Looking forward to some nice discussion and Nix-hating. After trudging through the evil path the evil ending left me with a huge smirk.
Nix: “Can you really kill me, Cole? Can you live with that?”
Cole: “I think I’ll manage”.
Some thoughts:
I would have liked for the 5/6 blast-shard reward to be given earlier. It would have made island 2 - part 1 a lot more manageable.
Overall a very enjoyable experience if one manages to overlook some annoyances.
I found the fire powers to be pretty lacking until I got the final grenade and missile upgrade, though ionic drain was a god-send.
What I’m wondering is, do you fight fire-enemies if you go the good route, or are they still ice-based?
However, I think the naming of the sides would have been more apt as law and chaos, instead of good and evil, as Cole still cares about his companions, even after he goes on a murderous rampage.
You still fight ice dudes. I was a little disappointed that it never switched to fire enemies since I got tired of those pretty fast.
You get the Ice Launch for going good, though, which is awesome fun. It’s basically a car jump that you can do anywhere, and it’s surprisingly useful for both moving around and dodging stuff. I kept on using it even after getting the tether, which feels like a great power with somewhat poor implementation. A third game set in a larger city with skyscrapers could really make great use of that power. Or maybe I should just replay Spiderman 2.
The good ending is not sequel friendly at all, though. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. None of the things I enjoy about Infamous are particularly linked to the cast of characters, so I’d love to see a bit of a reboot with a new power concept. And if they don’t do that, they can work on Sly 4. Win/win!
The evil ending could be used for a sequel, but I’m not sure how good it would be. One of the draws of a superhero game is to be stronger than the rest, if there are only people with super powers, with the rest dying from the plague, one would be “normal”. Agree on the reboot though.
I completed the evil ending as well, and overall the whole experience clicked for me in a way the first game didn’t manage–it held my attention all the way through, for one thing. Once I got into the the final section of the map, I could feel my interest starting to sharply wane as pretty much every fight started getting tedious, so I dropped the difficulty down to speed things up a bit. The enemies are still damage sponges, just less so, and of course it gives you much more room to play sloppily.
The ice titan and big lumbering freaks were something I liked the idea of, but the implementation was a swing and a miss. I got to the point where I’d heave a weary sigh each time one showed up. On the contrary side, I rather enjoyed the whole scripted sequence where you finally settle things with Bertrand.
I really, really wish the lightning tether power happened earlier in game. I think if it hadn’t been in the game at all I might not have finished. In retrospect, it was one of the first unlocks that made me feel Cole getting more powerful; the other unlocks really didn’t, they were just incremental with smaller steps.
The story was mostly background noise for me, and took itself much too seriously. One the plus side, this made me not have any character-hate for any of the goofy people trying to be earnest, be they Zeke or Nix. My favorite cutscene was one of the last few blast core acquisitions, where Cole and Zeke shut off their phones because, fuck it, let’s have some beers and watch a favorite movie.
I fully share the smirking over Nix’s whole “can you live with killing me??” bit. The entire play style the redside ending requires does not in any way support any emotional weight there. I suspect playing blue makes everything in general feel a bit more coherent, but probably no less ridiculous.
Finished it this evening, good play through. I thought the story held together pretty well, and far better characterization this time around. I didn’t hate anybody. Then again, when Kuo turned on me and I had to kick her ass, I had no hesitation about doing so. Also, she was cake.
Agreed about the big foes: tedious. I especially groaned when facing the hive lords and titans. The fight where there’s one of each? Awful.
After the credits rolled, the game suggested I start messing around and go evil without concern for my reputation. So far I’ve hesitated for fear of losing access to my karmic-dependent powers. Has anyone else tried it?
Been running around the post-game world trying to find the last pickups and missions. I missed about 9 blast shards, 1 dead drop, and 4 hidden missions. So far the hidden missions are trickier to find than anything else. The game is meting them out very slowly.
Interesting observation: The Beast gives you the ability to sense plague in the people around you. Red zones in a person show the progression of the plague. Yellow zones indicate the presence of the conduit gene. Using that on the civilians wandering the streets shows very few latent conduits. So far I have seen 2. Presuming these proportions are true throughout the world, the Beast’s notion of sacrificing the normal humans to save the conduits won’t work. There just aren’t enough to support a breeding population.
Also, isn’t the highest tier side-mission reward (I think you get it for doing all 60 side missions) a radar that leads you to the nearest blast shard? I almost – almost, but not quite! – like the game world enough that I’d consider grinding for that thing and then hunting down all the shards.
I’m also curious to know what happens after the storyline if you try to swing your karma the other way. Someone try it and let us know.
I would guess that ‘hidden missions’ refers to those side quests which are not indicated by a symbol on the map. These are the hidden package and convoy elimination quests that occasionally start (around 5-7 in the game I would estimate) when one eliminates an enemy group in the designated area and one of them “turns yellow” and allows the player to start the quest.
I found the best way to do this was to hold off until the very end (unless you find them accidentally of course).
Then, at the end, the areas in which these missions can “drop” off of fallen enemies is drastically reduced, so you can quickly comb through them with the fifth blast core reward and eliminate the 3-4 person enemy groups in the area until the map/photo drops or the convoy quest starts.
Ah, right. I sort of assumed those were just randomly generated. But now that you mention it, they do have the yellow indicators. So I guess you have to root out all of those to get the 60-side-mission unlockable.
A nuke? God, the 5 year old kid responsible for the Axe Cop plots is a better writer than the people who wrote the Infamous 2 story.
These people wouldn’t know how to do a good super hero story if their lives depended on it. Forget the crappy writing. They can’t set down the bones of a decent plot (granted, good writing can make up for that, where as a good plot skeleton + shitty writing is probably far more intolerable).
My favorite bit about the whole nuke bit is that the military hadn’t already done exactly that. If a giant monster is causing megadeaths in a steady path right down the eastern seaboard, if I’m the president, I’m jamming the button so hard I injure my finger. Now, sure, kaiju movies repeatedly demonstrate that nukes do not stop the giant monster, but you still have to at least try at some point between New York and New Orleans.
Come to think of it, maybe that’s why there was an newscaster aside cornerscene about the president being impeached.
Axe Cop would make a great videogame story, with more meaningful power upgrades. You could absorb a blast shard, and suddenly become Axe Cop With Lemon, or get a power that summons a ridable T-Rex with machinegun arms. That’s lots better than an incremental improvement to a lightning shotgun or lightning sniper rifle.
Impeached because he woulnd’t nuke it? That’s food for thought, though if memory recalls the Beast wasn’t public knowledge yet (not openly; the President surely knew but all of congress?).
What gets me about the nuke thing is precisely that it’s a monster movie tradition, and not just the kaiju films (the War of the Worlds film is 1953). And since it never works it’s not nonsensical to actively have the government avoid it, as a subtle wink/lampashading.
But instead they go and have the fucking protagonist do it. It’s a similar problem that The Matrix had. It’s hard to do an honest super hero story where the hero willingly kills/harms innocents. Granted, here you can be playing a dick, but it still doesn’t work for me.
They hand wave away the fallout in most absurd fashion. Far enough out from the city? It happens on top of the fucking city. Even if it was far enough out (pretend the docs are 30 miles away, in the boonies, I guess?), and the wind was idea, it would completely fuck the city (the local fishing industry is likely to take a hit, to put it mildly). I mean, it’s just the worst fucking idea ever, executed in the worst possible way.
I first vaguely thought the idea was that the Beast just slurped up all the radiation, straight out of Godzilla’s greatest hits, but on nuking it a second time recently (been doing the good playthrough) I realized that nope, they never actually say that. My other post-facto justifying straining is to declare that the missile wasn’t actually a nuke, just a big conventional bomb. Zeke just thought it was a nuke in a paint-fume daze. Also, Zeke never had the plague. All the coughing was damaged lung tissue from huffing.
I think the plot mostly annoyed me because it wasn’t bad enough to become awesome that way. Instead it was mostly phoned in and fumbled through and a lot of shrugging “well, then, this happens next” type developments.
I find the idea that the entire universe didn’t know about a hundred foot tall man walking down the coast of a country entirely populated by smartphone-wielding youtube addicts fucking hilarious.
The final blueside fights are really anticlimactic. “No! Not just yet!” our hero gravels, and launches himself into EPIC THROWDOWN. This will be a battle that’ll make taking down Bertrand look li…oh, it’s over? All right, then.
After playing through both sides of the story, you get a bunch of bonus XP, and it unlocks the opposite side’s karmic powers for you. So if you were really feeling the loss of not having the fly-ten-feet Firebird Strike or Summon Pointless Minions you can rectify that. I’m glad I played in the order that I did, because the blue powers are just streets ahead of the red ones in just about every aspect.
I also take back what I’d hopefully thought about blue being a bit more coherent. It just falls apart in different ways, not the least being that you’re apparently meant to be torn at the final choice not by millions and millions of people dying but by Nix’s pet swamp creatures being killed, like her being sad is the level of aggression that will not stand, and thus demands activating Electrical Christ Mode. Also, if that stupid RFI could be charged up at a garden-variety substation all this time, why was I…oh, never mind.
The big moment between Zeke and Cole (where Cole actually apologizes to Zeke, and Zeke says “well, I guess I kinda deserved it”)? Fuck. Just Fuck.
I find the idea that the entire universe didn’t know about a hundred foot tall man walking down the coast of a country entirely populated by smartphone-wielding youtube addicts fucking hilarious.
Granted, but this is the same game where detonating a nuke about 100 feet off the shore of a city where millions of people lives just causes a little property damage and not much else.
[quote=“Frank Austin”]I find the idea that the entire universe didn’t know about a hundred foot tall man walking down the coast of a country entirely populated by smartphone-wielding youtube addicts fucking hilarious.[/quote]
Granted, but this is the same universe where detonating a nuke about 50 feet from the shore of the city causes no real harm to the city.
The most absurd aspect of the whole thing is that apparently Zeke masterminded the plan - he apparently knows how to arm, target, and fire a nuclear missile he just happens to come across. Are we talking the same Zeke here? The extent of this dude’s ability to interact with a found nuclear device would be to maybe climb his fat ass on top of it and sit and drink a beer.
Infamous 2 is a fun game, but the story and characters and dialog are all embarrassingly amateurish.
