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Sucker Punch already has a masterpiece under their belt in the Sly Cooper series. Infamous was their premier PS3 outing and it showed hints of having the same greatness in it's opening hours, yet eventually fell short due to repetitious mission structure that felt like it was an exercise in copy-and-paste design and a story which did not have weight enough to offset the repetitive nature of the gameplay. I had high hopes that Infamous 2 would pull an Assassin's Creed 2, and turn repetition in to sublime depth by amping up both the story and play elements. Alas, that was not to be.
While new missions, new powers, new enemies, a new setting, and a more ambitious story sound like the stuff great sequels are made of, almost all of what feels shiny and new in the initial hours of the game feel rote and trite by the time you reach the endgame.
There are a few new mission types, but they play out extremely similarly and lack depth. The sweet new powers that make you feel more heroic than in many games, but the ones I found to be the most varied and useful are all only useable on the R2 button. Worse, some missions ask you to take photographs, and this action is also mapped to R2, making it so you cannot use these cool powers when on this recurring mission type. Too many missions also force you to switch back to the initial power you were given to map to R2. This would not be as huge an issue if these particular missions didn’t have the habit of cropping up just as I had unlocked a newer, cooler power to use on that same button.
Some of the enemies feature excellent art design and attacks which are initially fun to exploit, but they all repeat so much that you get tired of facing them once you figure out their two-to-three repeating strategies and, even worse, their impact is lessened as they become so frequent that their specialness disappears. Humanoid enemies all seem to be cut from the same cloth and even the few interesting variations repeat so much that their cool-factor is reduced down to nothing. There is very little interesting A.I. behavior as the enemies seem to have only two distinct behavior modes- attack or patrol.
New Marais has a strong appeal since it is replicating New Orleans, but you end up overstaying your welcome in every new area and large sections of the game world feel like a re-skinned Empire City despite the setting change. This also had the effect of completely negating my interest in the coolest new addition, the create-a-mission. I was so sick of New Marais that the idea of spending any more time exploring the same environs I had felt trapped in for so long.
I was excited to see how Sucker Punch would amp up the story from the first game, but I thought this tale was a true step backward. I did think the main mystery surrounding The Beast was well-handled, but any scenes involving the games two new female characters were an exercise in drudgery.
I hate to be so negative about a game I was excited about. Infamous was made by a development house a greatly admire, but this is simply not the advancement I expected for the series. There are about four truly great hours in Infamous 2. After that the new starts to wear off and the seams begin to show as obviously as the bolts on Frankenstein's neck. The proceedings do have a Crackdown-like appeal, but Assassin’s Creed 2 and Brotherhood perfected the formula so much that they make Infamous 2 seem downright archaic in comparison.