Infamous 2

[Jerthanis]

Anyone else played this yet? I was a huge fan of the original and pretty much devoured this one in a matter of days. The story and the characters receive a lot more attention, and I found I actually kind of cared about them by the end. In the first game, Cole was such a blank slate that he was impossible to see as anything other than the player. Trish was your garden variety love interest and Moya and John were just kind of 'mission commanders', telling you where to go and didn't have much personality themselves. Zeke and Kessler were the only characters with real substance to them and Zeke was just aggravating. In the second, Zeke hits the right balance between trusted confidante and comic relief, and he shows growth. New characters are quirky, interesting, and have actual personalities.

The villains, however are a lot less stylish and... I dunno, iconic, than Psychic Trash Robots or the Reapers were. The main villain for a large part of the game is kind of an uninspired bible-thumping good ol' boy with a motivation which skirts uncomfortably close to real world intolerance issues at times, and isn't handled expertly enough for me to forgive that. The presaged Beast is also in the game, but you barely ever see him except at the very beginning and very end.

Gameplay wise it's very similar to the original, with a few little shifts here and there, but it's definitely a case of more of the same. Parkour, Grinding on power lines, shooting lightning (and now some token ice or fire) in various flavors. I didn't notice nearly as many situations where doing the bad karma thing made things easier like in the first game... mostly it just shifted around what you need to do or who comes to your aid based on your choice. I rather liked the fact that doing the right thing was sometimes harder than acting selfishly in iF1... that there was the high, hard road and the quick and easy road.

The story begins rather strong, with actual subtext and themes it begins developing. About halfway through it starts getting kind of muddled when the third major villain group shows up around the end of the first island and aren't explained well enough. The ending...
Well, Massive Spoilers:
The ending may go down in gaming history as one of the most frustrating, and is perhaps a reason why really weighty choices in videogames might not be a great idea after all. The player must choose to activate the Ray Field Inhibitor, a plot device which will kill all Conduits (super-powered people) on the planet, including both Cole and the Beast, or he can allow all regular humans to die and have the world be populated only by Conduits... in which case he would survive. Either ending seems to end the story with such a firm finality that it's almost painful, especially since I actually cared about these characters now! I would almost describe Kuo's final scene as heart-wrenching. Somehow death is easy to get desensitized to in videogames, so when a character in a videogame really treats it appropriately it's almost shocking.

Just before the picture faded to credits, a lightning bolt struck Cole's coffin, so it's possible they'll revive him for a third installment, but I'd actually bet dollars to donuts that this is the end of Cole, and of the inFamous storyline with him. I'd guess the lightning bolt was just a thematic sign off for the character. Unfortunately.

[Typewriter]

I completed the game as a good guy. It was... fun? I guess.

I don't know I got angry a lot whenever Cole would refuse to climb a ladder or grab poles directly in front of him, but then the game would make some kind of bad joke and I would feel better.

I just felt like the game was small and kind of boring at times.

The story missions were fun, but any time you got more powerful abilities the game would just up the opponents you were fighting. For every step forward you'd take 2 steps back.

The side missions were OK, but they wandered between way too hard and way too easy.

The street missions (defuse bombs, mug people, muggings, etc.) were annoying as hell because it's the same three things over and over and over and over.

Collectibles were almost too easy. By the time I got the power that shows the nearest orb I only had 4 left to collect, and only 2 of those were because I missed them. The other 2 were simply an area I hadn't gone to yet.

What really disappointed me though was the powers. Everyone in the world can fly aside from Cole apparently, and all you get is the ability to ride rails and power lines kind of quick. Sure, as the game goes on you get a couple of other abilities, but nothing worthwhile. The tether? That power was slow as hell, and it took so long to hook that you couldn't really do it in midair. The ice jump was nice, but R2 was the most overused ability slot. And then your attacks? I felt like I was hitting monsters with a fly swatter when I used my regular attacks, and if I used my special attacks I'd be out of energy in 3 seconds.

I don't know, I think I enjoyed the game... I just keep thinking about Just Cause 2 and how that game takes place on a map that I think is literally 10x bigger and is more fun and open with a more enjoyable travel system. This game was fun, but it's nowhere near what it should have (or could have) been.

[Eliirae]

I'd recommend sticking to Just Cause 2 in that case. InFamous has always been about the story and not having three/four giant landmasses for you to explore just for the sake of exploration.

I enjoyed the game a lot, but it is much more glitchy than InFamous 1 was. Given the time that has passed between InFamous 1 and 2, I sure do hope it wasn't the result of developers screwing around for a few years then deciding at the spur of the moment they need to release another InFamous game. Something patches can take care of, though.

[Typewriter]

I'd recommend sticking to Just Cause 2 in that case. InFamous has always been about the story and not having three/four giant landmasses for you to explore just for the sake of exploration.

I enjoyed the game a lot, but it is much more glitchy than InFamous 1 was. Given the time that has passed between InFamous 1 and 2, I sure do hope it wasn't the result of developers screwing around for a few years then deciding at the spur of the moment they need to release another InFamous game. Something patches can take care of, though.

I'm not really sure you could say Infamous has 'always' been about the story, when there have only been 2 games so far, and the plot in both has been mediocre to interesting at best.

For the record I wasn't trying to say that Just Cause 2 was a benchmark for sandbox games or anything, just that from the first to second games in that series they made vast improvements and created a travel system that was both efficient and fun. GTA continually gets bigger and broader in scope. Saints Row is making fun of the entire genre and having a good old time doing so. And then you have Infamous.

Infamous is trying very hard to be a comic book superhero game, but it doesn't go a long way towards making me feel heroic or awesome. The area to explore is small and traveling around it feels like a chore. I'd be perfectly fine with the game being small if they had given you some more interesting methods for exploration, but as it is you have 4 rails that you can use to skate around quickly, but they're not place conveniently, and aside from that you have to rely on weak parkour and lame jumps to get anywhere.

I used Just Cause 2 as an example because it makes me feel like more of a superhero than Infamous 2, and it does so in a game that's 10x the size. Infamous makes me feel like a piece of moist tissue paper.

[Jerthanis]

Yeah, the game didn't grow its gameplay, and the area is about the same size as the first game. Showing collectables on the minimap was a mistake, since it makes collecting them trivial. I can see not liking inFamous 2 for being, essentially, inFamous 1 with more bugs and a different, but similar map, different but similar powers, and different but similar enemies.

However, I'm not sure how you don't feel powerful hurling cars at building sized monsters, and if you were disappointed in the game getting harder as it went, I'm surprised, since a difficulty curve is what I kind of expect out of any game. I played it on Hard and wished it were harder, so I'm not sure what you mean by it making you feel like moist tissue paper.

The fun, for me, in Infamous 2's travel system comes from its limitations. You can't just proceed in a linear path and expect it to be your fastest method. You've got to pay attention to your environment, see where grinding wires are and where you can get higher up easier. It made me faster when I got used to an area and I liked that. It made movement something I had to try to be good at, rather than something that happened automatically or efficiently.