Review: inFamous 2

This follow up to Sly Cooper creator Sucker Punch’s new IP from 2009 came out in the summer of last year.  Infamous 2 places you back in the shoes of the first game’s protagonist, Cole McGrath, a man who has developed electrical superpowers after being at the center of a massive explosion caused by an object called the Ray Sphere.

At the end of the first game Cole learned that a being called “The Beast” was on his way to Cole’s home town of Empire City and that it was up to him to stop it.  Now around a month afterwards Cole and his best friend Zeke are set to leave Empire City with NSA agent Lucy Kuo in order to find Dr. Sebastian Wolfe, one of the creators of the Ray Sphere, in order to find a way to increase Cole’s powers and stop The Beast.  Just as they are about to leave The Beast arrives and begins to lay waste to Empire City.  Cole attempts to stop it but fails and in the process has some of his powers drain, which gives you a reason for why you will have to work to regain all the abilities you had at the end of the first game.  After escaping The Beast, Cole attempts to find Wolfe and obtain items called Blast Cores that will increase his current powers as well as give him brand new abilities in order to make him strong enough to activate an item called the RFI (Ray Field Inhibitor) that is supposedly capable of allowing Cole to defeat The Beast. 

The core gameplay hasn’t changed much from the first game.  If you are unfamiliar with the gameplay in inFamous it is a 3^rd-person action adventure game where you can blast lightning bolts out of either one of your hands at a time in an over-the-shoulder shooter perspective.  Switching hands switches the camera to help you get the correct angle on enemies that are around corners or above ledges depending on where you are standing, which is great for sneak attacks on unsuspecting enemies positioned around the city.  It has an open city to explore which you mostly do by claiming on buildings using Cole’s parkour skills, like in Crackdown or Assassin’s Creed.  The climbing isn’t as fluid as Assassin’s Creed’s though and you can’t just point up and hold a button, you have to press jump repeatedly in order to climb a building.  The jumping and climbing in the first game felt very sticky to me, your guy would kind of warp to objects if you got close and while it still has that it doesn’t feel as controlling or bothersome as it did in the first game.  Before, I would take a very short jump off a lap post to get an enemy right below me and end up back on the lamp post. Now that almost never happens.  There is also some melee combat that has been improved this time around by the addition of a weapon called the Amp.  Every time you hit someone with the Amp it charges and after 3 hits you can execute a finisher that knocks out a regular enemy in a single hit.  The powers are still a lot of fun to use and you unlock new ones as the game progress depending on your choices and if you perform a certain move a set number of times.  A problem I have with some of the cooler ones like the shockwaves and grenades is that civilians who I am supposed to be protecting because I am playing as a good guy constantly run around like idiots and get themselves killed by my attacks because I’m fighting either an army or some giant monster in the streets and need to use area attacks.

This brings me to a weird issue I had with the game regarding the behaviour of some of its characters.  Cole has changed quite a bit since the first game and not in a way that is understandable from a narrative stand point based on the events of the first game.  Now there are cosmetic changes that fans of the first game will notice that don’t really matter, like the fact that Cole looks and sounds younger.  Those aren’t the ones I’m talking about.  I’m talking about the fact that Cole now acts less mature then he did at the beginning of the first game even after having the fate of Empire City put on his back, losing someone that was close to him and at the beginning of this game having his home town destroyed because he couldn’t kill The Beast.  A lot of times he cracks jokes and takes the missions far less seriously than he used to, even though as the game progresses The Beast makes his way across the country destroying city after city ending millions of lives. (Just need to interject that the addition of what is basically a countdown clock to the final battle between Cole and The Beast in the form of a map slowly be scorched by The Beast’s destruction is really cool.)  Zeke even gives Cole a type of side quest that you can find often by running around, like the hostage situations or bombs that need to be disarmed, which is to kill street performers because Zeke finds them annoying.  What kind of hero does that and what kind of sidekick asks him to?  I get that you don’t have to play as a hero like I did and can be an anti-hero instead and totally disregard human life, but that sort of behaviour doesn’t flow with the way Cole and Zeke react during the major cutscenes.  Clearly Sucker Punch was trying to add some humour and lightheartedness to the game as indicated by the random shop that can be found in the city called “red ring Electronics” that guarantees “repairs in only 12 weeks”.  So while it is nice to have these lighter moments and a game that just tries to be fun in certain places as opposed to being super serious all the time, it usually doesn’t fit very well.

This is especially disorienting because the game does a good job of crafting a serious story and manages to pull off an incredibly effective ending.  Obviously I won’t give away the ending but I will comment on the fact that it does an exceptional job of putting the game’s moral choice system to work.  While playing the game moral choices allow you to upgrade your abilities so long as you stick to one persuading you to actively choose either good or bad.  The choices throughout are fairly basic and inconsequential, which makes it easy to pick a side and just go with it without putting much thought into the decisions.  The ending however, really flips up the black and white choices and makes it really grey and it made the ending of inFamous 2 my favourite part and the thing that resonated with me the most.    

inFamous 2 is a fun action adventure game with a lot of cool abilities, some pretty solid characters, despite some incongruent behaviour at times, and an interesting story.  The ending transcends the rest of the game and presents a moral choice that is of Bioware calibre even though I feel it could have benefited from a better performance by Zeke.  If you played the first game this one is better, but not by leaps and bounds, so that should tell you whether or not you want it.  If you are unfamiliar with this game and being a super powered hero or vigilante appeals to you, then you should definitely check this one out.  While playing the first game is helpful to understanding this one, you should be alright skipping it if you can’t afford both or just want the better one.

Score: 3/5

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