inFamous 2

Oh gosh, inFamous 2. My first complaint with the original game was the story and how, aside from the collectable dead drops, there wasn’t a huge amount of obvious backstory to a lot of what was going on. Well, I was glad to find that in the time between the original title and the sequel, Sucker Punch have improved their writing a huge amount. Cole now actually had a proper personality to him which is the first major step towards actually making him someone that you can relate to!

The pacing of the story was improved hugely! There’s a long term objective established at the start so you actually have something that you feel like you’re slowly progressing towards overall while opening up districts and following the story in the meantime. That and the ending was much more enjoyable with a proper lead up to the final confrontation instead of just happening all at once as was the case in the original.

The gameplay hasn’t changed hugely, not that you’ll hear me complain, but it has been improved with a number of variations on different types of attacks, eg; numerous types of lightning bolts ranging from a slow, strong bolt to faster, weaker bolt and these changes span all of your skills which is a very nice change and allows for different strategies to be used in different combat scenarios. About midway through the story, you’ll also get an entirely new non-electrical subset of powers, the element depending on your karma choice, which adds a lot of fun ways to traverse around the environment.

The environment was very nice to traverse and has quite a bit of variation this time around instead of just being pretty much restricted to the same grey buildings. There are two main islands instead of three, however they feel much larger than those in the previous game and are split into four areas in total. You’ve got a nice tourist type area so it’s quite colourful with neon signs and the like, a less notable, poorer town, a flooded town (Spoilers: It’s literally called Flood Town) which gives a lot of room for grind cables and a more industrial area with large structures to explore.

I didn’t have any notable issues with Hard mode this time around, it felt like it came down to player skill instead of luck that you don’t get hit by cheap shots from the enemies. Speaking of which, enemies much more visually distinct so that’s a very welcome change, from me at least.

Oh lastly, I try not to focus on graphics since gameplay is really what it comes down to but I should really say that the devs have opted for less realistic art style this time around which, somewhat fits with the whole comic book. It’s aged quite well so far though and kinda grew on me pretty quickly.

Hmm, that’s about it. I really enjoyed my time with inFamous 2 so far and I’m very glad that there wasn’t a complete overhaul to the elements of the game that were perfectly fine as they were. My main issues with the original title were really just the pacing of the story toward the end, the lack of any proper goal and also probably the fact that Cole isn’t really that interesting but those things were all pretty much fixed for the most part. I’d definitely recommend inFamous 2 if you’ve played the first as it picks up almost straight after the end of the original game and expects the player to be familiar with the first game. Oh also, thank you Sucker Punch for not having reset all of Cole’s powers and made him start from scratch. I really hate when that happens.

Developer: Sucker Punch Productions
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Released in 2011
Platform: Playstation 3