Enemies beam in randomly at the edge of your visual range, per convention. No persistent flocks of strategically intelligent AI roam these urban battlegrounds. Thus you'll venture out from alleys or sprint across open recreational areas only to have your bell rung by half a dozen perfectly placed sharpshooters. Again, part of the balancing act. You may have superhuman powers, but you'll have to mind your surroundings, whether that means crouching below the edges of things and peeking out cautiously, or using your powers to detonate objects in the environment and rack up indirect takedowns.

It's possible to clean up each of the maps and establish safe zones that nullify most re-spawns by signing up for side missions. These offer dozens of low-repeat incentives to fool around between story missions. Stalk a courier without being spotted. Disable surveillance equipment tacked to the sides of a building. Escort criminals who'll try to escape en route. Trail the electric green afterimages of criminals to their source. Find a hidden package using only a photograph. Even the "protect a pedestrian" cliche has a twist designed to minimize frustration — instead of dying, they'll go to ground, or if they're injured, just have to be healed once you've mopped up. The spotlight's always on you, in other words. You're in danger. You could die. Not some aggravating albatross that careens stupidly into the line of fire and botches the mission time after time.

The main story's unfurls as various people contact Cole and send him pinballing between tasks. It's also told through recordings stashed in satellite dishes scattered around all three islands. Finding the dead drops is an end unto itself, part of a collectible angle that'll also see you scrabbling around the tops, sides, and under-hangs of anything hunting for hundreds of glowing blue shards — irradiated bits of something-or-other that gradually charge your maximum electrical capacity.

Occasionally, your radar map points you at a goal circuitously. Instead of tracking down static colored blips on a mini map, you're fed the visual equivalent of clicks from a Geiger counter. All the clues are there, but you'll have to do slightly more than follow your map to X, which in this case marks the general area instead of the determinate spot. inFAMOUS is an action-adventure, but also a game of sidewise glances and engrossing sleight-of-hand.

Even then, the design practically trips over itself to accommodate: The way train tracks loop around cities allowing you to quickly grind from one side to another. The way power lines snake between buildings and eventually across the bridges between the islands, a map of twisting highways in the sky. Fail or die during a mission and you'll restart almost from the point you left off. Go-go-go, says the game, and from start to finish, it's hard not to.