Infamous: Second Son
Infamous is very much a game focused around empowering the player – there are story elements and a few limitations in the name of progression, but for the most part it’s the kind of sandbox game that gives you an area and tells you to have at it. The gameplay experience is very smooth – movement and combat are both easily manageable and there’s rarely any difficulty spikes or annoying elements you have to deal with – while this could make for an uninteresting experience, Infamous throws a variety of missions and side missions at the player to keep things interesting.
It also has the nice feature of having different powers that really feel different – each style contains a certain set of attack and movement powers, similar enough that no combination is completely useless in any situation but different enough that they feel different. In addition, a lot of work have gone into the visual effects and making the powers look distinct.
Different sandbox games focus on selling different experiences, Infamous feels like it’s selling the superhero/supervillain experience remarkably well.