With the release of Infamous Second Son a lot of people were saying that Infamous 2 was a disappointing and skippable game, despite good reviews upon release. Having liked the first one and since I had a digital copy through PSN I decided to finally try it out myself. I'm glad I did; it was very good, but I also understand why it left a bad taste in people's mouths.

Infamous 2 has great graphics for a PS3 game, and a great and original design aesthetic. Virtual New Orleans (Not sure why they call New York Empire City and New Orleans New Marais but keep the real name for Washington DC) is a great place to set a game, and adds flavor to the open world proceedings with cool architecture, interesting pedestrians, and a bit of local mythology. The frame rate is pretty good most of the time considering the amount of action on screen and there are plenty of big detailed bosses.

Sound is not so great, with a lack of ambient noise or memorable music, but voice acting is very solid with plenty of cut scenes and radio calls.

The game plays great, combining traversal, relatively tight shooting for an open world game, various powers and utility abilities, and collectible open world hijinx. People who like collecting orbs in Crackdown or SR IV should enjoy collecting blast shards and dead drops in the inFamous games. The first area of the game plays great, and after beating the midway boss and opening up the next area Cole goes to a still-drowned part of the city where the floor can be deadly and a new type of enemy is introduced. It's a great change of pace and as you continue on the adventure you gain cool new abilities to play with and become more powerful, until you engage in a big epic battle and then...

You open up an industrial area with the same foes (but just more of them) and the story drags on and you fight the same minibosses over and over until by the time the game reaches its conclusion it has lost all momentum and relies on your desire to see the end of the story and affection for the first 2 thirds to push you over the finish line.

Sucker Punch seems to have believed that if fighting 10 bullet sponge enemies is fun fighting 20 is funner, and if a single battle with an Ice Titan is exciting, it would be great to fight 4 more before the game ends. Sucker Punch is wrong. I'm not sure if it was a desire to put in enough content to compete with other, longer, open world games, or just the incorrect belief that repetition is the same thing as challenge but it definitely doesn't help that the last area is not only boring looking and generally uninteresting in comparison to the first two, but also has less places to drain electricity, which you need for health and ammo, meaning that many late fights involve periods of fighting followed by periods of searching for ammo so you can rejoin the fray. I also hit two bugs during late game boss fights that forced me to reload my save, which isn't great when missions can take a half hour each. It makes sense that people's memories of Infamous 2 would become more negative over time as the first part of the game recedes in memory and the sour back end remains.

Overall inFamous 2 is still worth playing if you want an open world superhero game. The story is serviceable, the action is great, and the end part isn't bad, just not as good as the opening sections. If the game was a little shorter or had just a bit more variety towards the end it could have been a true classic, but what's there is pretty darn good and I am looking forward to Second Son.

P.S. Ice Titans are bullcrap. How you gonna only have one enemy that heals and that you have to melee part way through the fight before you finish it without clear instructions? Took me forever to figure out how to kill the first one.