The initial problem with Infamous is that it takes a little while before you start feeling anything like a famous superhero or an infamous super villain. When you start out, your electrical powers are all fairly muted and you'll spend a fair amount of time feeling perhaps just a little underwhelmed. You can't drive the cars or fly, so progress around the map is strictly on foot, which initially feels a little slow as you run around with everyone else zapping enemies with your distinctly underpowered electric shock power. Certainly you can climb like some kind of genius squirrel, but its all fairly low brow stuff to begin with. But gradually, as you finish missions and begin to light up other areas of the city better powers are dripfed to you, and finally you begin to feel a little bit more bad ass. By the time you reach the second island you'll be able to fly along electrical wires and glide over the trouble spots before unleashing electrical justice from the skies in a mighty ground pound. It makes for a far more impressive experience, but theres still issues.
Depending on whether you prefer red or blue, you follow either an evil or good path through Empire City. Mixing and matching evil and good quests is generally not encouraged - some of the higher powers are only available at the highest rank of whichever path you choose, and if you dabble at each end of the moral compass you simply won't level up high enough to get them. So you'll specialise and follow one path, which makes each 'moral choice' element essentially pointless as the decision is already made in your mind how to play before you even get that far. Moral choice is purely black and white anyway, with absolutely no shades of grey to challenge your perceptions of what to do.
Graphically, Infamous is pretty good, although there are a few rough edges here and there. Character models and cars are fairly repetitive and theres a few clipping issues. Combat is mostly entertaining. The enemies seem to have superhuman abilities to shoot you from afar, requiring a lot of clambering up to their lofty perches to take them out - whichever power you use, its all fairly entertaining stuff though. Using electrical push to fling bad guys off buildings is always good fun, as is sticking a grenade to their heads. Movement around and over the buildings is wonderfully easy, and the animation is always spot on. The city itself, whilst looking nice enough, is a tad static though. Simple things like not being able to drive, means you either walk or ride the rails limiting your involvement in the world and technical stuff like piles of debris that should react to your explosions etc are disappointingly immovable. Lack of a dynamic day/night cycle lessens the sense of a living breathing city until it all becomes a little disjointed.
Theres a fair bit of repetition involved too. Some of the missions are quite imaginative, but others are simple fair - climb a building to remove surveillance devices, escort some prisoners - fine once or twice, but after you've essentially done the same mission in different locations a number of times the attraction wanes slightly. The character models are slightly crappy and the less said about the irritating sidekick Zeke and Cole's plastic faced missus the better. One dimensional plot points and nothing more, they inspire no emotion. Cole himself is a fairly bland everyman character.
Essentially though it doesn't have the decent sand box element of better open world games which would allow you to play with the environment, or the emotional story to suck you in, but it keeps you going nonetheless. Fun then, but perhaps only a step on the way to a hopefully more complete sequel.