Three Lives Left

14th July 2011

Post with 12 notes

inFamous 2 : PS3

From the outset, I think it’s important to say that I loved my infamous-playing experience. With the first game, I found something which impressed me with its plot and drew me in with its gameplay to mean that I was enjoying the (if I’m objective and honest) repetitive trawl to get all the collectables. I completed inFamous with a 90% trophy set and was very pleased with the result. I pre-ordered the sequel and when it dropped through my door the morning before the street release day, I was very excited, even if I did have to wait a bit to get the time to actually play the game.

The first, and the most major, change from inFamous to inFamous 2 is in the graphics. To say these have been upgraded is a real understatement; in fact, the graphical update to the game is so vast that it makes looking at the original game almost painful. Cole, who was never the most likeable character, now has a level of graphical detail to pull him in line with many other top-of-the-line PS3 games, and the dull monotonous grey of Empire City has been given a loving run with the green-brush, as we leave that location and move to a New Orleans-like city with plenty of foliage. It looks lovely and considerably more vibrant, even if it’s still not Uncharted quality.

Pleasingly, the game takes some note of all the effort you put in before, checking your inFamous save file and following on by starting you with either a good or evil based character continuing your ending from the previous game - this is an important thing to do in sequels and it would have been a great shame had it not done this, but so many games fail to remember you have played before that it is worth mentioning. I knew I’d be playing through inFamous 2 twice (once for good and once for evil) and having enjoyed being good more the first time, I started by continuing my good agenda here too.

The storyline does well to limit your powers a little bit in order to get growth in the new game, while not nerfing you fully. You come into inFamous 2 with plenty of abilities and thus you continue on sensibly. This means that a lot of the muscle memory that moves you around works flawlessly and you’re not forced to start the game without, for example, the glide ability. Again this is important for continuity and would have caused frustration were it not the case. It’s so nice to see games in general growing up.

Once the game gets going though, any veterans from inFamous know exactly what they are doing. Sure, there are some new touches, but really if I’m honest, this is the same game just with knobs on. It looks a lot better, it feels upgraded, but it doesn’t break any new ground. This isn’t a bad thing if you are as much a fan of the first game as I am, as I found myself smiling inanely at having a whole new run of inFamous to play, but I can imagine people coming to this and complaining that it doesn’t do more. InFamous 2 is unabashedly an inFamous sequel, and not a reinvention or major change to the series: more of the same, but not in a bad way.

At this point, I feel obliged to talk about the User Generated Content, or UGC, that is so touted. On the face of it, this is great stuff and the first few UGC missions I did with glee until I realised that the biggest problem with UGC is the U part of it. Sadly, most people out there in the unwashed internet are not good level designers; hell, most of them can’t even spell ‘level design’. What the UGC means for the most part is having a huge swathe of monsters spawn next to you which you bash to death and then being told ‘congratulations, you finished the mission’ or whatever. Ninety percent of the UGC missions are painful to play just because you have to read the mission descriptions in txtspk or whatever contractions people believe pass for English on the internet, and those few that get beyond this are unlikely to be well-designed. The truth is that although the ability to design your own levels and play other user-designed levels looks great on the face of it, you’ll spend many hours sifting through badly conceived trite before you find a single unpolished gem and, other than getting the trophy for 25 completed UGC missions, I couldn’t see any real point in it. Certainly it wasn’t enough to draw me back to the game once it was all completed, which is, I believe, the point.

So back to the main game. You run, you jump, you float over buildings with all the relaxed skill of a superhero, you beat up a selection of tougher and tougher bad guys and it’s very enjoyable. The story starts to progress and you find there are others like you out there and even get to team up with one or two (depending on how you play) for the odd fun mission. The introduction of fire-girl (if you are playing evil) and ice-lady (if you are playing good) actually worked quite well for me, interested in the plot-line as I was, but really they are a little superfluous and what powers they add to the table have little relevance.

In fact, as I type this, I realise that inFamous 2 stands or falls on two things: the first, whether or not you, as a player, enjoyed the first game enough to want another full spread of missions; the second is whether or not you become engaged in the storyline. I found thankfully, that I was a fan of both, but I can imagine it failing on one, if not both, of these points for a lot of players; and that’s a shame because it really is good fun.

In inFamous, the plot works really well; enough to mean that on my first completion I was grinning at its brilliance, and eager to play again to see what it looked like from the evil perspective. With inFamous 2, the storyline doesn’t have the same edge but in all fairness it would have been near impossible for it to have done. What it does have is a continuation of story and ideas which are very pleasing for the fan and probably indecipherable for anyone coming to it without having run through the first game. This is at the core of inFamous 2’s strength and its greatest weakness - you have to like this game to like this game, and if you like this game, you’ll like this game. It’s a very odd position for it to be in, and probably one that doesn’t work for a large number of people. It works for me though and there are some scenes in this game which had me grinning like a loon, or being near frozen with upset; scenes that would be utterly lost on a casual player and yet they are the moments where inFamous 2 shows its greatness.

Five days after getting inFamous 2, I had my first platinum trophy. One hundred percent of, well, everything. So yes, I loved this game. I loved the first one and I loved all the upgrades that make the second one a worthy sequel. It ticked all the right boxes for me and I was quietly sad when it was all done (whilst still being elated about seeing that platinum trophy!). If you loved the first game, you should already have this, but if you didn’t, then give this a miss because it’s not going to do it for you.

Tagged: infamousinfamous 2PS3