Infamous 2 reviewed by Joe Bennett on PlayStation 3. Game supplied for review by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe

Infamous 2 kicks off with the player battling what appears to be Dr Manhattan’s evil twin brother, ‘The Beast’. You, as Cole (who I should point out has a new voice actor that makes Cole sound like the worst Christian Bale as Batman impersonator you’re ever likely to hear) are defeated by The Beast and sent packing south with your tail between your legs to New Marais.

New Marais is as Deep South as you could expect; swamps, churches, soulful music, small affluent pockets and huge poverty stricken areas. It even has an area called Flood Town, which is an eerie apocalyptic take on Katrina. The constant shift between neon lit buildings, gas works, train yards and shanty towns makes it an interesting, gritty and gorgeous city to traverse.

Once in New Marais you meet up with Kuo, Zeke and Dr Wolfe and set about trying to gain the power necessary to destroy The Beast. Along the way you meet up with a new character, Nix, who is the dark karma character to compliment the light karma character of Kuo. But whereas Kuo is a genuinely likable character with an interesting back story, Nix is, well, bland. Nix is trying hard to be interesting, daring and dark but she just comes across as a rushed afterthought. Even visually you could be mistaken for thinking this. Cole, Kuo and Zeke are all well modelled characters, but Nix looks odd, sort of like an alien with baby-oiled plasticine for skin. Depending on your karmic choices throughout the game, you’ll get to fight alongside one of these characters on some missions and can even combine some of your powers to devastating effect. Thankfully the light karmic route I chose meant more interaction with Kuo and less with Nix.

The enemies you face this time around aren’t just the militia but also human-sized monsters that resemble some of the monstrosities served up in Dead Space. But in addition to the militia goons and smaller monsters, there are also some huge bosses to contend with. And when I say huge, they range from ten feet tall to about 100 feet high (and that’s even excluding The Beast, who’s much larger). These bosses however, while all looking fantastic, suffer from the same problem; they can all be defeated fairly easily with Cole’s sticky grenades. And that’s the first problem with Infamous 2; the difficulty. While Infamous was unfairly punishing at times, Infamous 2 suffers from providing too little challenge.

By the time you reach the end of the game, you’ll have numerous abilities ranging from the aforementioned sticky grenades to pulse rockets all the way to conjuring lightning storms on to your foes. But the best weapon, the weapon that will defeat any enemy no matter how large they are, is one of the weapons you start with at the beginning of the game. With so many weapons at your disposal it’s a shame that you’re not tasked with using more variety in order to beat your foes.

Flood Town (an area you unlock on the second island) does make up for it in some respects though. Here, as the name suggests, much of the town has been flooded and as a man charged with electricity this makes traversing this town extremely difficult. Sticking to the rooftops is the order of the day, but when some of the rooftops are barely peaking out above the water level, death is never too far away. It’s here that you encounter the first new batch of enemies, and these new foes are more unpredictable, more dangerous and much more interesting. This is really the only area in the game where the sticky grenade loses some of its punch and other weapons become more useful. Why aim a sticky grenade at someone when you can punch them into the water and then electrocute the water with an electricity bolt? Especially when the latter is quicker, provides you with more XP to purchase other attacks and is disturbingly fun.

In addition to the main story missions, side missions and mini quests, there’s also UGC. UGC is Infamous 2’s USP and stands for User Generated Content. Sucker Punch has to be complimented on not being satisfied to just attempt to deliver a sequel that improves over its predecessor (which it has achieved) but instead try to do something to push the genre forward. So far the content on offer is quite lacking, but there have been a couple of gems (one being a Space Invaders clone with Cole shooting the descending aliens out of the sky with a bolt of electricity). I do worry though that despite the fact that the editor is very solid and provides you with the tools necessary to make an interesting level, that Sucker Punch has put a lot of effort into something that may just sink without trace.

I tried 27 different UGC missions and only two really stood out. Some were truly awful and others were over within seconds, shamelessly built to assist the player in gaining some cheap XP and nothing more. And while the editor is very comprehensive it’s also a little overwhelming to get to grips with. Still Sucker Punch should be commended for trying something daring and it’s now in the hands of the public to make the most of the excellent tools on offer to extend the experience further.

Another noteworthy addition to Infamous 2 over its predecessor is the hand to hand combat. Cole now has a new melee weapon called ‘The Amp’, given to him by Zeke. This electrified weapon doesn’t really do much, it has to be said, but the melee combat is an improvement over the original and now makes you look and feel more like a superhuman bad ass than just someone who got intimate with a plug socket.

Otherwise though, while undoubtedly a huge improvement over what was already a pretty satisfying game, it’s hard to think of many other changes that Infamous 2 implements. It just does everything it did before but better. That’s not a criticism, but it’s worth highlighting to those that may be expecting something vastly different to its predecessor.

Some of the originals’ failings do also make an unwelcome return. Visually Infamous 2 is a big improvement with much better character models, a steady frame rate (it never dipped once for me, not even when I piled 25 cars (yes, I counted them) into a heap and then blew them up for massive destruction) and some gorgeous scenery, especially at night time where the neon lit areas of the city are a sight to behold. However you invariably don’t get to see much of it, as your eyes are constantly drawn to the mini map.

Sucker Punch has again taken the odd step of making every hidden Blast Shard appear on the map when you depress L3. So not very hidden. And because they’re on the mini map, that’s all you look at. While running around the city I found myself constantly depressing L3 like someone with OCD and never really taking my eyes off of the mini map. If there’s an Infamous 3, I’d rather the developer just made them light up a different colour on the screen or drew your attention to them in some other way that didn’t force me to take my eyes off of the visuals and on to a small map with blobs on.

The city is also insanely quiet. For a city streaming with humans, cars, monsters and helicopters, it’s so quiet you could hear a mouse fart. This detracts from the atmosphere somewhat and is a real shame as what little audio there is is actually really good (kudos to the soundtrack which, although used sparingly, compliments the action perfectly). The missions can also be a tad repetitive, especially the side missions, where attacking boats happen far too frequently.

AI is again another bone of contention, only this time not because they can sniper you in the head from miles away (which is what Infamous became quite infamous for), but because some enemies don’t react to you if you manage to flank them and attack them in a position they’re not expecting you to be stood in. Likewise on one mission in Flood Town I was tasked with taking out a huge army of enemies, who stupidly decided to walk through the water towards me in one great big massive group. Three electricity bolts later, I’d fried them all and earned myself a cheap 500 XP.

And perhaps the most galling of all of Infamous 2’s foibles is the story. Not because it isn’t interesting, more because Sucker Punch just doen’t know how to deliver it effectively. The more I played Infamous 2 (which totalled just over 16 hours in the end to unlock everything), the less engaged I became with the story. For a long time I didn’t remember nor care why Cole was going up against The Beast. I kept collecting the dead drops (which are audio clips that Dr Wolfe has attached to pigeons that you shoot from the sky) but didn’t really get what most of them were on about. Was Zeke going to turn on me again? Is Kuo a double agent? Is Nix more than she looks? Is Wolfe playing me? Frankly I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was throw a car up on to a roof, or leave one enemy alive, throw a load of cars into one great big massive pile, lure him close to them and blow the living hell out of him. Or find another Blast Shard. Or locate that last blasted pigeon!

Ironically the UGC missions distract you from the main story even further, with some of them having their own intricately crafted story that contradicts the main story, which can be a little disorientating. But is this really a problem? Sure I would have preferred the story to have been delivered more efficiently so that I could have cared more about what happened to Cole and his crew and even sometimes just to know why I was doing what I was doing, but when I had so much fun dicking about in New Marais it’s hard to find too much fault.

Infamous 2 isn’t everything it could have been, and although Sucker Punch clearly knows how to deliver a technically sound (other than a camera glitch here and there) and fun experience, it would do well to reevaluate how it delivers the story in the future to ensure that the player is fully engrossed in their world. That said, Infamous 2 is an undeniably fun experience whereby hours of collecting, gratuitous explosions and a city turned into your virtual playground more than make up for the lacklustre story delivery.

Infamous 2 is out now exclusively for PlayStation 3 and is available from Amazon.