectile will home in on that. You can fire as many shots as you want and tag things and have the projectiles hit each subsequent target. All weapons have some kind of twist to them but it’s more fun to find out what they are by yourself, and it’s a huge part of the game to be creative with the combat. The powers also eventually extend to your movement options, and you’ll get the ability to use your electricity to magnetically “grind” on top of power lines, train tracks and other conductive surfaces, making the city into a Jet Set Radio-riffic (Future especially) playground.

Another thing that plays into upgrading your character is the moral decision mechanic. Essentially a completely binary choice, you’re regularly confronted by a situation that you can solve in either a good or evil way. The evil choices usually amount to egoistic choices rather than outright evil, which leads you down a path of an anti hero rather than that of a completely disgusting asshole. If you’re consistent with your choices – and it’s easy to be because the game points out what will garner what result – you’ll evolve into a precise, considerate type of character with powers that reflect that, or a self serving, destructive force that blows everything and anything up. If I take the bazooka as an example again, the evil version of the upgrade I talked about splits the projectile into smaller ones and cover a much bigger area in order to cause as much chaos as possible. Your alignment also affects the story to different degrees throughout, and it’s definitely worth it both narratively and gameplay wise to play the game through twice. Especially from a gameplay standpoint it’s an ENTIRELY different experience depending on what alignment you’re shooting for.

Another thing regarding the experience points is that depending on how creative you are in the combat you earn more of them. If you shockwave someone into the air and headshot him, you’ll get a precision award, and the same goes for a load of other combinations. Just go wild with that stuff, it’s superbly fun.

The mission structure is kinda standard openworld fare, but it feels more like Saint’s Row than GTA in that you have a distinctly narrative heavy main thread to follow and the side missions are all recycled basic objectives. The side missions essentially award you with that area of the city being reclaimed from the crazy gang types that lurk there, and sometimes you’ll save an area with a medical clinic that will act as a spawn point from there on. There is some repetition in the side missions eventually – most of which can be avoided completely by mixing it up with a healthy dose of story missions as you can tackle them whenever, even save them until after you beat the game – but it’s really never a problem thanks to the core gameplay being so incredibly good. Every opportunity to zap dudes – for whatever reason – is a good god damn time.

It’s due in large part to the clever blending of action game elements, but also the near flawless mapping of said elements to the gamepad. The basic control over Cole is something so fundamentally expertly crafted, the ease with which he moves around frankly reminds me of Super Mario Galaxy at times, and that’s about the highest kind of praise I can give it. There is an awkward stickyness to the way he grabs on to stuff when you start out and you’re still adjusting to it, but the thing is that all those things I’ve told you about you can do from ANYWHERE. Whether you’re jumping off a building, hanging on to a moving train, grinding a power line or climbing up a lamp post you have access to every power and you’re fully enabled to zap the fuck out of dudes. Any leap performed during the game is compensated for by its clever “gravitate towards stuff” system (that’s.. probably not the official name) in order for you to be able to keep juggling all those elements at all times even when the camera is pointing away from whatever you’re jumping towards. The result is often spectacular.

That’s not to say there aren’t some areas where the game falls short of genious. Empire City is kind of a dull looking place, the character animation during the in-game cutscenes is of the Thunderbirds school of facial expressions, and the story kinda springs alive during the third act (and leads into an amazing finish).. But then all those niggles are completely and utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things when you spend time with Infamous. Like 2006′s Gears of War the things done right are so many and so overwhelmingly rightly done that it’s okay that they save some stuff for the inevitable sequel to clean up. Whatever miniscule issues there are here simply cannot prevent the game from being a resounding success for me.

Infamous is one for the fans of expertly designed, extremely rewarding game mechanics let loose in a open world game. It is the complete anti-thesis to Grand Theft Auto’s hamfisted individual elements that are forgiven by overwhelmingly lavish production values, story and presentation, and one that deserves none of the percieved stigmas normally associated with sandbox games; “Jack of all trades, master of none” – because this is truly a master of them all.