Video Game: Gameplay Tips for Infamous

Infamous is one awesome game where you use electric superpowers and choose to be either a superhero or a supervillain. However, all the power in the world means jack squat if you don't know how to use it. This game can be challenging, to the point of aggravation. It will take hours to traverse across the map and fight bad guys all along the way. Having played the game twice now, I've found that the following practices and techniques can turn this game into a rather easy and enjoyable affair.

Less yapping, more zapping!

IGN Articles
PS3 Trophy Guide
Infamous Wiki

General Tips

• Like many of my favorite games, this is an exploratory open-world setting. After the first mission or so, you'll be given free-reign over Empire City. Each island unlocks after key events in the story, but you will be free to run around all parts of the unlocked islands to find a vast amount of collectables, side missions, and "dead drops." There are huge advantages to finding the blast shards, which will give you more battery cells and a slight experience bonus. Doing the side missions will not only net you more experience and kills, but will liberate the islands little-by-little, and drive away all the crazy gang members. Finding all the dead drops, however, won't earn you much of a reward, outside of a trophy and some mildly-interesting background information.
• Finding the blast shards can be a royal pain. They are everywhere - something like 300 in total - but finding every single one will take some serious time and devotion. Fortunately, it is easy to find most of them; you can just push down on the L3 button and look for the blue dots on the minimap. If you're looking for every single one, it might behoove you to sweep through each unlocked island block-by-block, finding and collecting every shard you see. Online maps may be able to help you too.
• Like I said before, the dead drops don't do much, but if you really have a burning desire to find them all, they're easy enough to find. When you push down on L3, a little gray circle appears on the minimap that'll indicate the direction of the closest satellite dish. You'll know you're close to it when you hear its respective sound effect (a bunch of beeps and noises).
• There is a caveat to doing the side missions. If you complete all the side missions and take over every part of every island all at once, you'll make it nearly impossible to complete all the stunts and earn all the combat-specific trophies. If you're aiming to complete these trophies, you will want to have an abundance of enemies around. At some point, you will need to blast three of them off of a rooftop, or kill so many from a moving train; it's much easier to complete these tasks when there are still bad guys running around everywhere. It does get annoying when you're always getting shot at in every street block, but it's worth putting up with to get the stunts and combat trophies in the long run. After completing those, then you can hack away at all the side missions.
• Toward the end of the story, you may find yourself hard-pressed to rack up enough experience points to unlock your powers (this is especially challenging for getting the trophies for buying all good or all evil powers). Story missions often give you loads of decent experience points, but side missions help too. If you're at the final mission and want to unlock those last few powers before beating the story (which, in turn, could require thousands of xp), I found that you can farm for xp by doing side missions over and over again. To unlock the last bolt upgrade, I actually played a side mission repeatedly where I had to destroy a tar truck. You can't replay completed side missions, so when I saw I played this repeatedly, I mean I purposefully died and restarted the mission. This truck always had an escort of RPG-wielding bad guys and a conduit, so killing all of them over and over again netted at least 100 xp or more each time. And since these guys respawned every city block, I just followed the tar truck and killed bad guys until I inevitably died, taking too many shots in the chest or something. Xp earned during this mission never went away, so it just kept building, until I got the 12000 points I needed.
• Throughout the game, you'll often have to make the choice between being good and being evil. You could flip-flop all you want, but it's strongly NOT recommended. If you want to unlock the right powers and earn the right trophies, you'll have to decide early on if you want to be good or evil, and stick with that decision all the way through. A few mistakes won't hurt much, but the major story-based decisions should be consistent all the way through. There are naturally advantages to either side; being good will earn you xp bonuses for healing people, and you'll be loved, whereas if you're evil you can cause all the collateral damage you want without a care in the world. The actual narrative is generally the same for either path.
• There's not much else to this game; just run across the map from one exclamation point to the other to play through the story, and you'll beat it in a week or so.

The Hardest Parts

• Whether you play this game on normal or hard, there are a few tricky spots in the story-based missions that you'll need to be careful with, because the bad guys will be relentless and victory will be harder to achieve.
• The Bus Escort:  Playing this level is a royal pain.  In fact, I believe most every escort mission in every game out there is a royal pain.  But the bus level here is especially painful, because gangstas will come out of the woodwork with RPGs at every corner, threatening to blow your bus sky high.  Playing this level on hard, however, I found that it can be a surprisingly easy affair.  The trick is, jump off the bus any time you see red blips appearing on the minimap.  Enemies will then focus on you, rather than the bus, and if you do this frequently enough, there will only be a few enemies to deal with at a time.  This gets nearly impossible when you cross the bridge, but the two factions will fight amongst themselves, so you should be able to get by unscathed as long as you don't engage them.  You will still need to clear a path and deflect the rockets though.  After crossing the bridge, continue to take out bad guys little-by-little, jumping off and on the bus as necessary.  Be sure to drain power from the bus when you're low, and keep and eye on the bus' status on the upper-right corner of the screen.
• Powered-Down Areas:  When powering up the different islands of Empire City, you will want to reach the manhole as quickly as possible, but there may be a huge amount of bad guys swarming around the area.  It seemed especially challenging in the Warren.  My recommendation is to use the rooftops and train tracks as often as you can, for they will keep you safe (at least somewhat) from any turrets.  If you're playing for evil karma, you can always bio-leech your enemies for more power (well, heck, you could bio-leech as a good guy too and just make up for it later).  Otherwise, you'll have to use your power sparingly.  If you are running on the ground level, the alleyways can provide more cover from the enemies, whereas open areas will leave you vulnerable.
• The Prison Yard:  Probably the longest, toughest, craziest fight of the whole game.  It's set up like you're protecting Alden, but fortunately, there's no gauge or indicator concerning the prison's health or anything; you just have to take out all the bad guys (or at the least, the last two giant conduits that come barging through).  You will have a few platforms of infinite energy to use, so make the most of it and spam the heck out of grenades and megawatt hammers.  You may have to move around a lot, especially in the last part, to avoid getting swarmed, and to keep some distance between you and the giant conduits.  You don't want them to get too close, or else they'll step on you.  I found that I could run around the prison's entrance for additional cover; Zeke will cry about it, but as long as you don't leave the area totally, it should be fine.
• The Hunt for the Ray Sphere:   Tricky only because there will be RPG-wielding bad guys everywhere.  Fortunately, a lot of them are terrible shots, but it'll still behoove you to deflect the rockets and take out the enemies when you can.  The best that I can recommend here is to keep on deflecting, and drain power from your platform often.

• Boss Fights can be a bit of a pain too, so here's some info on how to deal with them:
• Sasha:  After making your way through the underground tunnels and liberating a few hostages, you'll have to fight this weird seductress named Sasha, and it will seem a bit annoying at first.  You'll be plopped in the middle of a lake of the weird black goo, which you'll want to avoid by staying on the concrete areas.  Sasha attacks with a blast that can send you flying backwards; it can be easily avoided by staying in motion and jumping from place to place.  At certain points, she will also summon the weird ghost-like Reapers, but they can be dispelled easily with a few blasts.  Toward the end of the battle, she'll also summon worm-like things that shoot orange rockets, so it's best to shoot them down as soon as you can.  Upon avoiding all that, you can defeat Sasha by blasting the heck out of her when she's not moving.  Eventually, after so much damage, she'll kneel and a green bubble will appear around her; that's when you run up to her and start a QTE, in which you smash the X button and move the paddle in the direction of her head.  You'll need to do this a few times to fully defeat her.
• Alden:   After traversing across the ruined bridge, you'll eventually have to contend with Alden in a big metal conduit thing.  The power conduit will throw some balls of rubble at you; these can be easily deflected back at it.  It will also shoot some flechettes, which can be pretty devastating; you'll need to take cover behind the barriers and use the shield power until it stops.  In between attacks, blast the sucker as often as you can; little explosions all over the thing will indicate a good hit.  You can use the small lights in the four corners of your area to recharge.  After a while, the conduit will also throw fire out at you, which can kill you easily if you're not careful.  When you see the thing powering up to shoot fire at you, it's best to refocus your attention on the ground, and run away from where the flames are going to land.  If you keep all of this in mind all at once, you can develop a pretty steady rhythm of attacking, deflecting, attacking, hiding, attacking, running, recharging, attacking, etc until the level finally ends.
• Kessler:  This frakking guy will seem impossible at first.  He attacks with devastating beams of power, an earthquake ability, a punch that blows the air around, a power that can pick you up and toss you around like a rag doll, and he shoots little orange orbs out of him that blow up.  If you can even get to the end of the fight, he'll also summon those god-awful flying robot things.  If you try to bum-rush him, he'll actually be harder to kill.  The trick to this fight is to actually focus more on dodging the attacks.  You can jump to avoid the earthquake as it ripples outward (and if those ghost things appear, just zap them to make them disappear).  When Kessler does his super-duper lightning bolt attack, just do a rolling dodge (pressing the O button while pushing the paddle to the side), to avoid each strike.  If you dodge three or four of these in a row, Kessler will kneel for a brief moment; that's when you throw a grenade into his face! He'll still be quick to move, so it's ideal to attack him as soon as he stops for that brief respite.  When you see Kessler zipping around in front of you, be prepared for a fast rolling dodge, or else he'll use that air-punching power that takes away a good chunk of your life.  Avoid the orange orbs, if he spits them out, and don't worry about getting thrown around, since that power doesn't really take away that much of your life.  As far as the robots go, take them out as quickly as you can; Kessler won't do much when the robots are buzzing around, but he won't be idle for long.  The key is to keep avoiding his attacks until he kneels; if you seize that opportunity over and over again, his health will drop little by little, until he finally dies! Then, be prepared for the awesomest twist ending a video game can offer (save for Bioshock:  Infinite)!

Trophy Hunting
Infamous is one of the most do-able platinum trophies out there, but it will require quite a bit of time and effort.  You will need to do at least two playthroughs to get both the good and evil story decisions and powers.  One of these playthroughs will need to be on hard.  You will need to be careful to play as strictly good or strictly evil, and you need to be careful not to miss any opportunities for unique combat or stunt situations.

• Playing through the story as good or evil will unlock a number of bronze and silver trophies automatically.  Beating Sasha earns you a silver trophy.  Making good or evil decisions at key moments earns a few bronze trophies (on a second playthrough, you'll need to make the opposite choices to get the opposite trophy).  Beating the game on hard gets you a nice juicy gold trophy.  Of course, maxing out your powers and karma earns trophies too.  Overall, just playing the game in full will get you at least 50% or 60% of everything.
• Beating the side missions frees up territory in Empire City, so for some of the silver trophies, you'll need to liberate all of the islands by doing EVERY side mission.  If you blast through them all as they unlock, you can take it in stride and systematically liberate the city by the time you reach the final story missions.  However, as noted above, you might want to keep a few parts unmolested, to work on the stunts.  Note that doing karma-related missions will give you a choice of one or the other; if you play a good mission, it locks out the evil one, and vice-versa.  In cases like this, you'll only need to do one or the other, the game will not expect you to do both.  Be sure to complete the mission that matches your karma, so you'll unlock all your karma-related powers.
• Finding all the dead drops is do-able without a guide, simply by following the gray indicator that appears on your minimap every time you ping the area with L3.
• Finding all the blast shards is do-able as you run around everywhere and ping the area with L3.  If you do need a guide or map to find all these collectables, one can be easily found online.
• "Frequent Flyer" should unlock naturally, as you float around the city with your static thrusters.  If all else fails, you can always climb some tall buildings, jump off, and float around for 5 km.
• "Hotfoot" came very easily for me as well, grinding on the train lines for 25 km.  If you're missing this trophy, be sure to jump on a train track in a powered-up district, and grind on it in a constant loop until the trophy unlocks.  It will take a while.
• "Electric Hobo" came easily for me as well.  If you don't get this from doing the story or side missions that involve riding trains, then just jump on top of a moving train and stay there for a while.
• Purchasing every good or every evil power will require a good amount of xp (earned either by doing loads of missions, or killing enemies over and over again), completing the karma-related missions (stick with all good or all evil, because there are exactly 15 good and 15 evil missions, and you need them all on one side or the other to unlock their respective power), and playing through the story.  You might want to focus on buying up all the karma powers first, before upgrading such things as thunder drop or draining or whatnot.
• "Casey Jones" took a while for me to get.  There are just a few missions in the game where you ride a train; be sure to blast as many bad guys as you can while you're doing those missions, from on top of the train.  You could kill yourself during these missions and replay them from the checkpoint until the trophy pops up.  I tried to ride the trains in free-roam mode and shoot bad guys, but the trains move really fast, the camera shakes too much, and bad guys are scarce, so it's best to do this in the missions.
• "Road Kill" can be earned from that mission where you ride the bus.  Contrary to what I wrote above, you'll want to stay on top of the bus and spam grenades to take out as many bad guys as you can.
• "Drop Everything" can be allegedly achieved from a number of tall buildings.  If all else fails, there's always that huge tower in the Warren, and I think that's where I achieved this trophy from.
• "AC/DC" came to me pretty naturally, but if all else fails, the sewer levels do have areas with infinite electricity flowing out of them.  You can always use up some power and drain from those over and over again.
• "Get Off Of My Cloud' requires a lot of high fall takedowns.  I pretty much used shockwave at every chance to blow bad guys off of roofs (a requirement for one of the stunts anyway).  A lot of bad guys will just fall off anyway just by shocking them.  If all else fails, you can play through some of the side missions that involve destroying the water towers, and blasting some of the Reapers off of those rooftops (and you can die and replay the mission over and over again).
• I don't even remember how I got the "Red Baron" trophy, but it's do-able by using shockwave and shooting the enemies while they're airborne.  Best accomplished with good-karma shockwaves, which suspend enemies in the air a little longer.
• "Fish in a Barrel" is easy, get some bad guys in the water and zap 'em! Repeat 50 times.
• "Oh You've Done This Before" came easily, since I stuck grenades on bad guys as often as I could.  You have the power, so use it!
• "The Hunger" is, obviously, best accomplished on your evil playthrough.  Must be enemies; bio-leech fallen enemies as often as you can.  It's advisable anyway to keep your power up.
• "Doctor Cole" is easily accomplished by healing any pedestrians you see on the ground.  People in Empire City tend to be frail and fall down very easily, so there are always people around to save.
• Reaching full good or evil karma is easily accomplished by making consistent decisions.  Saving people, stopping muggings, stopping abductions, doing good guy missions, and other blue things will reinforce your good karma.  Massacring people, causing mass destruction, bio-leeching everybody, and generally being a jerk will reinforce your bad karma.
• Completing all 21 stunts can be a pain.  Here's what you need to do:
• Crush:  Kill an enemy by crushing them with an object.  I accomplished this pretty often by using shockwave to throw cars and dumpsters all over the place; somebody's bound to get killed that way.
• Sticky Bomb:  Kill an enemy by sticking a shock grenade to them.  If you use shock grenades often, this should be easy; aim for a bad guy, throw a grenade, and they'll freak out when it sticks to them.
• Highfall:  Kill an enemy by making them fall from a high place.  Shockwave a bad guy from a rooftop, and this should unlock.
• Enviro Take Down:  Kill an enemy with an environmental explosion.  Enemies take cover behind cars and propane tanks often, so be sure to shockwave them often, and the resulting explosion will take care of this.
• Melee Finisher:  Kill an enemy with the last hit of a 5 hit melee combo.  Melee an enemy five times until they die.  Best accomplished on harder enemies, like the First Sons.
• Air Strike:  Kill an enemy with a lightning bolt move while Cole is in the air.  I found this pretty tricky.  Basically, you'll need to find a rooftop overlooking some enemies, jump down, and blast away at them.  Hopefully, something will hit.
• Bast & Bolt:  Kill an airborne enemy with a standard lightning bolt attack.  I generally got this by using shockwave on enemies, and then blasting them while they are in midair.  Can also do this on falling enemies.  Good-karma shockwaves will render bad guys suspended in the air for longer, making this a little easier.
• Flying Head Shot:  Take out an airborne enemy with a headshot.  I think I got this purely by chance.  Using shockwave, and then a precision bolt to the head should get this unlocked as well.
• Flying Melee:  Kill an airborne enemy with a melee attack.  I found that if you melee people enough times, one of them is bound to do a magnificent flip in the air as you kick them in the head, causing this stunt to unlock.  If all else fails, I read that you can trap a bad guy between you and a wall to force him to fly around.
• Unquenchable Thirst:  Induction grind and transfer to 4 different grinds without touching the ground.  I did this once quite by accident, hopping from all four different train tracks in a row.  Can also be unlocked from power lines, or a combination of lines and train tracks.  Just keep on grinding and jumping from spot to spot until you get it right.
• Premature Detonation:  Kill an enemy by making a bomb-equipped kamikaze enemy explode next to them.  Any time you see these crazy guys running at you with a bomb, shoot them.  You're bound to get this stunt unlocked in the natural course of the game.
• Right Back At Ya:  Use shockwave to deflect a grenade back at the enemy who launched it.  Easier said than done.  I read that Alden's tower is the ideal place to get this done, but I think I accomplished this through the natural course of the game, just using shockwave indiscriminately at anybody throwing rockets and grenades at me.  This stunt is bound to unlock if you keep working on it.
• Air Sticky Bomb:  Kill an airborne enemy by sticking a grenade on them.  Oh God, this was hard.  Probably easier done with the good-karma shockwave, which keeps enemies suspended in the air for longer.  In any case, use shockwave to throw enemies in the air, then throw grenades at them and see what sticks.
• Insult to Injury:  Stick a grenade onto an enemy, then kill them with another power before it detonates.  In the heat of battle, I often throw grenades and zap everything everywhere, so this stunt unlocked naturally as bombs and lightning bolts hit enemies simultaneously.  However, sticking a bomb onto an enemy, and then using precision, will have a higher likelihood of success.
• Whack a Mole:  Kill a conduit with a thunder drop move.  I found a spot where one of those metal conduits was (you know, the ones that spawn the little metal spiders and carry RPGs), and I just kept climbing a building and thunder-dropping on him until this stunt unlocked.  I've also read that zapping the big purple First Sons conduits, and then thunder dropping on them when they shrink, will unlock this stunt.
• Suspended Sentence:  Kill an airborne enemy with the thunderstorm move.  When you get the thunderstorm power, use it on those flying robot things, and this should unlock.  Otherwise, I accomplished this stunt by using shockwave, and then immediately summoning a thunderstorm.
• Up Close and Personal:  Melee five enemies in a row without using powers.  Do what its says:  beat the snot out of five bad guys back-to-back without zapping them.  Probably best done in an alleyway with Reapers, which can get bottle-necked and clustered together for easier beatings.
• Crowd Control:  Kill five enemies at once.  A good well-placed grenade, megawatt hammer, thunder drop, or lightning storm in the very middle of a cluster of enemies should get this done.
• Splash and Crash:  While in the air, hit an enemy with a lightning bolt, and then thunder-drop the same enemy.  Probably the hardest one of them all; I really hated this stunt.  Once, I accomplished this on the ground level by jumping, zapping an enemy, and then somehow thunder-dropping right on top of the guy, and then the stunt was magically unlocked.  On the second playthrough, I had to jump from a tall building, zap the enemy, and then thunder-drop to get it.  It's hard either way, because you'll have to be deft with the fingers:  push X to jump, R1 to aim, L1 to shoot, release, then hold down the square button, all within a few seconds.
• Have a Nice Fall:  Kill 3 enemies at once by making them fall from a high place.  I got this one doing one side mission for evil karma, where a huge number of dust-men were on a rooftop.  Just shockwave them in all directions, and a bunch of them will fall off the roof.  There are probably other good places to get this done; just be on the look-out for areas where bad guys are gathered on a roof, and try to shockwave them off all at once.
• Ride the Lightning:  Kill and enemy with precision while grinding on a rail.  Pretty easy stuff, just grind along on a rail, look out for bad guys, and then use a precision shot on them.  Since precision slows time down, it makes the kill pretty easy, especially if you aim for the head.  If all else fails, you can always go backwards and shoot them some more.  A few side missions have lots of bad guys within shooting distance from the tracks.