Well, I finally finished Infamous 2 on both good and evil. The gameplay is amazing, and the new powers and melee is a lot of frikken fun. I loved how you could switch out/mix and match all your powers. The camera is kinda glitchy though, especially with the melee, but it didn't take away from the game much. New Marais is an amazingly designed city, felt much more diverse then Empire City. What was disappointing was the story and the sound design. Loud explosions and stuff during battles is fine, but afterwards it's really quiet and the background ambience is barely noticable. The story was pretty flat and uneven in places, and no matter if you were evil or good the dialogue/cutscenes stayed the same except for when you made a bad/good karma descision. Which means that evil Cole said/did heroic-ish things like comforting Kuo when she wigged out about not being able to control her powers. Kinda made the journey to the final descision hollow, because Zeke was still my best friend who had no spoken qualms about my evil tendencies until then, and then suddenly hated me when I chose that one last infamous descision. No eroding of their relationship happened during the game, heck evil Cole had just apologized to Zeke for treating him like crap not one mission before. The characters themselves, particularly Nix and Kuo, were written better than I thought they would be but still weren't that great of a cast. Voice acting was pretty good, though.
SPOILERS:
Spoiler (click to read)
I will say that the evil ending itself was awesome, it was pretty emotional and made me hate myself afterwards. Fighting and killing Nix was fun in a twisted sense, and the moment where I had to kill Zeke played out perfectly. And when The Beast transferred his powers to Cole so he could become The Beast and acitvate all Conduits and wipe out humankind? Epiiiiiiic. I wish I could say the same for the good ending. The concept for it was great, and the buildup to it throughout the game was good, but the way it played out was boring and the fight with Kuo and The Beast was repetitive. Heck, Kuo's attacks were just clones of an Ice Soldier's, even though she had different ice powers. And The Beast was just this huge thing that you whaled on, which made the battle feel really impersonal to me. So up until the big moment where Cole acitvates the RFI and sacrifices himself and all Conduits to save mankind fell flat and hollow. Just the place itself where he activated it felt completely un-epic. If they'd had The Beast in his human sized form and had me fight him that way, with him still trying to convince me to join him and such, the good ending would have felt a lot better.
Now for the Karma system. It's the same from the last game, if anything it's even more black-and-white. The only differences they made were (I think) steps backwards. Now there's places all over the map where you can either (a. Save a citezen or (B. Harm them for your own gain, with about 2-3 variations of each. And each time you do one or the other, you get a huge blue or red colored banner that says "CITEZENS SAVED" or "PROTESTORS SILENCED", etc. It's the same all throught the game, it's like they feel the need to tell you if you're doing the right or wrong thing. It really ruined the atomosphere for me, personally.
If it wasn't for the fact that it's amazingly fun to play and the UGC mission creator (which I'm still figureing out), I'd say this game was disappointing.
7.5/10
tl;dr?
Gameplay is awesome, UGC will keep you busy, but the story and Karma system was a bit of a fail.
Last edited by Bricklord (June 15, 2011 (07:39am))
I've decided that I'm going to become immune to several select, non-lethal poisons, then put them in my snacks to discourage sneaky snack snatchers. -Littlebrick
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