Fails to Achieve its Potential But Boy Is It Still Fun
inFamous 2 improves on the original in so many ways that it seems a shame to decide that it's not as good a game. Having romped through the adventure and had an whole bunch of electrifying fun, I put down the controller as the end credits rolled and had to reason out why I was less satisfied the second time around.
In recent times we've been blessed with sequels which have surpassed the originals. Mass Effect 2, Assassin's Creed 2 and Red Dead redemption were all improvements on the games which spawned them. inFamous 2 is better than inFamous in a lot of respects. It looks better, it has better powers, a better and much more interesting leveling system, more diverse environments, some stunning cinematics and you go into it without feeling underpowered for the first third of the game. Yet for all these positives Sucker Punch didn't quite bring us a great experience. A good one, even a very good one but not a great one.
Where inFamous 2 falls down is not so much in what it does but in what it fails to do. The introduction of new empowered side kick characters is fantastic and the potential for team based strategic combat, with which they teased us from time to time, was enormous. Yet they ducked out of making the most of the idea. The two new ladies in Cole's life only pop up and make themselves useful on odd occasions and when they do, the interaction between them and Cole never evolves. It was so easy to see how they could have continued to introduce new and ever more thrilling combinations of their powers. It would have made the moral choices that much more interesting. (Unfortunately they gave us the whole User Generated Content BS. Why developers do this is a mystery to me. Sure there are a small number of gamers out there who get excited about this sort of thing but they're minority. Most of us would have been far happier if they'd spent the time and effort which went into UGC on improving the game itself.) What could have been a stellar gaming experience was neutered. It's a huge shame because the potential for something truly epic was there.
This problem was compounded by a shamefully poor plot twist. I'll not go into the details for fear of spoilers but it was both way too obvious and underwritten. It takes a degree of talent to screw up in two antithetical directions at the same time but Sucker Punch managed it here. There was simply no reason to believe the direction they wanted to take the story. It was weak, silly and at odds with the established characters. It pulls the whole of the finale down. What should have been awesome and enthralling became irritating. To make the gamer believe in the scenario required a much more careful and detailed set of revelations and an element of foreshadowing. The odd thing is that the writers damn well should have known that. They wrote the same sort of material and much better in the first game.
For all the carping in the previous paragraphs I'd still heartily recommend inFamous 2. It is a good game, even a very good game. With the exception of a couple of the boss fights which were way too easy, the combat is fast paced, often difficult (if you choose the wrong tactics for the situation) and damn satisfying. It looks great ,it sounds great. The first and second chapters are enthralling, well written and keep you entranced. The voice acting and over all production values are superb (I wasn't a huge fan of the new voice of Cole McGrath I thought he came across as a trifle too flippant but it wasn't a major gripe). Collecting blast shards and dead drops was fun and rewarding. All in all it is a superior game. It just hard knowing that with a little bit more work, in the right places, and it could have been an epic one.
