Infamous / Infamous 2 (PS3 : 2 and 3)
As I mentioned in one of my recent posts, I'm working on collecting a modified complete PS3 library, and with this I intend to do reviews on all of them. A number of these games I have already played previously, so some reviews might be combined into one collective one like this. Also, the PS3 reviews will be noted with what number review they are in respect to the console.
So this post is going to be more discussion than review on the two Infamous games. I played the first one a couple of years ago, and I just recently picked up and played through Infamous 2. Instead of just reviewing each game individually, I would like to review them as a series as well as discuss what makes them stand out.
Infamous 2 starts off with Cole facing off against The Beast in Empire City, but he is nowhere near strong enough. With his friend Zeke and NSA agent Lucy Kuo, they flee to New Marais where Kuo says she can introduce Cole to a doctor who helped develop the Ray Sphere and can make him stronger. New Marais is under the control of a man named Joseph Bertrand III, who is anti-Conduit. (Conduit are people who possess a rare gene that can gain super-powers with the aid of a Ray Sphere.) Cole and his friends learn that Bertrand himself is a Conduit, having used a Ray Sphere in the past to obtain abilities but it turned him into a building-sized monster that can turn other humans into monsters as well. With the help of Zeke, Kuo, and another Conduit, Nix, Cole sets out to stop Bertrand's plan of a Conduit-genocide, and to finally face off against and defeat The Beast.
For combo maneuvers, holding L1 and □ will allow Cole to throw pulse grenades, L1 and X fires a shockwave, and lastly L1 with △ fires a pulse rocket.
For the second game, the controls remain the same, but they also get built upon as Cole learns even more abilities. You can use R2 to pick up objects and hurl them through the air, down on the D-Pad can fire an Ionic Vortex, which is essentially a tornado that will shoot out for a short distance wiping out anything in it's path.
Overall I really like the control scheme, and I especially liked how they didn't change it between games. I've seen a lot of series that give their controls an overhaul from the first to second games and it's mind-bending trying to readjust.
The story is driven by your main objective missions. These vary from tracking people or objects down, clearing out enemies from various structures, and restoring power to the grid in sections of the city that have been shut down. The mechanic for restoring power changes drastically between the two games. In the first, Cole must platform his way through sewer systems to find the main cell for the power grid, insert himself into it and activate his electric powers. In the second game, Cole must find one transformer and fire a missile that you must guide to the next transformer. At the next transformer, it will feed off your powers and your proximity to the transformer while Cole must fend off waves of enemies until it's fully powered back on. This is repeated a couple of times until the entire grid for an area is brought back online.
Side-quests are scattered over the entire city, and can become a bit repetitive. These are usually shorter based objectives like escorting a militia prisoner, helping someone find a package, or helping drive back enemies from a particular area. The main pull for doing the side-quests is once you complete one, a small area of the map becomes cleared of enemy forces and they won't show back up in that area for the rest of the game. So doing the side-quests can help minimize the amount of enemies you'll come across while playing the main story missions.
Your enemies in Infamous come from the militia and members of three different gangs who were minorly affected by the Ray Sphere. In Infamous 2, you still deal with the militia but you get a wider variety of enemies who were affected or created by the Sphere. There are the swamp people that Bertrand creates, and other Conduit's with ice-related powers.
Each game culminates in a final boss fight, Kessler and The Beast respectively. Each also features some mini-boss fights. The first game's mini-bosses are the different gang leaders, and the second game is all the larger Conduit affected creatures. These can be pretty fun, and are spread out enough through the game that they don't become overwhelming.
The combat can either be done up close if you prefer a hack-and-slash approach, or from afar if you prefer to attack from cover and use Cole's powers to your advantage. Either approach has it's own benefits and disadvantages. If you want to use his powers, you can attack from nearly any point you choose whether it's a rooftop, hanging from a streetlamp, or hiding behind signs and barrels, but doing so will eventually drain Cole's power bar and force you to run and find something to drain electricity from. If you prefer to get up close and personal, it'll save your power bar, but you will most likely take more damage from your enemies attacks as they frequently come in packs.
In the end, both of these games are really great. I like the casual flow of sandbox games because it gives you control over just diving right into the story, or taking your time to master each and every power you have while saving or destroying the city. And yes, that is a choice.
The final piece of this game is it's Karma system. All through the game, Cole's actions are graded. You earn good Karma by saving lives, making choices that benefit the city, things like that. Bad Karma is earned by harming civilians and making selfish decisions with any rations you find in the city. These choices can have minor affects in the story, but it's more with Cole's reactions to certain events. For instance at the end of the first game, when Kessler reveals his plan, if you have earned good Karma, Cole will comment on making himself ready for the Beast. But if you've earned bad Karma, Cole sort of laughs it off in a "yeah, right, like I'll use my powers against the Beast" manner.
Let's see how difficult these games are.
First, before discussing these areas, the matter of Cole's powers. There is no real challenge into earning them, as Cole learns them periodically over each game. However you can earn experience points by completing the side-quests and collecting blast shards throughout the city, and these points can be used to raise the effectiveness of each power.
The combat is easier in the second game than it is in the first. Due to his heightened electric abilities, Cole is unable to do a few things such as drive a car, swim, and wield conventional weapons. Because of this, the combat in the first game is strictly hand to hand (literally) or done through his powers. In the second game, Zeke creates an Amp that Cole can channel his electricity through and wield in combat. Not having a weapon in the first one sort of makes you shy away from any up close combat and puts more of an emphasis on using Cole's abilities. Gaining the Amp in Infamous 2 however gives you the freedom to choose and brings a much more equal balance between the two styles.
The enemies in the first game are pretty bland, it's only in the second game they begin to get a lot more flavorful. You run into regular militia men, to beefed up conduit enemies, to infected swamp creatures that can be much larger than you. They cover all the ranges of difficulty, as the regular militia men can go down in just a couple of hits, where the larger enemies will have you running for a power source to regroup yourself and come back with a fully loaded arsenal.
Platforming is fairly easy, although there can be moments where it gets frustrating. Cole tends to get caught up in awkward places where it shouldn't occur. He can hang from windows, ledges, or any portions of a building that jut out, pretty much anything that can support a grip. Occasionally these ledges don't register for whatever reason (in a game with a map this large it's really not surprising) and can lead to you completely missing a jump and falling back to the ground which can result in a mission failure in some instances.There's also an above-ground subway train that runs around the main island of the city, and you can essentially glide along the rails with Cole's electricity, and it's pretty fun to do.
Completing the side-quests can get repetitive, but it's also pretty easy. The difficulty in this area comes from not doing them, as this will cause the militia to maintain their presence through the entire city. So this becomes an area where the player decides how easy they'd like to make the game for themselves. If you do the side-quests then the only opposition you'll run into are whatever militia is present during your main miissions. Conversely, if you avoid the side-quests, you'll have a lot of enemies to wade through to see the story all the way through.
Overall, these games can be pretty easy. So let's see what was good and bad about them before my final verdict.
- Cole doesn't lose his powers in between games. This was one of my absolute favorite aspects of the second game. I've played a lot of game series where something occurs in the opening acts of the sequels that drains the powers the character had and you have to relearn everything from scratch. The moment I fired up Infamous 2 I was waiting for this, and to my surprise, it didn't happen. Instead, you maintain everything from the first game and build upon them with newer powers. It was a great touch and got a huge thumbs up in my mind.
- User generated content. In Infamous 2, they allowed for the players to create their own side missions for other players to complete. You have the option of turning these missions on and off, but it's very cool to see the things that other people come up with and you get to try and recreate.
- No variety for boss fights. While the bosses themselves are different, the methods of taking them down aren't. All of them just involve trying to whittle away their health as much as you can while protecting your own. There are a couple of bosses that require you to hit a specific weak point, but that's all it has for variety.
Once again, thank you for continuing to follow and read my blog, I've been having a blast with it. Coming up next week will be my review on Resident Evil 4 on PS2. I'll also be posting a quick review on the first Adventure Island on NES. After that I have a few ideas that I'd like to do in the month of August, as I'll be blogging a little bit less in September so I can spend time with my son once he's born. So here's a little list of some things you might see this coming month.
Spirit Camera - 3DS
Legend of the Mystical Ninja - SNES
Republique - PS4
Destroy All Humans - Xbox
TBD - Xbox One (I have a couple things I'd like to do on Xbox One, just haven't fully decided yet)
I'm also hosting my vote on which Dead Space game I will do in the middle of August. As of now, the original Dead Space is ahead in the voting, so if you want to see one of the sequels on here instead, head over to my Facebook page and vote!
So this post is going to be more discussion than review on the two Infamous games. I played the first one a couple of years ago, and I just recently picked up and played through Infamous 2. Instead of just reviewing each game individually, I would like to review them as a series as well as discuss what makes them stand out.
The Stories
The first two Infamous games follow the story of Cole McGrath. In the first game, Cole is working in Empire City as a bike messenger when he is directed by an anonymous client to deliver a package to a specific location and open it. When he opens it, it ends up being a Ray Sphere that triggers an explosion and wipes out six city blocks with Cole in the center. He manages to survive and is nursed back to health by his girlfriend and learns he now has electrical super-powers. The story of the game progresses through Cole trying to help restore balance to the city and wipe out the evil entity trying to reign over Empire City, Kessler. To avoid blatantly spoiling the details of the end of the story, I have made them "invisible" so if you just drag to highlight the next few lines it will reveal the details if you'd like to see them. The game ends with Cole facing off against Kessler at Ground Zero of the explosion where he learns that Kessler is an alternate version of Cole from a different timeline. Kessler tried running away from a creature called The Beast but was eventually tracked down and his family was murdered. He decided the only way to insure the defeat of the Beast was by traveling back in time to prepare his past-self for the fight. Kessler was the one behind the construction of the Ray Sphere and was the anonymous customer who instructed Cole to open the package.Infamous 2 starts off with Cole facing off against The Beast in Empire City, but he is nowhere near strong enough. With his friend Zeke and NSA agent Lucy Kuo, they flee to New Marais where Kuo says she can introduce Cole to a doctor who helped develop the Ray Sphere and can make him stronger. New Marais is under the control of a man named Joseph Bertrand III, who is anti-Conduit. (Conduit are people who possess a rare gene that can gain super-powers with the aid of a Ray Sphere.) Cole and his friends learn that Bertrand himself is a Conduit, having used a Ray Sphere in the past to obtain abilities but it turned him into a building-sized monster that can turn other humans into monsters as well. With the help of Zeke, Kuo, and another Conduit, Nix, Cole sets out to stop Bertrand's plan of a Conduit-genocide, and to finally face off against and defeat The Beast.
The Controls
The control scheme for the games remains identical from one to the next. In the first, movement of Cole is controlled by the left joystick and the right controls the camera angle. X makes Cole jump, O will dodge in whichever direction the left joystick is pressed, △ interacts with various things and □ is Cole's melee attack. L1 brings up an aiming reticle to fire Cole's bolts with R1. On it's own, R1 can be used to fire Cole's thrusters that will let him glide over distances. L2 is the Electric Drain ability which heals Cole and fills up his power meter, and R2 brings up a shield that can deflect bullets.For combo maneuvers, holding L1 and □ will allow Cole to throw pulse grenades, L1 and X fires a shockwave, and lastly L1 with △ fires a pulse rocket.
For the second game, the controls remain the same, but they also get built upon as Cole learns even more abilities. You can use R2 to pick up objects and hurl them through the air, down on the D-Pad can fire an Ionic Vortex, which is essentially a tornado that will shoot out for a short distance wiping out anything in it's path.
Overall I really like the control scheme, and I especially liked how they didn't change it between games. I've seen a lot of series that give their controls an overhaul from the first to second games and it's mind-bending trying to readjust.
The Gameplay
The Infamous series is an open-world sandbox style game. You are given a map to free-roam in, complete your objectives, side-quests, collect blast shards, or just lay waste to the city around you.The story is driven by your main objective missions. These vary from tracking people or objects down, clearing out enemies from various structures, and restoring power to the grid in sections of the city that have been shut down. The mechanic for restoring power changes drastically between the two games. In the first, Cole must platform his way through sewer systems to find the main cell for the power grid, insert himself into it and activate his electric powers. In the second game, Cole must find one transformer and fire a missile that you must guide to the next transformer. At the next transformer, it will feed off your powers and your proximity to the transformer while Cole must fend off waves of enemies until it's fully powered back on. This is repeated a couple of times until the entire grid for an area is brought back online.
Side-quests are scattered over the entire city, and can become a bit repetitive. These are usually shorter based objectives like escorting a militia prisoner, helping someone find a package, or helping drive back enemies from a particular area. The main pull for doing the side-quests is once you complete one, a small area of the map becomes cleared of enemy forces and they won't show back up in that area for the rest of the game. So doing the side-quests can help minimize the amount of enemies you'll come across while playing the main story missions.
Your enemies in Infamous come from the militia and members of three different gangs who were minorly affected by the Ray Sphere. In Infamous 2, you still deal with the militia but you get a wider variety of enemies who were affected or created by the Sphere. There are the swamp people that Bertrand creates, and other Conduit's with ice-related powers.
Each game culminates in a final boss fight, Kessler and The Beast respectively. Each also features some mini-boss fights. The first game's mini-bosses are the different gang leaders, and the second game is all the larger Conduit affected creatures. These can be pretty fun, and are spread out enough through the game that they don't become overwhelming.
The combat can either be done up close if you prefer a hack-and-slash approach, or from afar if you prefer to attack from cover and use Cole's powers to your advantage. Either approach has it's own benefits and disadvantages. If you want to use his powers, you can attack from nearly any point you choose whether it's a rooftop, hanging from a streetlamp, or hiding behind signs and barrels, but doing so will eventually drain Cole's power bar and force you to run and find something to drain electricity from. If you prefer to get up close and personal, it'll save your power bar, but you will most likely take more damage from your enemies attacks as they frequently come in packs.
In the end, both of these games are really great. I like the casual flow of sandbox games because it gives you control over just diving right into the story, or taking your time to master each and every power you have while saving or destroying the city. And yes, that is a choice.
The final piece of this game is it's Karma system. All through the game, Cole's actions are graded. You earn good Karma by saving lives, making choices that benefit the city, things like that. Bad Karma is earned by harming civilians and making selfish decisions with any rations you find in the city. These choices can have minor affects in the story, but it's more with Cole's reactions to certain events. For instance at the end of the first game, when Kessler reveals his plan, if you have earned good Karma, Cole will comment on making himself ready for the Beast. But if you've earned bad Karma, Cole sort of laughs it off in a "yeah, right, like I'll use my powers against the Beast" manner.
Let's see how difficult these games are.
The Challenge (or lack thereof?)
Both these games share a lot of common ground for the challenge factor. The combat, platforming, and side-quests are all plentiful in each game.First, before discussing these areas, the matter of Cole's powers. There is no real challenge into earning them, as Cole learns them periodically over each game. However you can earn experience points by completing the side-quests and collecting blast shards throughout the city, and these points can be used to raise the effectiveness of each power.
The combat is easier in the second game than it is in the first. Due to his heightened electric abilities, Cole is unable to do a few things such as drive a car, swim, and wield conventional weapons. Because of this, the combat in the first game is strictly hand to hand (literally) or done through his powers. In the second game, Zeke creates an Amp that Cole can channel his electricity through and wield in combat. Not having a weapon in the first one sort of makes you shy away from any up close combat and puts more of an emphasis on using Cole's abilities. Gaining the Amp in Infamous 2 however gives you the freedom to choose and brings a much more equal balance between the two styles.
The enemies in the first game are pretty bland, it's only in the second game they begin to get a lot more flavorful. You run into regular militia men, to beefed up conduit enemies, to infected swamp creatures that can be much larger than you. They cover all the ranges of difficulty, as the regular militia men can go down in just a couple of hits, where the larger enemies will have you running for a power source to regroup yourself and come back with a fully loaded arsenal.
Platforming is fairly easy, although there can be moments where it gets frustrating. Cole tends to get caught up in awkward places where it shouldn't occur. He can hang from windows, ledges, or any portions of a building that jut out, pretty much anything that can support a grip. Occasionally these ledges don't register for whatever reason (in a game with a map this large it's really not surprising) and can lead to you completely missing a jump and falling back to the ground which can result in a mission failure in some instances.There's also an above-ground subway train that runs around the main island of the city, and you can essentially glide along the rails with Cole's electricity, and it's pretty fun to do.
Completing the side-quests can get repetitive, but it's also pretty easy. The difficulty in this area comes from not doing them, as this will cause the militia to maintain their presence through the entire city. So this becomes an area where the player decides how easy they'd like to make the game for themselves. If you do the side-quests then the only opposition you'll run into are whatever militia is present during your main miissions. Conversely, if you avoid the side-quests, you'll have a lot of enemies to wade through to see the story all the way through.
Overall, these games can be pretty easy. So let's see what was good and bad about them before my final verdict.
PROS
- Comic book style story. The developers behind Infamous are the same ones behind the Sly Cooper series. While they wanted to step away from the style of the Sly Cooper games, they maintained the comic book feel of the story so some of the cutscenes appear in a graphic novel type form. It gives it a unique look and helps more with developing and connecting to the characters and the story.- Cole doesn't lose his powers in between games. This was one of my absolute favorite aspects of the second game. I've played a lot of game series where something occurs in the opening acts of the sequels that drains the powers the character had and you have to relearn everything from scratch. The moment I fired up Infamous 2 I was waiting for this, and to my surprise, it didn't happen. Instead, you maintain everything from the first game and build upon them with newer powers. It was a great touch and got a huge thumbs up in my mind.
- User generated content. In Infamous 2, they allowed for the players to create their own side missions for other players to complete. You have the option of turning these missions on and off, but it's very cool to see the things that other people come up with and you get to try and recreate.
CONS
The one con in this section will be focused on the second game. The cons that I would have had for the first game (no melee weapon, low variety in enemy types) were all improved upon for the sequel, which kind of makes listing them a little silly since it's a combined review.- No variety for boss fights. While the bosses themselves are different, the methods of taking them down aren't. All of them just involve trying to whittle away their health as much as you can while protecting your own. There are a couple of bosses that require you to hit a specific weak point, but that's all it has for variety.
Final Verdict
In the end, these games are amazing, and deserve space in your PS3 collection. They are a lot of fun, and they're big. They're also sandbox games which means you can do whatever you want. You can cruise around just for the hell of it, or dedicate yourself to the missions and side-quests. The Karma system also makes for a lot of fun as you can choose if Cole becomes good or evil. You can pop into your local GameStop and pick up both of these games for five bucks. Not each, total.So there's really no excuse not to pick them up and try, and I promise you won't regret it.Once again, thank you for continuing to follow and read my blog, I've been having a blast with it. Coming up next week will be my review on Resident Evil 4 on PS2. I'll also be posting a quick review on the first Adventure Island on NES. After that I have a few ideas that I'd like to do in the month of August, as I'll be blogging a little bit less in September so I can spend time with my son once he's born. So here's a little list of some things you might see this coming month.
Spirit Camera - 3DS
Legend of the Mystical Ninja - SNES
Republique - PS4
Destroy All Humans - Xbox
TBD - Xbox One (I have a couple things I'd like to do on Xbox One, just haven't fully decided yet)
I'm also hosting my vote on which Dead Space game I will do in the middle of August. As of now, the original Dead Space is ahead in the voting, so if you want to see one of the sequels on here instead, head over to my Facebook page and vote!
