Let me get this out of the way first, Infamous 2 is a good game. It's almost a great game in fact, with well written characters and fun gameplay. It just has a very big problem that has been shoehorned into so many other games of late, to varying degrees of success, the moral choice system.
First let me give a quick review of the game. Infamous 2 picks up not long after the first game ended, with Cole McGrath having acquired super powers in the form of electricity shooting out of every orifice and saving Empire City from multiple threats. He was informed about an even greater threat coming his way, a creature known simply as "The Beast". After the Beast arrives, destroys Empire City and thoroughly kicks Coles' butt, he flees south to New Morais to find a way to boost his powers so that, when The Beast makes its way there, he'll be ready.
The gameplay that follows is pretty much identical to the first, just tightened up in a few key areas with some improved abilities thrown in. The storyline is a bit shorter, and even a bit more confusing in places but it's well written for the most part and ties up most of the loose ends nicely by the end. The real meat of Infamous 2 is in its character interactions, you really feel like these are living people with real friendships and rivalries, Coles and his portly buddy Zeke in particular. One mission will see you battling a skyscraper sized monster while the next will have Cole and Zeke sitting on the couch watching TV. It sounds odd but it works, and it makes you care about these people.
As always, I played through the game on the "good" side and enjoyed every last second of it, even though the ending was a bit sloppy and should have been far more emotional than it actually was. The problem came when I realised that I could play through the whole game again on the "evil" side and get an entirely different ending. After spending a few hours maiming innocent civilians and being a complete douche, I gave up. I wasn't having fun, the game was dictating to me what was good and evil and left NO room for any kind of middle-ground. I just flat out didn't agree with some of the choices the designers had labeled either saintly or pure evil, and because the game still has to push you through the same story, being evil makes no damn sense.
Very few games have managed to get the whole moral choice system right, the ones that do, do it in a way that you don't even notice like Red Dead Redemption. The worst examples, and Infamous 2 is one of them, only reward you for being on the farthest of either end of the spectrum. You can't settle for logical choices, you have to just look at the decisions the game throws at you and keep picking your chosen alignment otherwise you wont get any of the cool upgrades to help you beat the game.
In almost every game that has done this lately I've spotted more than one moral choice that I just flat out didn't agree with, where they'd labeled something evil, even though it made more sense in the long run. Why not let players choose a side without telling them if it's evil or not and let them work it out for themselves, it would be far more rewarding to be presented with a difficult choice and discover you made the right decision AFTER the mission.
Another aspect of this system that twists my nut sack is the fact that, in real life, people make the wrong choices because they're usually easier and let you skip hard work. Why spend hours trying to save innocent people who get in your way, when you can plow through them and get your mission over with quickly? Most games just don't seem to get this, and in some cases the evil missions are harder, so WHY would you do it? Evil missions should be tempting you to the dark side, with promises of easy reward and getting where you need to be by trampling on the less fortunate. When you make the evil missions just as hard as the good ones, there's not really any temptation, leaving you to base your choices solely on which ending you'd like to see.
Where Infamous 2, and many other games, stumble the most is in the integration of this moral choice system with the actual story. The story has to progress regardless of what choices you've made. So instead of having branching paths, they give the illusion of this, while still following the exact same story, except for the ending itself. In the worst cases this is done by having your choices make no impact on the story whatsoever until the final mission, which is the ONLY part of the game that dictates the ending. I know not all games do this but I've seen it done enough times to be sick of it.
For the sake of fairness I will point out some good examples of moral choices. Though the games themselves may have still pushed good and evil options on you, I found the endings of both GTA4 and Fable 2 to have the toughest choices, because they related to characters you cared about and not just faceless innocents. GTA4 still suffered from the end-of-game-choice-that-trumps-all-others, but the choice had far more impact for me because neither was really good or evil, it all depended on what YOU felt was right, and it affected the lives of characters you cared for. The same goes for Fable 2, which offered you the option of bringing thousands of innocent people back to life, or bringing your family and dog back. Having spent the entire game with the dog you become quite attached, making the decision extremely painful because again, neither is good or evil, it's about what matters more to you.
Infamous 2 is far from a bad game, I may not have enjoyed it as much as the first game due to the worst example of a moral choice system I've seen so far, but the characters are more well-written this time, and the gameplay is more fun. It's a must own for the PS3, if you can ignore the devil and angel sitting on your shoulder the whole time.
8/10
First let me give a quick review of the game. Infamous 2 picks up not long after the first game ended, with Cole McGrath having acquired super powers in the form of electricity shooting out of every orifice and saving Empire City from multiple threats. He was informed about an even greater threat coming his way, a creature known simply as "The Beast". After the Beast arrives, destroys Empire City and thoroughly kicks Coles' butt, he flees south to New Morais to find a way to boost his powers so that, when The Beast makes its way there, he'll be ready.
The gameplay that follows is pretty much identical to the first, just tightened up in a few key areas with some improved abilities thrown in. The storyline is a bit shorter, and even a bit more confusing in places but it's well written for the most part and ties up most of the loose ends nicely by the end. The real meat of Infamous 2 is in its character interactions, you really feel like these are living people with real friendships and rivalries, Coles and his portly buddy Zeke in particular. One mission will see you battling a skyscraper sized monster while the next will have Cole and Zeke sitting on the couch watching TV. It sounds odd but it works, and it makes you care about these people.
As always, I played through the game on the "good" side and enjoyed every last second of it, even though the ending was a bit sloppy and should have been far more emotional than it actually was. The problem came when I realised that I could play through the whole game again on the "evil" side and get an entirely different ending. After spending a few hours maiming innocent civilians and being a complete douche, I gave up. I wasn't having fun, the game was dictating to me what was good and evil and left NO room for any kind of middle-ground. I just flat out didn't agree with some of the choices the designers had labeled either saintly or pure evil, and because the game still has to push you through the same story, being evil makes no damn sense.
Very few games have managed to get the whole moral choice system right, the ones that do, do it in a way that you don't even notice like Red Dead Redemption. The worst examples, and Infamous 2 is one of them, only reward you for being on the farthest of either end of the spectrum. You can't settle for logical choices, you have to just look at the decisions the game throws at you and keep picking your chosen alignment otherwise you wont get any of the cool upgrades to help you beat the game.
In almost every game that has done this lately I've spotted more than one moral choice that I just flat out didn't agree with, where they'd labeled something evil, even though it made more sense in the long run. Why not let players choose a side without telling them if it's evil or not and let them work it out for themselves, it would be far more rewarding to be presented with a difficult choice and discover you made the right decision AFTER the mission.
Another aspect of this system that twists my nut sack is the fact that, in real life, people make the wrong choices because they're usually easier and let you skip hard work. Why spend hours trying to save innocent people who get in your way, when you can plow through them and get your mission over with quickly? Most games just don't seem to get this, and in some cases the evil missions are harder, so WHY would you do it? Evil missions should be tempting you to the dark side, with promises of easy reward and getting where you need to be by trampling on the less fortunate. When you make the evil missions just as hard as the good ones, there's not really any temptation, leaving you to base your choices solely on which ending you'd like to see.
Where Infamous 2, and many other games, stumble the most is in the integration of this moral choice system with the actual story. The story has to progress regardless of what choices you've made. So instead of having branching paths, they give the illusion of this, while still following the exact same story, except for the ending itself. In the worst cases this is done by having your choices make no impact on the story whatsoever until the final mission, which is the ONLY part of the game that dictates the ending. I know not all games do this but I've seen it done enough times to be sick of it.
For the sake of fairness I will point out some good examples of moral choices. Though the games themselves may have still pushed good and evil options on you, I found the endings of both GTA4 and Fable 2 to have the toughest choices, because they related to characters you cared about and not just faceless innocents. GTA4 still suffered from the end-of-game-choice-that-trumps-all-others, but the choice had far more impact for me because neither was really good or evil, it all depended on what YOU felt was right, and it affected the lives of characters you cared for. The same goes for Fable 2, which offered you the option of bringing thousands of innocent people back to life, or bringing your family and dog back. Having spent the entire game with the dog you become quite attached, making the decision extremely painful because again, neither is good or evil, it's about what matters more to you.
Infamous 2 is far from a bad game, I may not have enjoyed it as much as the first game due to the worst example of a moral choice system I've seen so far, but the characters are more well-written this time, and the gameplay is more fun. It's a must own for the PS3, if you can ignore the devil and angel sitting on your shoulder the whole time.
8/10
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