Infamous 2
I’m a tough man to write video games for. Any triple‐A title released for a major console is the result of so much craftsmanship from so many talented people, such that you can find genuinely good things to say about even the mediocre ones.
Why do I want a game to have long‐lasting impact? Why does it have to be profound to me after I’m done with it? I played the original Infamous for at least fifteen hours — doesn’t that say more about its quality than whatever I feel about it eighteen months later?
Because I feel the same way about Infamous 2. It’s just as good as Infamous in all the ways that Infamous was good, and bad in all the ways its predecessor was bad.
At the beginning of Infamous 2, plot contrivances lead Cole and his annoying sidekick Zeke to make their way from Fake New York (Empire City, the setting of Infamous) to Fake New Orleans (New Marais). A giant evil thing called The Beast is heading in their direction, slowly and surely, but in the meantime there’s a new city to play in. The open world is full of open‐worldy stuff; there are scattered things to collect, and territory missions, and even user‐generated side missions.
And there’s the main storyline, a set of missions where you meet other people with crazy superpowers and fight generic monsters and find blast cores (which function as rather blatant plot coupons; The Beast gets closer each time you collect one). All of this is fine, I suppose, and I’ve loved games with plots just as ridiculous as this.
Maybe I’m just getting tired of games that don’t seem to care about their own plots. There’s no sense of pacing or cresecendo; Cole seems to react to everything that happens with the same sort of grizzled nonchalance. There’s no attempt to make exposition seamless or elegant; if there’s something you need to know, a supporting character will give you a clumsy info‐dump the moment you need to know, and no sooner. (Midway through the game, Lucy tells Cole about a plague that’s killing half the city. If it’s that large, shouldn’t Cole know about it already?)
Or maybe it’s that I can’t think of a single thing Infamous 2 does that hasn’t been done better by another game. Maybe it’s good in a way that’s too balanced, and if it had tried hard to excel in a certain aspect I’d at least be left with something to grab onto.