Review: inFamous 2

On paper, Sucker Punch’s inFamous 2 seems like a great concept. It places you in the role of a super hero, and you have the freedom inherent to an open world. While the core combat and movement mechanics are fairly entertaining, the game as a whole is simply too generic. The characters are uninteresting, the storyline is forgettable, and most importantly, the missions are extremely repetitive. Add in some puzzling design decisions, and you’re left with an experience that’s difficult to recommend.

Your character, Cole McGrath, is bestowed with the power of electricity. During combat, you mostly shoot different types of bolts at enemies, and can recharge by taking power from any electrical object. Your abilities also extend to more interesting uses such as picking up and throwing objects as heavy as cars, throwing electrical grenades, or unleashing a shockwave when you land. You also have a melee weapon, which can be useful when enemies get close.

In a vacuum, these combat abilities are enjoyable; however, the enemies you fight are so repetitive that it spoils the experience. Around three quarters of the enemies you will fight are generic foot soldiers that just shoot at you and occasionally throw grenades. Because you’re so powerful, most missions have to throw a large number of enemies at once. You’re surrounded, can’t really effectively take cover, and so you have to run around and pick off enemies one by one.

There occasionally are bosses that require some strategy to defeat. Some of them have weak points, or others are vulnerable when doing a particular attack. My favorite strategy, which seems to work against most bosses, is to throw a lot of cars at them. While throwing cars does use up your energy fairly quickly, it is fairly trivial to recharge your power.

After you spend 5-10 minutes defeating a boss, you may get some sense of satisfaction. However, that satisfaction is quickly drained the second, third, and fourth time you fight the same exact boss. Apparently the designers felt they needed the game to be longer, so in many instances a boss character is later reused. Not only do you have to fight the boss, he now also has 10+ foot soldiers to go with him! There are some unique boss fights, but most of the other bosses come back for these encores no one wanted. At a certain point, I started cancelling side missions if I saw I would have to spend the time killing a mini-boss once more.

The movement mechanics are really the only aspect of the game I consistently enjoyed. The gliding feels really good, much like the gliding in Arkham Asylum. You can also zip around the city by grinding on power lines, and it’s entertaining in an early Tony Hawk sort of way when you’re jumping from one power line to the next. My favorite ability, which you get later on, is the electric grappling hook. Once you combine all three of the movement abilities, you can speed through the city, and it’s a lot of fun. I‘d argue that in many cases getting from mission to mission was more enjoyable than the missions themselves.

That’s because the missions are mostly forgettable. Many of them, especially side missions, literally just take you to a spot and have you attack waves of enemies. There are a few standouts (such as a latter mission where you have to take compromising pictures of a major character), but for the most part the missions become tiring. And there are a lot of missions. I skipped many side missions, but still invested some 15-20 hours in the game. I can’t bear to think how much the game would have dragged on had I completed all the missions.

Sucker Punch also attempted to add some variety with user-created missions. However, most of the missions I tried just felt too detached from the game. One sample user mission had you go to an outdoor rave where you waited a while before you had to fight 20+ foot soldiers. Another one had you basically bowling by throwing exploding barrels at enemies. I took a brief look at the mission creation tools, and they seemed to be on the level of the Halo Forge tools. You might be able to make some odd minigames, but I don’t see much added value.

The other main feature of inFamous 2 is its karma system. In most instances, you choose between saving or killing civilians. If you kill them you slowly build towards being “infamous,” and conversely saving them will give you points towards being “heroic.” There also random events where, for instance, you might stop a mugging. But whether you’re infamous or heroic doesn’t matter all that much; you mostly just get slightly different upgrades to your core powers. Now it’s true that a few missions, including the final one, can be done two different ways depending on your karma. And while I do give Sucker Punch some credit for having two different endings, I don’t feel it adds much replay value.

There are also a plethora of minor issues that become grating. Like many modern games, inFamous 2 employs a desaturation filter when your health gets low. Unfortunately, the implementation Sucker Punch settled on is obnoxiously overdone. Not only is there a desaturation, there’s also a heavy blur. So when your health gets low, it becomes extremely hard to see what’s going on, which to say the least is extremely frustrating.

A more egregious issue is the unclear failure cases for missions. There are instances where the game expects you to stay within a certain area. This is fine, but you’re not told about the restriction until it’s too late. You walk two steps outside of the restricted area and “sorry!” but the mission failed. There’s no countdown or anything of the sort. As soon as you walk outside it will fail. How a mechanic like this made it into release is befuddling, and this and other minor flaws do add up.

Had Sucker Punch crafted a better story, I would be a bit more forgiving. But inFamous 2’s story is laughable at best. As the generic super hero, there’s some generic big bad guy that’s coming so you need to become stronger. Add in some generic dialogue, and a generic cast of supporting characters, and that’s the story in a nutshell. In fact, in my estimation, many of the cutscenes are expendable. They add no real flavor to the game, and just unnecessarily prolong it. I don’t care about the generic motivations of a generic character.

The worst offender is the main character. Due to the aforementioned karma system, in every cutscene Cole basically is lifeless. He uses a monotone voice most of the time, and has no real expression on his face. I’d suppose this is because the developers wanted all of his cutscenes to be usable whether you were good or evil. But if that’s the case, what’s the real value of the Karma system?

In any event, while I did find some aspects of the game enjoyable, the never-ending stream of repetitive missions made my experience one to forget. If you’re a PS3 fanboy and want to rub an exclusive in your Xbox friend’s face, you’re better off sticking with the Uncharted series. InFamous 2 is nothing to write home about, and I’d only recommend it to someone who really enjoys open world games or comic books. Otherwise, there are better games to spend your time with.

VERDICT: SICK CANARY

InFamous 2 is available now on PS3. Reviews appear every Friday on Game Canary. The Game Canary review system is detailed here.

Categories: Reviews

Tags: inFamous 2, PS3, Sick Canaries

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