Good or evil?
Despite the comic-book aesthetic, New Malais, which is based on New Orleans, looks drastically better than Empire City did in the first game. Neon-lit streets and towering buildings, designed purposely to be climbed, sit pretty among the incredibly detailed shop fronts, while street furniture and the mass of citizens pottering around make the city spring to life. Level design is impressive as you zip across this huge game world on electric power lines, shimmy up drainpipes and leap across rooftops battling enemies by causing carnage with your powers. While inFamous players will have got to grips with Cole’s free-running exploits in the last game, New Malais is an exciting, more glamorous city to explore and much slicker to navigate than Empire City.Missions are varied too, and there’s plenty to do as you collect blast shards in order to gain access to bigger and better powers, or search for audio logs which help to build up the storyline. The biggest addition to the series, however, is the ability to create your own content via a comprehensive mission editor. Though it would have benefited from a tutorial mode, this is really where inFamous 2 stands-out from its predecessor and indeed other games of this ilk. The content creator is incredibly in-depth, allowing you to create the likes of event triggers, place NPCs anywhere you like and even manipulate the environment. You can create a wide variety of mission types and, depending on your patience and willingness to get to grips with the toolset, you can create some real masterpieces that give other players in inFamous 2 more than enough reason to keep coming back to more once the campaign is complete.
For all its good points though, inFamous 2 does have a few negatives. As you hit the second half of the game, combat starts to get a little repetitive, bosses repeat and the fact that you have to pummel every enemy numerous times to kill them can get a little draining. The good, however, most definitely outweighs the bad, and it’s that feeling of progression and constant reward for your efforts that will keep you upbeat and keen to reach the final outcome, which ends up being well worth your efforts.
inFamous, praised for spawning an impressive new breed of super-hero in the electrically-charged Cole MacGrath and then creating an extravagantly designed open-world city for him to ply his trade, was one of those games that demanded a sequel. Stereotypically, sequels are never as impressive as their originals, but inFamous 2 improves in many areas to deliver a smooth-flowing, enjoyable and explosive ride, while the addition of user-generated content really pushes this particular genre to a whole new level.
