David “The Jaggernaut” Jagneaux here to give you my second opinion review of Sucker Punch’s infamous 2. For those of you familiar with the Koalition, you might already know that I have been following this game pretty closely, as I wrote a big preview of it before it released. You can also check out our official review written by Gary A. Swaby. I am here to give you my second opinion review, and I will instead be focusing on some of the ways this game differs from the first, instead of another overall review.
As a person that has played the original inFamous, the story feels pretty familiar to me, but I will summarize it briefly while still avoiding spoilers. After the end of the first game, Cole knows that he is going to be required to face off against “The Beast” but is not quite powerful enough yet. The game takes place in New Marais, Louisiana which is essentially New Orleans in an alternate reality. The story in general is basic enough to grasp, and has enough twists and turns to stay interesting. Next, I will cover some of the major changes between this and the first game.
One of the key changes is the way that Cole acquires new powers. In inFamous 1 you unlocked new powers by charging up electrical depots in different areas of the city. Once you have these powers unlocked, you can level them up and acquire some new powers and variations by spending the XP that you gain. The second game shakes up this formula a little bit. The really big/main powers are unlocked over time in the story similar to the first game, but the way you go about spending XP and unlocking other powers is quite different. There are many small variations on individual power types that you can unlock. Your power set is split into different types of powers for each button on the controller. In order to unlock those power sets for the ability to purchase, you have to fulfill the requirements, which usually involve doing stunts (stunts in the first game were mostly optional/side content.) After they are unlocked, you then have to have enough XP to purchase them. This is quite a bit different from the first game.
Another change relating to the powers themselves, is the powers that you can unlock. As I said above, you get different variations for each button type of power. For example: you start the game with the basic bolt, later on you unlock powers that are more powerful but slower, you can also get a machine gun like ability, or even some that shoot lightning in different ways. All of these are just powers that can be assigned as your default bolt, each tier of electric power has separate upgrades. inFamous 2 also employs a way of switching powers on the fly that is extremely streamlined and easy to use.
As for the game as a whole, they improved pretty much every aspect of the game. The graphics style is a huge upgrade on an already great looking game, animations are extremely smooth, the music and sound are all top-notch and fit their respective settings well and the story as a whole is told well with tons of choices throughought. The game also has two hugely different endings that really warrant playing the game twice. Just like inFamous 1, wheter you are good or evil changes powers you acquire, and this time around some of the story missions will actually be totally different.
The User Generated Content in this game could have been done a little bit better, it seems like figuring out how it all works is a bit more complicated than it should be, and most of the missions I have seen popping up have been pretty uninspired and less than thrilling. This can of course change over time, but as of now spending a lot of time seeking out user missions might not be worth the trouble. All of the sorting features you are afforded are really nice though, and they are seamlessly streamed directly into your game, so it makes things really easy to locate since they are green mission icons on your map.
Overall inFamous 2 is a pretty big improvement over the first one with welcome additions that add to the overall experience. This game plays almost identically to inFamous 1, but with a few changes and improvements. If you liked the first one, check this out as soon as you can. If you have never played the series, go buy the first one and play it, then play this one. It really would be best to play the first game since the stories are directly connected and follow the same storyline. Not to mention the series will just be that much better.
I hope you enjoyed my second opinion take on inFamous 2, overall my view of the game is very similar to our official review by Gary A. Swaby as you can see, and I hope this gave you a bit more insight into one of the PS3’s best exclusive games.
