One thing I thought Sucker Punch really nailed in the first game was the balance between Cole's powers and the enemies', and the way you had to stay on your toes and use the city's geometry to your advantage, and I feel like they lost it towards the end of inFamous 2.
You never became
really powerful in the first game, not in the sense that you could go and Rambo into a den of bad guys with much luck, but if you were mindful of your surroundings and picked the best area to fight from you could always do pretty well for yourself. Some of the later missions were really brilliant, and I think it was the second-last one in particular that threw a practical army at you but space them out on various rooftops in such a way that you were pretty much a match for them by your lonesome. It's hard to describe, but I feel the balance was a lot better in the first game.
There were moments in inFamous 2 when I thought I was playing the best thing ever, and it never got stale because the way you play that game changes significantly with pretty much ever new power you get. I was amazed at how the gameplay opened up when I got the Ice Launch, and the first big bossfight was absolutely brilliant in a way that inFamous 1 could never have offered. And then when you get to Flood City things get even better because all of a sudden you need to start getting a whole lot more precise with your platforming because there's water everywhere. But then you realise you can even use that to your advantage, though, because blasting dudes off rooftops into water and shocking them is an easy one-hit-kill. Only stay frosty, son, because these effers can jump, too. I just
adored the middle of inFamous 2.
But I feel like it just goes downhill really significantly when you unlock the final part of New Marais. It feels like every enemy gets a huge bump-up in health with every passing mission, so before long even the most basic enemies need five second long bursts to the face before they even slow down, and you can just wail on bigger enemies for minutes at a time. Ice Titans are the worst thing in the whole game because they barely even fight back. The one on the bow of the cargo ship just stood in place while I emptied my electricity stores into his face and then ran off to recharge over and over again. I love the huge battles in inFamous where you fight a dozen different enemy-types at once and each neeeds to be dealt with differently, but by the end of the game I just groaned every time the game threw another forty enemies at me because it just took
so long.
It got to the point where, despite your amazing new powers, you actually feel
less dangerous at the end of the game than you are at the start because enemies simply have more health. And rooftop-to-rooftop battles are pretty much gone in favour of bland one-level fights in warehouses and city streets. You
can still find higher ground, but when all you're doing is firing dozens of rockets into the same Titan it's easier to get in close because they travel so slowly; it's not like he's going to do anything about it.
I was planning to start an evil playthrough right after I finished, but by the end of inFamous 2 I was just done. I hated the way the story ended, too, but that's neither here nor there
