Infamous 2 Review

2 years ago Sucker Punch, the developers of the Sly Cooper series, brought us a fresh look at the superhero genre by taking us into the world of a free-running lighting powered bike courier. It was a great game with some flaws that stopped it from being fantastic, and this time around Infamous 2 shows up with more or less the same stuff with some minor improvements. The Beast that Kessler warned about decides to show up a bit earlier than expected and completely wrecks Cole, so he heads down to New Marais to hopefully become strong enough to take the Beast out.

Infamous 2
Developer: Sucker Punch
Price: $60.00
Platform: PS3 (reviewed)

First thing to get over with is whether your progress from the first game and the answer is yes. If you got the either of the karma trophies you’ll start the game with the first level of that specific karma choice maxed out. If you got 25% of the blast shards you’ll get a free energy core, 2 energy cores for getting 50% of them. If you finished the game you’ll get 1000 XP bonus right at the start, and finally your karma choices from the first game influence certain missions and dialog.

I got through the game in what I assume is close to 15 or so hours, possibly a little more so yea the game is quite longer than your average game. Now I got that time and I still have around 70% of the side missions left to do and have close to 200 out of the 300 or so blast shards. The side missions thankfully have a lot more variety than the first game and you’ll do various things such as taking pictures of enemies for Intel, stopping enemy convoys, or helping out a super powered ice conduit take out his own friends. The main campaign also gets a lot more variety this time around and feels a lot more tightly paced than before, although the actual story ends up feeling a bit anticlimactic. By the end of Infamous you really wanted to kick the shit out of Kessler, but this time around Bertrand, who’s the leader of the militia, ends up being a good villain but ultimately a weak boss battle. The battle with the Beast at the end also felt like shit since it was basically “Shoot this guy while protecting this generator”, there was nothing grand about it at all.

This time around the game takes place in New Mararis which is basically New Orleans like Empire City was New York. I quite like this area more than Empire City since both islands are basically split in two sections that feel different from each other. While Empire City had 3 islands that all looked the same, New Marais has 2 islands that has a city area, a run-down shanty town area, an industrial sector, and possibly my favorite is Flood City where the entire area has been flooded which makes for some good platforming fun. I get the feeling that the theme for this game is momentum. Whether in combat or simply traveling around the city you’re always keeping up a sort of momentum of moving around the place as fast as possible and some new additions help with that. There are electrified pipes scattered around the city that can launch halfway up a building, the static thrusters (glide ability) have been improved and even get upgraded for added lift/speed, and one of the ice powers you can get launches you into the air with a pillar of ice. My major gripe with the climbing mechanic is still around from the first game in that climbing simply feels like you’re mashing the X button to jump up. It’s not like in Assassin’s Creed where everything feels so natural, Cole is literally just hopping up the side of a building as fast as possible and once you realize this it’s not as much fun as it used to be.

In the first game the interactive karma moments in-between missions where you’d cut down a person being hanged or not felt like a chore and just weren’t even close to interesting after the third time. This time around they switch it up with things like stopping muggings, defusing bombs or healing people for good karma and killing cops, civilians with blast shards, and street performers for bad karma. This all works fine enough; it’s just that the evil karma options don’t seem to have any depth to them at all. The good choices feel right and it actually feels like you’re helping out the city and doing what a good guy would do, it’s just that the ‘evil’ choices feel more like douche-bag choices. The only evil karma moment that happens (not including the mission karma moments) that actually feels evil is when you take out a group of police officers.

This is contrasted in the missions where you’re actually given a good reason to be either good or evil, unlike the first game where the karma moments were pretty useless except the last two big ones. As an example; the very first mission you have to power up a generator to lower a bridge and you could either power it down to lower the bridge or overcharge the generator causing it to cause the entire area to explode which will not only kill all the enemies waiting for you, but also the civilians. Kuo and Nix serve as your guardian angels on your shoulder and will make you pick who to side with in various missions. These are actually a huge improvement over the mission karma moments in the last game since both choices offer a completely different way to tackle a mission. In one mission where you must assault a mansion to save some police officers you could either take the good path to rescue some other cops who will then follow you into battle with the militia, or just power up a small train and smash it into the building causing everyone to die inside.

Combat feels improved as it should be and mowing down hordes of enemies while hanging onto buildings or poles is just as satisfying as it was before. This time around you’ll start with a few of the powers from the first game but you will have to relearn the rocket and sniper abilities which feels a bit lazy since they could’ve added actual new powers instead of having us relearn something old. Of course this time around you’ll be able to acquire either fire or ice powers during a major karma moment halfway through the game and they feel fantastic. Both of them are great, but I took a liking to the ice powers simply for the ice launcher power that skyrockets you into the air with a pillar of ice. That’s not to say the fire ones are bad, it’s just that they’re more combat heavy while the ice powers seem a little more for support since you also gain the frost shield which replaces the shield from the last game that blocks bullets for you.

Stunts from the first game return but they actually serve a purpose instead of being an annoying trophy (I’m looking at you knock 5 enemies off a building with the alpha blast move stunt). This time around you’ll unlock new powers by completing story missions, but they’re only ‘unlocked’ for viewing. To actually unlock them for use you’ll have to perform a specific stunt such as getting 10 direct hits with the rocket power to unlock the sticky rocket. Once you do that you’ll be able to spend your hard earned XP to buy them. Besides increasing the amount of powers you’ll get Sucker Punch has also added a neat ‘power swap’ feature where you hold down the right arrow on the directional pad and hit the R1 button (for example) to cycle through the various powers in that category. You have a separate category for your basic attack, grenade, rocket, R2, and X powers which have around 5 different powers in each category that can be swapped out (in that respective category, don’t expect to have grenade on all the buttons). The way it looks is nice and clean too with a transparent set of words appearing on the left side of the screen while the action is paused.

Graphically the game looks great and looks like a great improvement over the first game, I also love the smoke effect explosions and rockets leave. The characters animate great during cutscenes and Cole really shows some emotion this time around and Zeke also gets some great moments in too. The game has a good score with songs feeling appropriate for the area you’re in and the fights.

Infamous 2 comes packed with a new feature called User Generated Content (UGC) where you can go anywhere in the game and make a new mission. I tinkered around with it for a bit and it feels exactly like LittleBigPlanet where it’s easy to pick up and make a mission, but difficult to master. I’ve seen a few really shitty missions, some decent ones, and some great puzzle ones. When you turn UGC on your game world will be populated with various green missions markers where you can go play whenever you want and even rate them, there’s also a helpful filter so you can specifically have the best missions showing up. A neat option is the choice to tweak or ‘remix’ another person’s mission, although when you publish the mission it won’t show up as your creation, but as “A Remix of Bob’s Mission”. Another perk is that you can gain XP from these missions.

The Final Word
Overall Infamous 2 is a fantastic game with great updates over the last game, but overall more of the same stuff. You can expect to get around 15 hours in a single playthrough (that’s with messing with a few side missions and getting blast shards) and possibly extend that time if you enjoy the user created content..

– MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good