Tag Archives: infamous 2

inFamous 2 released exclusively on the PlayStation 3 last week but you may not have heard too much about it because the E3 video game expo overshadowed everything else in gaming.

That’s too bad because this is a really good game that improves on the first one and introduces some quality elements to the franchise.

It’s one of those games that every PS3 owner should at least try. inFamous 2 is developed by Sucker Punch and is rated T for teen. It retails at $59.99.

Graphics

I don’t typically care too much about graphics, except when a game looks so horrible that it has to be mentioned. inFamous 2 is not that game.

Sucker Punch really upgraded every visual aspect of the game. The cinematic scenes look amazing and the world Cole maneuvers in looks far better than it did in the first.

The story/decisions

inFamous 2 picks up where the first one left off. Only this time Cole has to face a massive enemy known only as “The Beast,” which is basically a supernatural being that destroys everything in his path.

Cole’s overall mission is to destroy this beast. But Sucker Punch gets Cole to that point by sending him through a story that involves meeting new people, learning new skills and making moral decisions along the way.

The game’s backdrop is an open-world that let’s you decide when to progress through the story. You have the option of doing side missions or just climbing, gliding, and sliding along the city’s infrastructure.

What separates this game from other adventure titles, though, is how it combines everything so smoothly. Cole learns more about him capabilities and moral limits but never really loses sight of the overall mission.

Many sandbox games will often let you descend into a never-ending string of pointless side missions or quests. That makes it easy to lose sight of the overall narrative thread.

Sucker Punch gives us options but not so much that you go to far without building Cole’s physical powers and emotional makeup.

I do wish the moral decisions were a little more challenging and allowed for more options. One of the key things about inFamous is deciding whether to build your evil or good karma. Different skills unlock depending on which side you pick. It’s pretty much impossible, though, to fill either meter if you decide midway to switch sides.

That means you’ll more than likely automatically make decisions based off which karma meter you decided to fill. So you won’t really feel a connection to the results.

The basic idea is that Cole is deciding to either save humanity or destroy it. But I really never felt the weight of that while making the decisions.

The weapons

Cole’s super powers are based off electricity. He still manipulates it into grenades and bolts, for instance. But there are a few surprises along the way as you work though the missions and unlock variations of electric abilities and different types of powers all together.

What that means is that Cole still has some really cool powers. Unfortunately, Cole’s overall weakness is still there. Playing the middle difficulty, I found that Cole was routinely overpowered by a group of bad guys. Few of his powers are useful for crowd control and he tends to take more damage than he inflicts.

So you’ll have to run around a good bit to let his health regeneration and to recharge his powers using nearby electrical sources.

That doesn’t really take too much away from how great it is to wield electricity. It just means you’ll have to duck behind cover more than you might want to.

Build your own

Perhaps the biggest feature added to inFamous 2 is the mission creation tool. With it, you can build your own level from scratch or tweak existing templates. The options to this tool are impressive and it’s obvious that the developer wants gamers to create their own experience.

Some of those missions or games already created are really fun to play. My problem with the tool is that I think it will be far too difficult for most gamers to understand. It took me hours before I felt comfortable enough to create my own mission. Even then I didn’t save it because it was horrible.

This is the kind of thing that more developers should let gamers do. But I think Sucker Punch could have boiled it down a little. Give it a try for yourself, though. There’s a chance I’m just too stupid to use it.

The good news is that I’m not too stupid to play the nice missions other people created.

Overall

inFamous 2 is one of the best games released this year because of it’s dedication to both a story and the open world feeling. You can do whatever you want without really feeling lost or disconnected from Cole’s main focus.

The game brings better graphics and a variety of skills and weapons to upgrade. But you might be left wishing Cole’s powers were a little more juiced up and be left bewildered by the game’s theoretically cool mission design feature.

I think Sucker Punch has done something pretty interesting with the sequel to their beloved sandbox superhero game. Despite many players working their way through the first inFamous game on the PS3 and successfully saving Empire City (New York) from the Beast, within a couple minutes of booting up inFamous 2, we find the city gets destroyed. So was there a point to the story in the first game? That’s how videogames go though. You save a world and you watch it get destroyed. Empire City isn’t the only thing that gets wrecked in this sequel though. Sucker Punch took their hit franchise and sent the sophomore release racing down the highway of ambition without a seatbelt.

inFamous 2 faces a few issues, but ironically, the biggest issue this game faces is trying to do too much in the game and failing. There are more storylines going on here than in those soap operas your grandma stays glued to all afternoon. Cole MacGrath is back and he’s facing everything the developer could throw at him. The game is larger than the original in just about every conceivable manner and that’s important because you need some place to stick dictators, plagues, monsters, confusion, friends, foes and friends that might be foes. Can I get a large fry with that? Cole didn’t get any French fries, but he’ll still fry your ass with his electrical powers; many of which are “new and improved”.

One of the cool things about inFamous 2 is that all those dedicated Sucker Punch fans that finished the first game get a little something extra in the form of importing inFamous 1 data to the sequel. Trophies, collectibles and karma from the original can all be used to get bonus XP for Cole’s new adventure. You’ll need the help too because you’re not just trying to save New York…., I mean Empire City. You’re trying to save New Orleans…., I mean New Marais. This contains different sections of town that range from Mardi gras style streets full of liquor and lights to the sad and water-logged “Flood City” which still sits partially under water.

Controls and navigation are pretty nice at first and feel intuitive. They don’t become “unintuitive” later on exactly, but they don’t fit the gameplay. That is to say that the game’s design goes a little off track and never really finds its way back later on. The controls and level design really say a lot about the mindset that Sucker Punch had while designing the entire game. By that I mean that they just seemed to get more and more confused while simultaneously getting even more ambitious. So by the time you get to the last third of the game, level designs just don’t make any sense. Cole can’t use powers due to certain environments or level designs (better yet, lack of level design). It’s really a shame considering the potential this game has.

The level design is huge. Sucker Punch created a massive world to explore and play in. The problem is that after only a short while of “playing around”, there’s not much else to do outside of the core game. One of the major identifying qualities of a sandbox title is the ability to do what you want and get outside the box of campaigns and story-based missions. Now while you can do that, there isn’t any real incentive to as the game progresses. This is where inFamous 2 fails to satisfy. The first game offered so much that it set a lot of high expectations for the sequel. inFamous 2 has tried to exceed those expectations, but instead of flying high thanks to the use of static flight, it just kind of hovers in place. This isn’t to say that the new game is bad, but Sucker Punch has failed to wow with this follow up.

The addition of user-generated content might increase the value of this game in the future and make the later wide open worlds a little more playable, but like many older gamers, I’d like to get an enjoyable and feature packed game right out of the box from the designer instead of waiting for other customers to supplement content the developer failed to provide. In time, inFamous 2 might turn out to be a solid game with lots of extra things to do. Until then, inFamous 2 stands as a game that tries to do too much and comes up short.

Graphics

9.0

Great looking game. Electric pops off the screen and worlds are beautiful.

Audio

8.0

There is something satisfying about the crackle of electricity. Very solid.

Single Player

6.0

Wonderful for a little while, but quickly becomes very boring.

Multiplayer

N/A

You can download content made by others in the future, but that’s it.

Replay

5.0

You have to want to finish once to replay it right? Not so much here.

Overall

6.0

inFamous is an expensive disc of what might have been but failed to be.