Story
Right, so I’ll admit the story of Infamous wasn’t perfect. But one thing it did do was seem like it mattered. The basic story of Infamous 2 is that superpowered protagonist Cole McGrath travels to the city of New Marais to gain new powers so he can fight an unstoppable monster, The Beast. While there he gets involved in the dealings of a violent Militia who are trying to rid their city of any superpowered people and have imposed martial law. Now, after the intro you might as well forget about the Beast until about three quarters of the way through. It’s the main villain, the whole point of the story, but about half way through, I forgot it was in the game. They don’t mention it, in fact it just sort of appears at the end, then disappears then they have a chat and it turns out was Cole’s old partner in a shocking twist that doesn’t really make any sense. Oh yeah, spoilers by the way.
There’s really no sense of danger. About half way through you fight the chief of the militia who turns into a huge monster. And then you beat him. And he runs away into the slums. You’d think that things would be getting tenser as the game goes on, but you’ve just beaten the second most powerful thing in the game and you’re only half way through. Later on you fight him again and it’s even easier. Compare this to the first game, where you fight a huge cyborg, you beat him, but then there’s another more powerful enemy. Here, you completely beat him, and then you are still supposed to buy him as a threat. It... doesn’t work.
To be fair the story is no more ridiculous than Infamous the problem is that you just don’t care. Things happen and they either come from nowhere, aka the moment where your friend just turns up with a nuke that you’ve never heard of before, or they make no sense at all, that being the part where you are told to swap powers even though it sounds like a terrible idea since you already have the best ones out of the people you’re allowed to swap with. And you aren’t allowed to say no. So, the story is flawed. It didn’t put me off the game, but it really didn’t make me want to play any more.
Powers
This really annoyed me. At the start of the game they take away some of the powers you have in the first game. Then throughout the game you get these powers back, and they try to claim these are new. So you unlock lots of powers but nearly all of them are just the same as the powers as in the first game. Another trick they have is the ice/fire upgrades. You gain ice or fire powers in the middle of the game, so you’d think you’d gain some cool new powers like fireballs or freezing, but no. You just get upgrades for the powers you already have that look different, but pretty much do the same as the power you had already did. There are new powers such as the ability to pick up metal items and carry them and throw them, which is fun to start with, but just ends up making you have to some really dull and frustrating missions were you have to carry boxes around. And there are some new movement abilities that help you travel better but there are no new attacks. At all. You could claim throwing cars at people, but considering I have never managed to hit anyone with this power, so it doesn’t really count. Because it’s shit. Oh and there’s the amp, which is just a huge electrified tuning fork Cole can hit things with. But it’s basically just an improvement on the awful melee attacks in the first game and nothing new. Sure in most games it would be fine just to leave things the way they are, but this is a superhero game. You’d think they could give you something new.
Enemies
This is a short complaint, but the militia seem to be exactly the same as the reapers from the first game. Not in their story, but they have the same attacks and a similar look. The same goes for the ice warriors near the end, they have very similar looks to later enemies in the first game. And one of the more powerful ice enemies is practically the exact same enemy as one of the robots from Infamous but with ice instead of metal. There are also swamp monsters. Maybe it’s just me, but they really smack of Prototype, a similar game. I can totally see a meeting where the developers looked at it and thought “what good things did they have that we didn’t?” and blatantly ripping off the monsters from there. Well at least you fight them differently to most enemies which brings us to...
Gameplay
I could forgive all the other problems if it was fun to play. So luckily, for the most part, it is. It’s the same as the first game, down to Cole being almost magnetically attracted to walls. But, it’s still fun to roam the city searching for items and the attacks although nothing new are enjoyable. Except, there are still a few problems. Fighting the basic monsters is best with melee attacks. Problem is, there’s only one melee attack button, so when you’re attacked by a group it just means you sit tapping square for a few minutes. It gets old pretty quickly.
And the biggest problem with the game, the problem that almost made me stop playing are the mini-bosses. Not the bosses, no, they’re a challenge, but it’s fun. The mini-bosses however turn up in practically every mission after they’re introduced and they take a completely unreasonable amount of damage. The worst part is they’re not even challenging. They’re easy to beat, it just takes forever. And they are only so many times I can be bothered to fight the same dull enemy that takes about 5 minutes to take out. This really made me stop playing for bit, because I was tired of it. This is not a good sign.
So to round off, Infamous 2 is a similar game to the first, not bringing anything new except a worse story and some dull gameplay. It isn’t however a bad game. I still played the whole game through and enjoyed it. But it’s definitely not a worthy sequel or a particularly exciting game, just mediocre in most ways.
3/5
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