InFamous 2 (PS3) Review

 InFamous 2 (PS3) 7/10

[THIS REVIEW WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS! READ AT YOUR OWN RISK!]

“I don’t know if you ever let someone down, got your ass kicked, or straight up failed. But those are the moments that define us. They push you further than you ever thought possible and force you to make choices. No matter what the cost.”

Hello everyone. Today, I’ll be reviewing the second installment of the InFamous series. InFamous 2 was released on June 7, 2011 for the PS3 exclusively. The game was developed by Sucker Punch Studios (who made the first game) and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Now, I have played this game in the past, but not nearly as many times as the first game. I’ve played the Hero side a couple of times so this time around, I decided to be a villain and do the Evil story. One thing I should mention before I start: I will not be touching the Festival of Blood DLC as I do not have access to it due to technical issues with my PS3. I know this game is almost 15 years old now, but I want to discuss spoilers for both InFamous 1 and 2. With that out of the way, let’s begin.

Our story takes place 2 months after the events of the first game. At the end of the first game, Kessler reveals his identity and a premonition that a monster will arrive that will destroy the world, The Beast. In those 2 months, Cole meets an NSA agent named Lucy Kuo who knows about the situation. She wants Cole to go with her back to New Marais and meet Dr. Wolfe, the man who created Ray Sphere technology and has the ability to increase Cole’s powers through the use of Blast Cores. As they are about to leave, The Beast appears. Cole attempts to fight and defeat it, but he is severely injured. Cole wakes up in a hospital bed and finds out that Empire City had been completely destroyed. While he’s recuperating, he’s preparing himself for the new challenges he’ll face and strengthens his resolve to defeat the Beast and save the world. In New Marais (New Orleans lol), Cole will come face to face with new enemies, the local Militia led by Joseph Bertrand, as well as other hostiles that’ll get in his way of getting stronger.

The best way to describe this story is that it’s unfulfilling and inconsistent. Let me explain. This story is just about Cole powering up to defeat The Beast. Nothing extra or exciting about it as opposed to the first game. In the first game, Cole had to figure out who sent him the Ray Sphere, what is the Ray Sphere, why him, and what he needs to do to get to it. Along the way, he’ll be carving out his own path on how to get there. Should he be a hero to everyone and save as many people as he can or go guns blazing and kill everyone that gets in his way, both enemies and civilians alike. There was also this whole massive conspiracy for him to figure out. In this game, it’s just him following bread crumbs and hearsay and stumbling upon the locations of the Blast Cores. Cole shows no initiative to find these things as opposed to the first game. Another thing, the Blast Cores should not have been the McGuffin to the game. Obviously make these relevant to the plot, but once Cole has them all, continue the story. Make his struggle with Bertrand go on longer. Make an actual boss fight with the Ice Soldier General. I’ll leave the rest of this for a discussion for later. But the overall story and plot with the game is very unsatisfying and it straight up sucks.

Let’s talk about the characters. Like I said earlier, Cole could’ve been better. Zeke now magically has mechanical prowess and he’s an engineer. Here’s my issue with Zeke. So in the first game, he casually mentions he makes “homemade batteries”. Okay whatever. But now in this game he now has the skills to make a Toa Tool for Cole, spotlights that can kill swamp creatures, and the ability to fix a very unique device that he should have no idea the first thing about (The RFI). The game’s only excuse for all of this is that he took shop class back in high school. That must’ve been YEARS ago. Where the fuck did he get all the tools for these inventions too? It’s one thing for him to be handy with tools and can create some mild inventions, but we never saw any of this back in the first game. I like Zeke. He’s one of my favorite side characters ever, but he just pulled all of this shit out of his ass. Next is Lucy Kuo. I’ll make this short and simple: she’s a Karen. Stuck up bitch that’s constantly preaching to the choir about being a good person, but then when the final decision comes up, she decides to betray humanity. Like bruh, how hypocritical can you be? Next is Nix. Nix is wasted potential. She has all of this anger and rage and hates everyone because society did her wrong. When she opens up to Cole about how Bertrand got his powers, I feel like this would’ve been a perfect opportunity for her to turn over a new leaf. She does have a “character arc” when The Beast kills her pets over in the swamp and sides with humanity, but she could have been so much more. Larouche is easily the worst character in the game. He is the head of the rebels that’s trying to reclaim the city from the Militia. This guy is inconsistent. So in one of the Flood Town missions, he mentions that he lost his wife to Hurricane Katrina. Earlier in the game, he’s hitting on Kuo like a pervert. How can you say you are a widower and then make a 180 and start hitting on random girls. He makes no sense. Thankfully, he doesn’t play too big of a role, so you won’t have to deal with him a lot. Larouche is just kinda there for plot convenience.

InFamous 2 has two main antagonists, as opposed to the first game where it was Kessler with Sasha and Alden as hurdles for Cole to get over. Bertrand and The Beast aka John White are incredibly well written. Bertrand is a devout Catholic who sees Conduits as a blight on humanity and against God’s design. He wants to use Conduits to start fueling wars and conflicts all across the world, putting them in a bad light and eventually have all conduits killed. Through his hypocrisy, he is also a Conduit. Bertrand is just an awesome villain and I love how his character is used as a way to bring religion into the story. In the presence of superpowered beings, it’s not too far-fetched to ask these complicated questions, and of course Bertrand offers a warped view on this idea. He’s also incredibly brilliant and if it weren’t for Zeke, he could have killed Cole. The Beast is another excellent character and adds a lot more depth to John. When Cole destroyed (or used) The Ray Sphere near the end of the first game, John got sucked up and he had to rebuild himself atom by atom. Eventually he came to and when he first appeared in Empire City, he was still adjusting himself and was in pure primal mode. Now here’s the interesting thing with John, and this also goes into another story aspect: John is a walking Ray Sphere. He absorbs people’s energy to power on certain individuals' Conduit genes, and in doing so is spreading and curing the plague. The plague is going to kill everyone who isn’t an active Conduit. John sees one solution to the plague problem, but there is another. Either way, people are going to die. John is a great character who develops a god-complex. Although I wouldn’t really call it that as he simply sees the best solution to an outrageous problem. He brings up a lot of ethical questions that also coincide with Bertrand’s, making him an even more compelling character.

InFamous 2 has two endings, as opposed to the first game. Regardless if you are good or evil, InFamous 1 ends with you defeating Kessler and getting the premonition about The Beast. This game gives you two options: Hero or Evil. In the Hero ending, you side with Zeke and Nix and fight against the Beast, using the RFI to kill all conduits, and saving the world from the plague. In the Evil ending, you side with The Beast and Kuo, hunting down the RFI to destroy it, killing Nix and Zeke in the process. You gain The Beast’s Ray Sphere abilities and you start going around creating more Conduits, trying to save as many people as you can from the rampaging plague. Now I’ve seen some talk that the devs originally wanted the evil ending to be canon ending, mainly due to some foreshadowing that they did in the first game and advertising for the second. Personally, I like both endings for different reasons, but from a gameplay standpoint, I have my problems with both, which I’ll get to later. Overall I like both endings, but I wasn’t super affected by either because the game’s story had so many issues.

So there’s a couple of missions I would like to go over. The first one is when you charge Fort Philippe for the Transfer Device. The mission itself is fine. It’s the decision on who you transfer powers with that’s the problem. So at first, Kuo wants to destroy it because she feels violated by it and wants it gone. Okay that’s understandable. Once Cole and the gang get their hands on it, Cole and Nix convince everyone that they should transfer powers. Kuo then says “Alright. If we’re going to transfer, it has to be me.” Why? Why does it HAVE to be you Kuo? Even if I was a good guy, why am I forced to choose Kuo? What If I want Nix’s powers? Her reason and logic here is completely retarded and serves no greater purpose. God I dislike Kuo so much lol.

The second mission I want to go over is the final mission in Flood Town, where you get to choose how to expose Bertrand. Kuo suggests doing some espionage and gathering evidence against the man and have the city turn against him. Sounds good. Nix is like “Fuck that. I want some pets of my own. Cole, you gotta help me.” What does this have to do with Bertrand? Even Cole thought that they were raising their own personal army to fight against Bertrand, which wasn’t Nix’s end goal. This whole mission is completely stupid and irrelevant to the greater story of the game. The mission is only there to stick it to Kuo.

The third mission I want to go over is “Conduit, Not Human”. In this, we get to see Kuo in action on her first day as an actual Conduit. When Cole first meets up with her, he starts yelling at her to control her powers. She’s brand new to this. Why the fuck are you yelling at her? Cole can’t be saying shit as it took him 2 weeks to be able to control his lightning. Hell, Kessler even said in the first game that a Conduit will be able to have full control of their powers in 2 weeks after first exhibiting their abilities. Cole knows this, so why is he yelling at her? So stupid.

And all of this brings me to my next main problem with the game. There’s no actual choice here. Let me explain. In the first game, Cole is given choices on how to approach certain situations. Should he start a riot and let the civilians take the heat or should he go charging in? Should he save Trish or the six doctors? Should he destroy the Ray Sphere or activate it again? All of these choices were Cole’s decisions. No one forced him to do these. Sure there were suggestions to him (such as John telling him to blow up the Ray Sphere) but in the end, it was ultimately his decision. In InFamous 2, that’s not here. There are no karmic decisions like that in this game. Cole is given options to approach certain situations (Like either freeing the police from the Militia to save Kuo or blow up the plantation and take out the remaining forces). Cole didn’t think of these himself. These were ideas given to him and the game forces you to choose either one of these. Because of this, the game also limits how you approach these missions as well. There was no inner conflict for Cole. The only decision that Cole makes himself is the final decision to either save humanity or betray everyone and join The Beast. At then end of the day, from a writing perspective, InFamous 2 never hits the same highs as the first game, even if it desperately wanted to.

The game looks great. Graphically, the game is peak PS3 hardware. I love the way New Marais looks as it’s suppose to be a New Orleans rip-off. You got the high culture areas, Catholic citadel, porn theaters, flooded neighborhoods, massive graveyard, and an industrial park. New Marais looks like it could be New Orleans. I also like the updated character models for everyone as well. I especially love Evil Cole’s design. I love the designs for Kuo (Conduit), Zeke (although I do miss his gold shades), and Bertrand. I love the enemy designs, especially the Ice Soldiers. Nix looks like trash though. I wish she had a different look. On a technical side, thankfully there were no game freezes or crashes. However, I did experience some clipping and unresponsive controls which resulted in me dying several times.

The music is top notch. A different sound compared to the first game, InFamous 2 went with a more organic sound to fit in with New Marais and it’s great. The use of the violins and saxophones and drum beats fits the game perfectly. They even got the drummer from Guns n’ Roses to help with the soundtrack. Now, this game has two soundtracks. Weird right? Between the Blue Soundtrack and the Red Soundtrack, I like the Red MUCH more. I can honestly say that the Red Soundtrack is one of the best video game OSTs out there, although low on that list. It’s so underrated. Tracks like “And I Thought I Was A Pyro”, “Plant Monster”, “Ascension Parish”, “Abducted”, “Junction”, and “The Railyard” elevate this soundtrack. 

The voice acting on the other hand is hit and miss for me. I like Cole’s new voice (Eric Ladin) to some extent, but Jason Cottle did Cole perfectly back in the first game. I don’t know why they got a different voice for him. Dawn Olivieri (Kuo) is probably the worst performance here as she talks with a lisp half the time and it’s just annoying. Underrated voices here are Bertrand (Graham McTavish), Zeke (Caleb Moody), and John White (Phil LaMarr).

So if you have played the first game, then you’ll know how the game plays. Open world superhero fantasy. This time, they changed a couple of things, and some of them aren’t for the better. First thing that bothers me immensely are the upgrades. In the first game, you can upgrade your attacks to do more damage and other things (bigger blast radius for the Shockwave, homing rockets, increase damage taken, etc.) This time around, you don’t upgrade your pre-existing abilities. You add on to them. You can switch up which types of attacks you can do (Alpha Bolt, Pincer Bolt, Skull Bolt, etc.) (Alpha Blast, Nightmare Blast, Punch Blast, etc.) (Alpha Grenade, Double Grenade, Sticky Grenade, Cluster Grenade, etc.). Yeah this is all cool and all, but these don’t really do shit if I’m taking a solid 5 minutes to kill my enemies. Because I was Evil, half of my powers were locked out, including my fucking Polarity Wall! That was in the original game and now you lock it behind Good Karma in this game? That’s bullshit. Oh but I get a fucking Lightning Tether that I’ll only use once (twice if you do the good ending). I also lose the ability to recharge as I’m grinding on rails. There’s so many of Cole’s powers that’s missing from the original game and it’s very disappointing. I don’t mind that Cole lost some of these powers because he almost died when he first fought the Beast but I don’t understand why certain abilities are locked behind Karmic alignments, or are flat out missing. They also could’ve gotten more creative with the extra powers that Cole gets. There’s so much you can do with Napalm Manipulation and Ice Manipulation. Another issue I have is that Cole just feels so weak compared to the first game. By the end of the game, Cole still feels just as strong as he does when you first get to New Marais. This is because the game focuses more on power add-ons and not actually making his attacks stronger. Some of these enemies take FOREVER to take down and part of the problem is that Cole just isn’t hitting as hard as he should. Hell, sometimes it’s easier to go melee mode to knock out mfs instead of endlessly blasting them with electricity.

Another issue I have are the enemies, more specifically a couple of specific enemy types. First is the Devourer for the Swamp Monsters. This fucker is a walking tank and the only way you can damage it is shooting its mouth. Problem is, this is such a small window that you’ll only get two hits in before he attacks. If you’re close, he’ll grab you with its tongue. If you’re any other distance, he’ll launch a barrage of throw up at you that can kill you in one round if you’re not careful. The Devourer is one of the most unfair enemies I've had the displeasure of fighting. What’s worse is the Crusher from the Ice Soldiers. These fuckers are like linebackers. They’re strong, they’re fast, and their attacks are utter bullshit. Once they start charging at you, you are fucked. There’s no way to dodge them unless you clip through their ice. These guys are the worst enemies ever and whoever designed them needs to be slapped. The final enemy I want to talk about is the Ice Titan. Not nearly as bad as the Crushers, but still somewhat annoying. These guys are the size of the Devourer. Fighting them is actually fun, but here’s my problem. They walk in such a way that they sway back and forth. When they do this, they completely dodge all of your attacks. How does a giant hunk of ice dodge like that? That’s some Dark Souls boss bullshit right there.

The missions for the game are completely uninspired. I know I touched upon this earlier, but I wanted to go just a little bit more in depth. ALL OF THE SIDE MISSIONS ARE THE SAME! Go here and kill all enemies. Go here and kill all enemies. Go to the water and kill enemies on a boat. Its all the same fucking shit. There’s like only 3 missions that come to mind that aren’t like these, which are few and far in-between. There’s no minor karma missions like in the first game either. In the first game, there was a side mission where you have to escort this kid to his locker and as a reward he’ll give you a blast shard. Karma moment: take the blast shard or kill him and take the whole stash. There are no missions like that here. The only karma missions here are the 15 Good/Evil ones, which might I say suck as well. Let’s go on patrol and kill Militia/Ice Soldiers. It’s all the same. The only ones that are somewhat interesting are the good side missions where you team up with an Ice Soldier to take down his crazy brothers and then he goes crazy so you have to kill him.

           This game also has User Generated Content (UGC for short). UGC is user created missions that don't tie into the main story. These missions add immense replay value. Sadly, because the game is old, there's no new content (at least from what I saw). Sucker Punch's own missions are still available and pre-existing user generated missions. Honestly these are only really necessary for getting the platinum trophy, but if you want to fuck around with the game, these missions will fill that empty void inside. Last time I played this, I remember this mission where Zeke created a time machine and Cole was hopping through time. I wish more games had a system like this.

The bosses for the game are a complete joke. And no, I don’t count Ravager, Hive Lord, Devourer, Crusher, and Ice Titan. Those are not bosses. They’re just special enemies with a large health bar. With that said, the only bosses in the game are Bertrand and the final mission. The first Bertrand fight was cool. Cole versus a giant monster was awesome. Bertrand’s second fight was bad though. It’s literally the same thing except with two auto scrollers thrown in. What they should’ve done is give Bertrand a second health bar and have him summon as many monsters as possible. While everyone is fighting off this overwhelming force, Cole will do a 1v1 against Bertrand while everyone is yelling at Cole to finish this off as quickly as possible. That would’ve been badass instead of literally the same fucking fight as the first time, but now Kuo and Nix are fighting alongside you. Very disappointing.

There’s two final fights: Good and Evil. The Good fight is Cole and Nix vs Kuo and The Beast. This fight is pretty cool as you’re fighting off Kuo as the RFI charges up and then you have your revenge match against The Beast. The Evil fight is Cole, Kuo, and The Beast vs Nix and everyone in New Marais. The fight with Nix was actually pretty cool as you’re fighting all across New Marais, trying to kill her. After that, you have one of the most heartbreaking moments ever: Cole vs Zeke. Zeke knows he’s going to die, but he dies trying to stop Cole. Cole is just zapping him, slowly killing his best friend. And the music that accompanies this is very sad. But overall these boss fights just aren’t as entertaining as what we got with Sasha, Alden, and Kessler.

I think I’ve said what I needed to say. This game is a mess and it breaks my heart that it’s like this. Although, despite my issues with the game, it’s still a good, fun game. However, it is nowhere near the level of quality of the first game. The game’s story, pacing, characters, missions, everything is off. The best part about the game is the music. Absolutely godly. And the reason why I was nitpicking this to all Hell was because it’s the direct sequel to the first game. Sequels are suppose to expand and build upon what the original did and if it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it. I will say this, playing as Evil Cole was very fun. Completely disregarding anyone and everyone was fun as fuck and the best highlight of the game next to the music. I probably won’t be touching this game again in the future.

If you read all of this, thanks for reading. I’ll be tackling Second Son in the future, but for now I need a break from the series. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time.

This is Zorgak, signing off.