Implementation can only carry imitation to a point. If Dark Sector’s soulless, emo-tinged Hayden Teno is anything to go by, his BioShock-style elemental powers slapped onto ubiquitous cover mechanics, a game can be stitched together with scarcely a blemish, but it’s the seams of construction that reveal the patchwork within.

It’s a danger to which inFamous’ identifiable blend of swiftness and muscle could have fallen easy prey: as the bald-headed Cole, you can scamper up structures in a series of pivots and shimmies akin to Assassin’s Creed’s Altair and plummet back to the ground with the hammering power of Crackdown’s hulking coppers.

But rather than a Frankenstein assemblage of latterly sandbox heroes, inFamous’ design hinges on the underpinnings of its developer’s past. Granted, after years of reiterating Sly Cooper, developer Sucker Punch has sustained a legacy of crafting familiar platformers with a simple edge: controlling a character with distinctive grace and ease.

Cole inherits the nimble tiptoe of the thieving Sly crossed with the weighty pummel of superpower; a fusion of elegance and strength that few developers can match. He skates along wires that crisscross the cityscape, glides through the air on a cushion of electricity and dishes out electrical blasts, sending hoodlums careening off rooftops.

Ease may pervade control, but there’s much to be mastered: one thoughtless move and a hail of gunfire proves you’re a downright pansy when taking bullets. Yet Sucker Punch commands the mounting complexities with sophistication, leading players skilfully along by tying Cole’s toolset to Empire City’s electrical grid – each rebooted sector equating a newly introduced power.

Hop on the train tracks and use the constant current to accurately snipe thugs while whizzing along rails. Blast shock grenades backward in an electrical gust, making each lobbed orb stick to an enemy before detonating in a fury of explosion. The toolset is perpetually broadened, even to a point where the controller eventually feels the slightest bit overloaded.

Yet such mechanical beauty reaps nothing without a complementing urban sprawl, and Empire City’s skyline of dilapidated buildings and ramshackle slums are harmonized with Cole’s leaps, zaps and bounds. Every structure can be scaled from top to bottom and each decayed city block is webbed with interconnected currents, seamlessly propelling you toward the next distraction.

Because if Half-Life 2’s towering Citadel represents a constant and looming goal in the distance, always drawing you forward, so too do the landmarks that peak from Empire’s slums. If it’s not the mountainous pile of trash that a gang of hobos has piled toward the sky, it’s a collectible blast shard sitting atop a barely reachable ledge.

Diversions are plentiful, and missions uphold the game’s central conceit that there’s always a perfect place for combat. Keep a train rolling as its human generator and the battles that crop up in between can be carried out on your terms: play it at street level with a near endless source of electricity, or forgo power and take to the rooftops where accuracy is key.

Despite the grace of its central mechanics, though, inFamous teems with rough edges. Enemies will spawn out of thin air, hording and whittling your health to nothing in an instant. Or they’ll clip into a building’s side, remaining there until you zap them free. Even the wonky animations of the populace produce hysterics, each face strangely contorted atop a mannequin’s body.

It culminates as a toy box that tries its damndest for believability, yet reluctantly settles in Crackdown’s synthetic territory. And with so much heavy grit overbearing its world, it almost seems as if Sucker Punch isn’t entirely aware of what inFamous gets so right. Because just like the mischievous racoon before him, Cole’s blend of strength and light-footed style is of a calibre all its own – beyond a playground of amusement, he needs nothing more, nothing less.