I think it’s safe to assume that going forward in the industry we’re likely to see more sequels to preexisting franchises than entirely original intellectual properties. In 2011 alone we’ve seen Dead Space 2, Portal 2, Crysis 2, LittleBigPlanet 2, Shogun 2, the Witcher 2—and of course, Sucker Punch’s electrifying sequel, inFamous 2. As we’ve seen in the past, sequels can improve on the ground work already paved in the franchises first installment, but with inFamous 2 it doesn’t feel this way—rather it feels like Sucker Punch rested on their laurels a little too much. Ultimately inFamous 2 is a lateral step—a step that doesn’t improve too much of what made the first game so much fun, and not fixing the problems that plagued it from the beginning.
In inFamous 2 you continue to play as Cole MacGrath, an unfortunate courier who was involved in a freak accident in Empire City that resulted in electrifying super powers. He used these super powers to take down Kesler, a nefarious super villain hell-bent on, not killing Cole, but making him as strong as possible. The reason? In a short period of time a massive creature known as simply, “The Beast” will haphazardly begin terrorizing the citizens of the United States and Cole is the only Conduit on earth strong enough to take him down. Kesler proved himself to be Cole of the future—a future where Cole wasn’t strong enough to take down the beast, resulting in a world full of death and destruction.
This time, however, Cole travels to the city of New Merais, a New Orleans-inspired metropolitan that has been ravaged by horrendous weather and traitorous violence. His mission is to find several “power cores” which will further increase Cole’s power—hopefully enough to take down the Beast once and for all. In case you wanted to know—yeah, New Merais looks a lot like Empire City. There are two islands separated by water and you can’t get to the second island until you first complete every story mission on the first one.
Essentially inFamous 2 plays similar to its predecessor. Same button layout, same powers, same mission structure, same overarching narrative—inFamous 2 does, in fact, feel like the same game only in a brand new location. To an extent this is perfectly fine—the original formula was lots of fun, plus the positive and negative karma gave you reason to come back to Empire City a second time. But if you thought the original inFamous was somewhat exhaustive than inFamous 2 may not be for you. I truly believe fans of the adolescent series will find the minor tweaks enough to warrant another purchase, but inFamous naysayers will definitely ware off the formula pretty quickly.
By no means is inFamous 2 a bad game, though. Besides being nearly identical to its predecessor inFamous 2 is tons of fun. You still continually hunt for blast shards, complete side missions to heal the city of crime, progress through a pretty interesting story, like before. But this time everything is much varied. Previous side mission were mostly monotonous but inFamous 2 features plentiful variety. Cole Powers are much more evolved, too. The pea-like electric bolt and the other powers from the first game still exist but feature much more customization. Cole also has a new melee weapon that looks like some sort of cattle prod. The melee system is great but sometimes the camera would get screwed up during the animations.
At some point in the story Cole feels like an absolute badass, whether you’re good or evil. All of the electrifying powers you obtain keep getting better and better, plus mid-way through the campaign you get to choose a new power (fire or ice). Basically by the end of the game Cole feels unstoppable. I played on the normal difficulty setting and had little trouble with any part of the game. Luckily the game features a hard mode that is good for a second playthrough with the karma you didn’t choose the first time.
The only significant problem with inFamous 2 is that the same bothersome issues from the first game still persist. The enemy behavior, for example, still has the same mentality of coming out of nowhere and killing you in one hit, whether it be from a rocket launcher blast or a shotgun to the mouth. The moral choices also seem very contrived and too obvious. It’s either you do the very good thing, or you do the very bad thing. No in-between. The game feels very unpolished in some spots, too. The audio cuts out randomly and visual glitches rear their head a little too often.
inFamous 2’s overall presentation is quite good despite being a little clunky here and there. The voice work is great and the city of New Merais can look stunning at time. The frame rate likes to jump all over the place, though. Sometimes you see the game running a 60 frames for a couple of seconds but quickly dip to 30 and sometimes lower in crazy situations. Cole’s power effects still look absolutely amazing, plus some of the city is destructible, like verandas and gas pumps.
One of the more controversial additions to inFamous 2 is mission creator. When I say “controversial” I mean that one person will likely have a different experience than the next person. Basically it’s like the level creator from LittleBigPlanet or the track creator from ModNation Racers. The only problem was that I never played a mission that I liked. I don’t doubt that there’s a multitude of cool missions out there but I never played any awesome missions myself. The creator is also very complicated. It doesn’t feature a very good tutorial or guidance like LittleBigPlanet and ultimately becomes even more confusing because of this.
inFamous 2 is ultimately a very fun game that feels nearly identical to its predecessor. If that’s a bad thing, than it’s a bad thing. If it’s a good thing, than it’s a good thing. There really isn’t a clear-cut way to ultimately decide whether its familiarity is a hinderance or not. Nonetheless, inFamous 2 is a lateral step—it doesn’t do anything especially new or groundbreaking and still features some annoying hinderances that plagued the original. It is quite addictive, though, and if you have the patience to trek through another superhero romp than by all means, play inFamous 2. I just assumed it would have been generally more polished.