inFamous 2 raises the bar for its genre.
InFAMOUS 2 Review
The original inFAMOUS falls into a group of games that I would call the future of sandbox gaming. Controlling an immensely powerful character while fighting worthy adversaries and giving the player the abilities to traverse the world very quickly but make doing so enjoyable by itself. The original inFAMOUS had all this in spades and one of the most well crafted open worlds that I have ever seen. It was topped off by a good story with characters that were relatable, the problems Cole faces in the original with his girlfriend Trish is still one my favourites in any game. But it was the super tight, fluid, responsive and explosive nature of the gameplay that made it so much fun to play.
inFamous 2 has less steam than the original because Cole is already established as a hero and his powers are familiar to anyone that has played the first game. inFamous 2 does a pretty good job of catching up players that aren’t familiar with the story and then it gets straight to the action. The Beast shows up in Empire City just before Cole, Zeke and newcomer Kuo are about to leave for New Marais so Cole can increase his powers by working with the mind behind the ray sphere technology. After a gruelling fight with The Beast, Cole must figure out how to increase his powers with this new technology and overcome The Beast, as well as a few other little problems along the way. Like a militia and ice controlling mercenaries that don’t take too kindly to you showing up in New Marais.
The story is somewhat lacking overall, Cole just seems to step out of character for instances every now and then and some of the staple cut scenes really don’t make sense when you’re playing an evil character. The original had a very well told story and the characters felt very relatable, especially Cole. This isn’t the case so much this time around, the story isn’t bad, but it just doesn’t feel as tightly paced as the original. The morality element from the first game returns and has the same gameplay influences over your powers. These are handled much better this time around, you can’t see the opposite karma powers and they are far more balanced. You won’t feel like you’re missing out on the best powers depending on what alignment you chose.
Cole has plenty of new tricks up his sleeve for taking out enemies, the melee system has been expanded and you can now pull of quick finishers or ultra attacks, it’s simple but very entertaining. Your core powers take the form of groups and each group has a number of different abilities, all of these can be swapped on the fly via a popup menu. This really amps up the excitement when in the heat of battle, you also gain some fire or ice powers depending on your karma choices and these round out the powers nicely. Cole’s agility is also one of the great things about inFamous and has been improved greatly, the improvements made to the combat and agility make it easy to overlook the areas that lack the polish these have.
The quality of the action does highlight the areas where the game is lacking the polish that the action clearly got. Bosses are very spam happy with their attacks and there are some enemies that have attacks that are almost unavoidable unless your alignment is good. This isn’t a game breaker by any means, but when everything else about the combat is as good as it is, these little blemishes stand out. There are also several glitches that happen frequently, the game crashes when upgrading powers a lot and some triggers for the ending of missions (especially the user made ones) don’t work properly.
Sucker Punch have paid a lot of attention to the visuals for inFamous 2, it doesn’t look significantly better on a technical level but it looks a lot more vibrant. Colours are varied and vivid, characters are very well realised and the world has the same sense of life as the original. The game world is about the same size as in the original and is as much like a city as it is a sprawling playground for you to enjoy. The flooded and industrial sections are easily the biggest stand outs , but that main island has some great areas that make New Marais a great city to explore. There are a few recycled areas from the first game, but unless you’ve played a ton of the original inFamous you won’t notice these.
A massive addition to inFamous 2 is the ability to create your own missions and challenges via the user generated content. If you’re into this kind of stuff, then this is a huge bonus, learning the system is quite simple due to the handy templates that explain how to do things. The fun really starts when you begin creating entire scenarios by yourself, some people are already creating some fascinating stuff with this and it ensures the fun doesn’t end once you complete the game.
After the first game I had extremely high expectations for inFamous 2 and all but one was met and exceeded. The only thing that is lacking is the story, it’s partly what made the first game as enjoyable as it did, the story tied everything together so well. That’s about the only huge thing that holds back the sequel, there are too many instances where characters behave, well, out of character. The minor issues with the enemies and glitches only really stick out because everything else is so great. inFamous 2 is a better game than its predecessor and makes good on nearly everything it aims for, hopefully Sucker Punch can maximise their blueprint next time around and you would be looking at one the finest games of this generation.
