Cole McGrath has returned to the Playstation 3 with Sucker Punch’s anticipated sequel, inFamous 2. InFamous 2 picks up right where the original left off in Empire City. As Cole you are trying to make sense of the events that have just taken place, however, you need to act quickly as another threat has shown up. If you have gone through and beat the original inFamous you are given the choice to import that title and use it in inFamous 2. You can choose whether it is good or evil karma or simply start from scratch. Importing your save file will have minimal effects, however, what it does do is pretty cool. You will start out with some extra XP and things of nature but what I really liked is how some of the dialogue changed. If you play through inFamous 2 with a brand new file, some of the dialogue will be a little different than if you had imported your file. I thought that this was a great idea and a great way to reward players who have gone through the original game.

If you have played the original inFamous you will be shocked at how much better inFamous 2 looks. I don’t know what Sucker Punch did but the graphical improvement between the two titles is pretty amazing. I thought that the original title had some issues and while this game still has some of those same problems, overall, it is a much more polished game. Cole’s latest adventure is set in New Marais which is essentially New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. There is one portion of the game where the town is completely devastated and a bunch of houses and buildings are underwater. Seeing as how I can’t go into water it was an interesting concept and definitely made me think momentarily about getting from building to building and not landing in the water.

One of the new features in inFamous 2 is the user created content. In inFamous 2 you can create your own missions and then upload them for others to play. There are even trophies that revolve around playing a certain number of user created missions. Just like every other game that includes user created content, some of the missions are a lot of fun and some of them can be pretty bad. It is definitely a cool concept though and will add some replayability to the title once you have completed all of the “normal” missions in the game. Sucker Punch also chose to go down a new route in regards to learning new powers. To unlock new powers you have to meet certain criteria. As an example, to unlock the “Detonation Blast” power I had to get five “Watch Your Step” stunts which is defeating an enemy by blasting him off a rooftop. I had mixed feelings about this new approach as I really didn’t like having to meet special criteria to gain access to new powers. With that said though I did respect the fact that Sucker Punch was trying to change things up and trying to get you to experience different ways of playing the game. Shard collecting has also returned with inFamous 2, however, Sucker Punch has made it a little easier to find them all. You can press in the “L3” button at any time which will send out a “ping” to see if there are any shards in your immediate area. If there are they will be represented by a blue dot on your mini map and you can go over and collect it. It’s a great feature and definitely a welcome one for those who will try and find every shard in the game.

InFamous 2 is an improvement over the original in just about every way, however, some issues do still exist. For starters the gameplay needs to be refined a bit more. An example of this would be if there is a ladder that I want to use I can’t simply run up to it and Cole starts climbing. I have to jump on to it in order to get Cole to grab on and start climbing. It is really weird and can break the rhythm of the game. There are also times when Cole will grab on to things too easily. What I mean by this is that there were many times where I would try and drop from a building only to have Cole grab on to something that I didn’t want him to. Sometimes I had to press the button a couple times to get him to do what I wanted and that became really annoying. There were missions where you had to tail someone or chase after someone quickly and there were times when Cole would grab something I didn’t want him to and it would cause me to fail the mission. The camera was a little wonky at times as well which would cause some problems if I was in the middle of a big firefight.

Overall, inFamous 2 is a fantastic game. It has some issues as I outlined above but the bottom line is that I had a lot of fun going through this title. I have enjoyed the story so far and I am definitely curious to see where they go for inFamous 3. I originally played through the game as a “Hero” but I enjoyed it so much that I am going to replay the game on the evil side of things to see how things turn out. The game does have two different endings based on your decisions which should help with the replayability of this title. Sucker Punch has created a tremendous universe here and it is quite possibly one of the best superhero games that I have ever played. If you were a fan of the original title than you definitely need to play this game. If you are new to the series and enjoy open world games than you should definitely give this a try as well. I will say though that you should play the original inFamous first as there are some moments in the inFamous 2 story that will mean more if you have played through the original title. There are a lot of games that have come out already this year with many more to come so be sure not to overlook inFamous 2. It is a fantastic ride that you will want to take more than once to experience everything the game has to offer.

Score: 8.5/10

Originally posted on Totally Gaming Network