Infamous 2

When I wrote about the first Infamous game nearly a year ago (has it really been that long?) I commented about how it was a good start to an open-world superhero franchise, but just took a bit too long to get going for me to truly enjoy it. With Infamous 2 consider that criticism a thing of the past- the whole game is just awesome. You start off with all of your powers from the first game, and things only get better from there. I'm glad the game allows an import of your character from the first game, because playing with an already-set level of good or bad karma made the two games fit together well- I was a hero in Empire City, so it makes sense that as I journeyed to the New Orleans stand-in New Marais, my people loved me everywhere I went. I figured I would continue on with this, becoming the ultimate good guy, until a choice in the middle of the game surprisingly skewed my karma level. You see, the game gives you a couple romantic interests who themselves are superheroes, a 'good' one with the power to shoot ice, and a 'bad' one with the power to shoot fire. Now the hero, Cole, has his own free will and can be good or bad, but when a time comes for Cole to switch his powers with one of his new friends, it was treated way more seriously than I thought it would be. I wanted fire rather than ice, but doing so made the ice-girl hate me and dropped my karma far into the 'evil' end of the spectrum. What's so evil about this? Oh well. It was actually kinda convenient because the only reason I planned on staying 'good' throughout the game was because the best powers are only at the extreme ends of the spectrum- starting good and turning evil would result in a wishy-washy neutral karma that would get me nowhere. But no, my choice was made, and I was now evil. Things don't remain quite so black and white, but I kept up my evil presence, launching cars full of people into the ocean and causing mayhem throughout the city, so in the end I got the 'evil' ending to the game, which was pretty damn good. Stan assured me the 'good' ending was better, so I Youtubed that and it probably is. So yeah, no matter what Infamous 2 lived up to the hype and is well worth a play.