Okay, I swear this is not going to be a regular thing but my previous post made mention of Sucker Punch in comparison to Naughty Dog and because of the nature of that comparison, I feel like I need to expand upon my experience with Sucker Punch in-depth because both companies had franchises that were such a big part of my childhood and I find it strange that one peaked during the PS2 era while the other only seems to be improving, even if only by small margins each time.
My first experience with Sucker Punch was the Sly Cooper series. Much like Jak and Daxter, Sly Cooper is a series of Platformers that are exclusive to the PlayStation 2. Rather than follow an adventurer with his best-friend turned talking Pokemon, the Sly Cooper series is about anthropomorphic animals that live human societies with the same countries and same roles, just with different animal species, starring Sly Cooper, the leader of the group and the suave master thief, and his friends from an orphanage, Bentley and Murray.
Like Jak & Daxter, Sly Cooper is a series that focuses on Platforming through open maps that expand more and more as you progress through them and unlock chunks of them. Also like Jak & Daxter, the first Sly game has five levels, one for each member of the gang that you're hunting down. That said, though, of the five villains in the game, only one of them is actually worth mentioning as the main antagonist and probably the biggest part of the series as a whole, and besides him, only two of the remaining four are actually memorable, so much so that they're the only two besides the main villain who are seen in more than one installment.
The first is Muggshot, a thug who was weak as a child and trained his arms and upper body so much that not only does he walk on his over-sized hands and arms rather than his legs but apparently, Sly is almost entirely incapable of actually harming the guy, he's just that beefy I guess.
The 2nd is the Panda King, who is a Master of the Martial Art known as Flame Fu. And, before you ask, yes, it is a Martial Art dedicated exclusively to generating and fighting with fire. For as much as the bosses in the first Sly Cooper game were about as fun and exciting as an average boss fight in the Jak games, the boss fight against Panda King is by far my favorite because he's the only one that is just a straight up one-on-one fight between two masters of their crafts; it just so happens that Sly's craft is thieving, while Panda King's craft is Martial Arts.
And last, we get Clockwerk, who is simultaneously the most important character in the entirety of Sly Cooper history in terms of the Cooper family line, and the character who had the worst villain design in terms of video games and boss fights. Don't get me wrong, a giant Owl as a boss is definitely unique, and going for a more humanoid boss design might seem unreasonable given how intimidating the Owl design has turned out to be but because he's a bird there are only so many ways to anthropomorphize him before he stops being a bird completely. Because of that Clockwerk actually serves as the series worst set of bosses in the entire series, but again, given that he's a mechanical owl, I don't really know how to fix that without making him a completely different order of species entirely.
And in all fairness to Clockwerk, most bosses in the series are generally pretty weak. One-on-One boss fights with an enemy who fights in a similar way to you are probably the best encounters most types of games can give you if you have bosses at all but, if every boss you face is humanoid and has a skill-set that you can learn and achieve within the game's mechanics, the fights just get boring and repetitive, Dark Souls 2 proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Even so, there aren't that many boss fights in the series that are one-on-one fights with similar characters. Sly Cooper and the Thievius Racoonus only had the Panda King, everyone else was a gimmick, Sly 2 had Demitri but he was the first boss and he was the only one that was remotely similar to the Panda King and not even the best boss in Sly 2 period, and Sly 3 had maybe one boss fight like this but with a unique spin on it where, instead of Sly fighting him, it's actually Murray who does it.
Of the original trilogy of Sly Cooper games, Sly 2 had the best assortment of bosses, having more bosses both overall and percentage-wise that hit the mark but even most of these are not perfect. Demitri is a good first boss, for being one that doesn't overwhelm the opponent with a moveset that is hard for the limited combat mechanics but the two best boss fights are The Contessa for doing what Demitri did but better, not only because the Contessa had a moveset that fit the combat mechanics better but also because her mechanic was honestly really cool and made sense to her background as a brainwasher/hypnotist/interrogator, and Jean Bison who had a fight with Bentley that actually subverted boss fight expectations with the gimmick that it had where, rather than fight Jean directly, you can use stage hazards, controlled by Sly at a control panel, to harm Jean and his mooks. Ordinarily, adding mooks or adds to a boss fight would make it worse or, in some cases, even unfair, it worked in the Jean fight because, if the mooks were removed, the boss fight would simply be a matter of getting Jean to follow you into a trap, then hitting the right button to activate that trap. The adds serve a valuable purpose by adding decision making to which trap you use next, not only because you can only use one trap at a time but also because each trap has a cool-down period before you can use it again. It's a level of strategy that adds rarely give to a boss fight and I like that.
That said, for as much as Sly 2 has the best assortment of bosses, that does not necessarily mean the best assortment of characters. Demitri is a good fight because his moveset is similar to yours but as a character he's basically just a walking hipster art-critic stereotype. Jean Bison is a living "Stupid Canadian" joke and as much as he's a barbarian lumberjack who only exists in this time frame because he was frozen for a thousand years, there's only so much lore can do to justify weak characterization. The Contessa is probably the best character out of all the boss fights I mentioned between her control over the police force, her desire for money and the way she gains it, and the way she manages to get a hold of a lot of money from people like Counts and Barons, she only gets a few scenes of screen-time, which is really hard to justify since she is among only three characters, the others being Jean Bison and Rajan who get more than one level.
Neila, for as great as her character was, never actually gets a boss fight. I mean, technically she does after she takes control of Clockwerk's body, but the fight itself is actually just a reuse of Clockwerk's boss fight gimmick from the previous game. That said, one thing I do like about the Clockla fight is, once the gimmick from the first game is removed, you get a pretty good set-piece where you jump on debris from Arpeggio's destroyed zeppelin and actually do some platforming on Clockwerk's damaged body in a manner that is probably as close to Shadow of the Colossus as this series gets.
Sly 3 has the fight against Don Octavio where you have to use Sly to pump some oil onto the streets to slow him down enough for Murray to get some good shots in but, other than that, there aren't really any other notable boss fights in Sly 3. Except the first fight against General Tsao, that was really fun, and a standout among the series.
I've said so much about the boss fights but, let's be real, boss fights are not the only significant piece of gameplay, unless your game is Shadow of the Colossus. So let's talk about some of those other things: the things that Sly does really well.
Sly, much like Jak, does a lot of platforming. However, there is a fundamental difference in how these two franchises tackle platforming. In Jak & Daxter, you are given a set of abilities to traverse the world with and that set of abilities, while limited, is free-form and filled with enough interplay that using it is always fun. Sly Cooper is much more contextual in the way his platforming works a lot of the time. And, when I say contextual, I am referring to how Sly's moveset is programmed into the game. Another way to refer to his moveset is "on rails." You see, there are many different surfaces in each level of each sly game that emits a blue sparkly particle effect. When you are near something with this particle effect, you can press circle and Sly will do something in relation to that object. For example, if the effect is on a lamp-post Sly will climb up it, if it's on a telephone wire or a tight-rope, Sly will walk along it, if it's by a small ledge, Sly will sidle along it. In this way, these two Sony series can actually be compared to Nintendo series. Namely, that if Jak & Daxter is Super Mario, then Sly Cooper is The Legend of Zelda.
However, while The Legend of Zelda has a much heavier emphasis on item use, Sly Cooper is much more about what Sly can do with the limited resources he has. In this way, Sly Cooper is actually a bit more ergonomic because while Link's reliance on items means that individual models and sprites have to be made for those models and placed appropriately, in Sly Cooper, more often than not, you just take the same set of code you made for one contextual event and you reuse it, only swapping animations and desired effects where necessary.
I could be completely off-base about that, since I'm referring to modular programming again, which Sly Cooper may not have had access to during that time since it was the PS2 era and I didn't actually learn about programming or any of its current facets until 2012, which was pretty close to around the time the PS3 and XBox 360 generation was nearing its final years. Custom game engines with custom programming languages also muddy up that issue somewhat, since not all programming languages come with modular programming. C++ does, Java does, Python does, and C# does, but C, Ruby, Fortran, and SQL did not at the time of their conception. As a result, it's possible that the developers had a custom coding language that didn't have modular or function programming or they were using a programming language that already existed but was not object oriented. Whatever the case, they were able to reuse assets they had already made to give the illusion that Sly had a greater moveset than he actually did.
The great thing about how this was handled was that new levels introduce new abilities for Sly that look visually very cool and different from each other that are only available starting at certain levels or, in some cases, exclusive to a set of levels. What that does is it gives Sly a moveset that has the illusion of growing over time, which makes the player feel like their moveset is progressing. They may not think they're getting better, and indeed they may not be, but a lot of players like the idea of their character gaining new abilities at least, and this was a nice way of giving Sly a lot of unique abilities while still only mapping them to one button.
Essentially, these contextual events are sort of like scripted sequences and quick time events that I criticized the Uncharted series for but there are two major things that Sly Cooper does with them that makes them a lot more acceptable as game mechanics. First off, these abilities are not made obvious that they're contextual QTE's. There are never any button prompts on-screen and while hitting the circle button will lock you to whatever you attached yourself to, hitting X will not only cause you to jump but it will also disconnect you from what you were attached to, which makes progressing through a level much more organic than QTE's ever get. The thing to consider about this also is that, while the sparkly effect indicates that pressing circle will cause a contextual event, it doesn't trigger a cutscene to play that does the work that you want to do, it simply connects you to whatever particles you were aiming at and you can continue from there, it's still entirely gameplay no matter how you look at it.
The other thing to consider is that, even though these are contextual events, and some linear level layouts may motivate you to use the contextual events a lot more often than a game like Jak & Daxter or Devil May Cry would have there is still a degree of choice. For example, one way to get to the top of a building is to climb a nearby pipe to get to a roof that you can perform parkour on, or you can jump on several, rather organic and cartoonish jump pads to get you to a roof, or you can double jump onto a nearby platform and work your way up the way a regular platformer does. The only real times the games tell you that these contextual events are required are during missions where you have to use stealth and silence to get around an obstacle without being detected. Once the mission constraints have been removed, you can go back to the mission area and traverse it however you please.
That's also why the Clockla set-piece works better than the set-pieces in Uncharted. Because you are jumping on debris that is making a clear path to where you need to go that is miles in the sky, there's no way to go off script because the path you are given is so obvious and if you fail to follow the path, the punishment of falling to your death is believable. That's right, Sly Cooper barely has any elements in it that are like Uncharted but the parts of it that are like Uncharted are handled much better than anything Uncharted ever does, barring arguably the train sequence and even then, I find the spectacle of jumping off of debris thousands of feet in the air to defeat your family's mortal enemy now possessed by probably the least trustworthy character in all of gaming except maybe Tanya from Mortal Kombat to be much more exciting and tense than riding a train full of enemies. Both incorporate superhuman, or in Sly's case, inhuman characters and ridiculous situations but, conceptually, when dealing with these two set-pieces, if you fall off a moving train, you are much more likely to survive than you are to survive a 200 story drop in free-fall. Falling off the train might still kill you but considering that the Uncharted series has established that Nathan Drake is a regenerating conduit in possession of the God Hand, that prospect seems a lot less likely.
The set-piece with Clockla in Sly 2 is a lot less visually impressive than the train sequence in Uncharted 2 but conceptually, and implicitly there's a lot more going on, which makes it work a lot better.
Another thing that Sly Cooper has a major focus on is Stealth. As I said, there are boss fights, and Sly Cooper is a bit of a Platformer but if you remove the Platforming and the boss fights what's left is stealth. Not just Stealth either but also stealing. Sly Cooper features a pick-pocketing mechanic where you can sneak right up next to an enemy right behind them and maintain a certain distance in order to pick-pocket for money and, in some cases, loot that you can sell on Bentley's site ThiefNet.
At least, I think it's Bentley's site, we're not given a whole lot of context for that gameplay mechanic, the ThiefNet is really just there to serve as a shop where you can sell the treasures you've stolen for money and then use the money you got to purchase ability upgrades that are not contextual. But considering that Bentley is the only one on the Cooper gang with the technological know-how to build a website and fence things on it without getting them caught and there really wasn't enough in the mythos at the time to suggest that another programmer or hacker could've made it and then Bentley somehow found out about it, I think the idea that Bentley made, runs, and manages the site just makes the most sense to me logically.
Speaking of, there are several abilities that Sly, Bentley and Murray can use in Sly 2. A number of them also appear in Sly 3, so just bare that in mind. Most of the abilities are not that useful but the Paraglider is probably the most useful ability in the game given that it allows you to make platforming challenges easier without turning Sly into a clone of Jak or Ratchet, and my favorite ability in the game has to be the alteration on the Alarm clock where you throw out Tom from Toonami. The reason that's funny is quite obvious but in terms of why it's there, back during the development of Sly 2 the Toonami crew made a deal with Sucker Punch where they would review Sly 2 on the small commercial bit where Tom reviews video games and in exchange they would put that item in there for those people who watched the review and got a hold of the code that would unlock him.
The Stealth Slide, where Sly slides across a surface silently is useful for going past groups of enemies undetected, especially if you're going down an incline but going uphill is much easier with the regular sprint because the stealth slide removes all friction on angled surfaces. I don't really know what else to say about it other than slides are fun.
Other than that, most of the abilities are useless. You can also gain new abilities from safes that are in each villain's lair. In each level, there's a certain number of clue bottles that you can collect, which is fun because grabbing them and getting the contents makes a breaking sound complete with glass shattering onscreen, but these abilities are rarely more useful than anything that you can purchase in the shop.
Of the Sly Cooper games, Sly 2 is easily my favorite. Sly 1 is my second favorite purely because I have not played Thieves in Time yet, and I'm not going to talk about that one here because Sucker Punch didn't make it, and Sly 3 is my least favorite.
Those of you who watch Caddicarus on Youtube may have seen his Sly Cooper Retrospective and in it he says that Sly 2 is the worst of the trilogy because it attempts too much. He also says that Sly 3 is his favorite of the trilogy because he loved it when he was a kid and of the trilogy, it was the only one he actually played as a child. And given that the retrospective took place as an adult, it could very well be that he let his nostalgia for Sly 3 cloud his judgment and force him to make the assumption that Sly 2 attempted too much because it has much more variety and intricacy in the plot than Sly 3 does. Of course, it's also worth mentioning that in that same video he says that Jak II is terrible because it gets harder and more mature in terms of story and tone. As unbiased as I try to be a lot of the time, whether I'm successful or not, I have to say that I don't watch Caddicarus anymore because he has proven that he doesn't really know anything about game design or what makes a good game.
It's not even simply a case of "I disagree therefore he's wrong." Just to put this into perspective, disregarding the tutorial level of Sly 2, Sly 2 has ten total hub worlds and each of them has a total of around ten missions. Each of those missions takes around five minutes to complete. That's one thousand minutes of game time, or about 16 hours. By comparison, Sly 1 takes around one fourth of that time, and Sly 3 is a five hour game. All of Sly 2's gameplay is core gameplay. For as much as the contextual events add variety, they are still a single mechanic that functions differently depending on where you are or what you apply it to. By comparison, Sly 3 is significantly shorter and is much more reliant on gimmicks like vehicle turret sections, dog fighting, the underwater sections with Demitri and. . . you know what? Pretty much the entire pirate level.
Jak 3 had its fair share of gimmicks as well but many of those still utilized the core mechanics and didn't place arbitrary limitations on you most of the time. Most of the time, there are still times when it does.
A fair thing to mention about Sly 3 was that it was created within the span of a year, Sucker Punch decided to make it before the release of the PS3 so that they could have a trilogy under their belts before moving onto a new IP, and Sly 3, for as much as I call it my least favorite in the franchise, it turned out about as well as one would hope for a development cycle of only one year.
That's why I say Caddicarus doesn't know anything about game design: he thinks Sly 3 was great when there was clearly a much heavier reliance on avoiding core gameplay, whereas he says Sly 2 attempted too much when, in reality, Sly 2 simply expanded upon what was already there in Sly 1. Okay, mini-tirade over.
Then we move onto Sucker Punch's next Franchise, which is just as good as Sly Cooper in every single capacity, if not better in some ways, InFamous. Ignoring the Morality System that is a staple in InFamous for better or for worse, the gameplay of InFamous takes every single necessary aspect of Sly Cooper, modifies it slightly so it works in the new setting, and gives the main character lightning powers and a third person shooter control scheme.
Now, one might argue that InFamous, at its most basic level, is a third person shooter and you don't want to play another shooter from this generation since you've already got Uncharted, Tomb Raider, Halo, Destiny, The Last of Us, Metal Gear Solid 4 and 5, or some combination of the above but the InFamous series has a few interesting ways of handling itself that make sense in the context of the premise.
You see, Cole has Lightning Powers. He is what the series refers to as a Conduit, who are basically people with a certain gene that allows them to develop super powers. Think the Meta-gene in DC comics and you get the idea. Now, technically, all of Cole's abilities could be replicated by some form of firearm, or other third person shooter mechanic except for the Lightning Storm. However, because Cole's abilities are Lightning and not firearms, it gives great context to a lot of the mechanics that are in place, which a lot of shooters use nowadays but don't really do as well.
First off, the regenerating health. In the first game, it was believed that Cole's regenerative ability was due to the electrical impulses surging through his body that increased the rate at which his cells reproduce. However, InFamous: Second Son seems to suggest that Enhanced Regeneration is just a general Conduit ability. So plus one for InFamous, they gave context to the regenerative powers, which Uncharted lags behind in.
Next, because Cole's abilities are lightning based, he does not need to hold any weapons. What that means is that all of his abilities that correspond to different firearms are attached to different buttons and different mechanics. In the first game, Cole has Lightning Bolts (the pistol), an electromagnetic shockwave (grapple or grenade reflect), shock grenades (grenades, obviously), the megawatt hammer (rocket launcher), Polarity Wall (Riot Shield), and basic melee attacks. Because all of these are simply aspects of his powers, tied to different button combinations, Cole not only has no limit on weapon types because he has no weapons, but he doesn't need to switch between weapons because they're all readily available once you unlock them. Basically this is a faster, more efficient, more combat-focused version of the backpack from The Last of Us.
Finally, there are some powers Cole has that just cannot be replicated by regular fire arms. The Lightning Storm, Arc Lightning, Impulse Blast, and Electromagnetic Grinding are obvious but what's not so obvious is that Cole can use his shockwave to reflect rocket blasts back at the user, he can fire a Megawatt Hammer and then shoot lightning bolts at his intended target so that the rocket redirects and hits the target that it initially missed, he can fire grenades that separate into smaller grenades that explode in separate places at different times, and, at least in the first game, he can recharge his powers by, I kid you not, shooting something metal to electrify it, then absorb that electricity to refill battery cores and, depending on how low you are on health, heal yourself as well. Of course, that particular mechanic was altered in subsequent games where the basic lightning bolt does use up battery cores but it was a nice concession the first game made for making areas with no power easier to navigate through without actually rebalancing the enemies or area.
InFamous 1 also had arguably the best set of villains that Sucker Punch has ever created. Sasha, Alden, and Kessler were all villains that had something to do with Cole and the Ray Sphere, they all had believable motivations, even if that only applies to Sasha in retrospect, and they weren't just against you, they were against each other as well.
Arguably these interactions are not on the level of Demon's Souls or Dark Souls, but for what they were, they were actually really cool.
Then there's the morality system. Now, some people have criticized a large portion of the PS3 and XBox 360 generation for having far too many action games with morality systems that were weak and didn't play into the gameplay or story or whatever but I feel like, at least in the case of this series, that hate is entirely unjustified.
InFamous was designed from the ground up to use a morality system, it permeates the gameplay, the story, and the world. In game, you have two different karmic spectra, good and evil. Each one is divided into three grades. Once you enter one of the grades, that grade has an unlock for each of your abilities for you to use. Some abilities don't have karma-based upgrades, and some abilities don't have upgrades at all but the majority of abilities that can be upgraded use XP to upgrade. You acquire XP either by defeating enemies and pulling off in-game feats like headshots (which are referred to ingame as Head Shocks) in order to get XP modifiers. Head Shock is a basic one, another, much more challenging one is to kill a Conduit using only melee. This is usually impossible except for two Conduit types, the Reaper Conduit, and the Aura Conduit, and the best ability that makes this easier is the Gigawatt Blades, which are DLC.
Hitting enemies like Reapers, Dustmen, and First Sons will get you Good Karma, while hitting civilians and cops will get you bad karma. There are also some abilities that exclusively give you certain types of karma, in particular the Bio-Leech and Pulse Heal. Bio-Leech allows you to steal bio-electric energy from basically anyone to fully regenerate health and regain all battery cores but using this ability will always give you bad karma, even if you do it to an enemy. Conversely, the Pulse Heal will only give you good Karma because it heals civilians. The third of this trio, the static shackles (that's not actually what they're called) that will give you good karma if you use them on enemies and bad karma if you use them on civilians.
Some abilities can also only be used while you are in a specific karma state. Arc Lightning, which functions similarly to Star War Force Lightning, is an Evil-Exclusive ability, whereas the Impulse Blast can only be used on Good Karma.
Moral choices that you make during some gameplay sequences also affect how the world reacts to you. For example, there's one mission where there's a bomb on a shop that the cops need diffused. You can either absorb it's electricity to render it inert, or you can shoot the bomb in order to set it off. If you choose the former, the Cops will help you out more often. If you choose the latter, the cops will immediately start shooting you because you killed too many people. In another example, there's a guy with a locker who is currently injured. If you heal him, he will open the locker for you and give you the blast shards that are inside. If you attempt to force the locker open, the bomb inside the locker will explode and damage you and destroy the blast shards.
There's one particular scene where this doesn't work that way but, to the game's credit, it actually works in favor of the story. You see, there's a part of the game where Cole's girlfriend, Trish, gets kidnapped, and you have to rescue her from Kessler. Your options are to either save her or save five doctors, both tied up at the top of opposite buildings. Rescuing one, will cause the other the drop and fall to their death(s). If you rescue the doctors, Trish falls and she dies, if you rescue Trish, turns out the girl you rescue isn't Trish at all and she is actually among the doctors that die as well.
When I first played that sequence, I wanted to get the doctors because I was aiming for good karma but, because the buildings and positions of the people weren't exactly made clear to me and I was on a time limit, I rushed up the wrong building and accidentally went to the one where Trish is with the Doctors. This is where that discrepancy comes in.
The cutscene that follows is not like other cutscenes. Other cutscenes play based on the decisions you make in a given sequence leading up to it. In this case, however, the cutscene that plays is dependent on your current karma level. What that means is that, if you've been good this entire time, even if you fuck up like I did and attempt to rescue Trish, the cutscene that plays will have Trish tell you that she is proud of everything you've done. On the flip side, if you've been an asshole the entire game, even if you rescue the doctors, Trish will use her dying words to call you a piece of shit.
This actually plays into Trish's characterization a little bit. How so, you ask? Well, this little discrepancy in the cutscenes actually makes it very clear that Trish is about overall character rather than what you do in specific situations. If you're a piece of shit, rescuing the doctors is not gonna make Trish change her mind on that. If you're at least trying to be a hero in a city that hates you, Trish will lament the poor treatment she's given you over the course of the story and lets you know that she's proud of you. This indicates that Trish, as a person, recognizes that people who are good can still make mistakes or selfish actions without it harming their character too much. It also indicates that she recognizes, if you're a piece of shit by default, a good thing you do is clearly just to gain favor that you don't deserve. In a way, it makes her quite understanding even if she's angry because the Ray Sphere explosion killed her sister.
Then the 2nd game rolled around and, it was probably a better game all around in terms of core gameplay but between removing that one small hack for infinite charging stations, and having a much weaker overall villain, it did have some problems that InFamous 1 didn't have.
InFamous 1 divided its conflict across three different villains but that conflict was so well handled that every villain, even Sasha, could've been seen as redeemable in some regard, or at least sympathetic. InFamous 2 has a much looser narrative, by which I mean it sets up the main conflict with The Beast early on, and then, once you get to New Marais, the Beast is forgotten about in favor of an asshole politician who also happened to be a conduit called Bertrand. We are also introduced to Nix, who is probably my least favorite character in the entire franchise, and Lucy Kuo, who is probably the best female character in the entire franchise who also just so happens to not be a villain or at odds with Cole, at least until the very end, if you're doing a good playthrough.
Okay, let's get this out of the way, Bertrand is the worst villain I've seen in a Sucker Punch series, and given that this same company made Arpeggio, that's saying something. Arpeggio is a disgusting, pathetic piece of shit, but at least he only gets a few scenes so he doesn't ruin the whole story. Bertrand is introduced fairly early on and he apparently has a goal to create artificial conduits to sell to different countries in order to profit off of the wars they cause. Basically, while Arpeggio's motivation amounted to acquiring something he didn't have, Bertrand's amounted to getting more of what he has in spades.
Honestly, the only reason Bertrand exists is to give Cole something and someone to fight while he waits for the Beast to catch up to him. In this way, Bertrand is a filler villain. But he's even worse than a filler villain because he takes up 95% of the whole game. The three different factions he makes are also worse, too.
What makes him worse, in all honesty, is that InFamous: Second Son attempts something similar with the DUP and Augustine but does it better, and given that the game before InFamous 2 had such a strong roster of villains, there is no excuse for Bertrand being this bad.
Fortunately, what saves this game is the mechanics. Like Sly 2, InFamous 2 expands on the core gameplay by adding new upgrades on old abilities that were in the previous game. Now, InFamous 2 for some reason takes away these abilities after Cole clearly shows he has them in the opening sequence, and Sly 2 kinda does the same thing where Sly doesn't have the abilities he should have gained from the first game but, since I didn't fault Sly 2 for doing it, and a lot of games do that honestly, I don't think I should fault InFamous 2 for doing the same thing.
There are many more upgrades on existing abilities but these upgrades are actually treated as separate types of ammunition. Let me elaborate: each ability has a set of upgrades, each of these upgrades can be swapped out in a menu for different effects. For example, the lightning bolt has the regular bolts, there's a bolt that fires three bolts at three different angles, dealing more damage and hitting more easily, the artillery bolt, which hits at a much farther distance than any other bolt, essentially making it the sniper round, the magnum bolt, which is a single explosive bolt, like a grenade launcher, and the bolt stream, which is basically automatic fire on rapid bolts. Every ability has upgrades like these and, like InFamous 1, some are Karma-specific.
So, for the sake of comparison, again, if InFamous 1 is Cowboy Bebop, InFamous 2 is Samurai Champloo, better gameplay and action but a much weaker story and set of characters.
There's also InFamous: Festival of Blood but I'm not going to talk about it for two reasons: first, it may not even be canon, the ending suggests that it probably isn't. The 2nd reason is, even if it is canon, I haven't played it. Sorry.
So next we move on to InFamous: Second Son, which I admit I enjoyed a lot more than a lot of other people did. One thing that InFamous: Second Son has over InFamous 2 is a much more cohesive story that is much more impactful overall and has a stronger set of characters. Of course, this only applies to a good playthrough, since some cutscenes that play in certain situations are not altered to fit the evil path but even so, for what it was, it was better overall than InFamous 2.
Now, before I go any further, I want to say: 60 Frames Per Second! (Fucking finally!!) The Previous InFamous games ran at 30 fps because they were pushing a graphical standard that the PS3 honestly couldn't handle. Clearly, there was more focus on good gameplay than Uncharted or The Last of Us, but they clearly sacrificed the frame rate to they do whatever they wanted to do.
In InFamous: Second Son, however, in the options menu you can either cap the framerate at 30 or, uncap the framerate so you can see that the game, in most sequences, runs perfectly fine as a relatively unstable 60 fps, by which I mean it runs at 60 fps most of the time but, in some situations, particularly the Neon Karma Bomb causes serious frame rate dips but holy shit, running around at light speed with neon powers with 60 fps frame rate was worth the price of admission alone.
Now, InFamous: Second Son featured four different power sets but you're only going to use three for the most part. Concrete was disappointing but only because it was unfinished and, like I said, you don't get it until the end of the game, so it's essentially post-game content. What other powers were there? Well, there was Smoke, which would've been helpful to switch between in some situations, same goes for video. But, because Second Son basically pulls a DMC3 and has you only use one ability at once, instead of cycling through them on the D-Pad, Neon is the best thing to stick with at all times.
If you could cycle through the powers on the d-pad like in DMC4 with the styles, that would make InFamous: Second Son far less painful in some areas. But, to be fair, Hideaki Itsuno's team didn't think of that until DMC4, so in all likelihood, we may very well get Power Cycling out of Delsin in the next InFamous game, provided Sucker Punch decides not to abandon the world they've already established.
The Sly Cooper and InFamous games may have their flaws, I fully acknowledge they're not winning any awards for "Most Perfect games of all time" any time soon. But what Sucker Punch does with InFamous is something that Naughty Dog seems to have largely abandoned with the Uncharted and The Last of Us IP's, namely a focus on core mechanics that are engaging, good to experiment with and, most importantly, fun.
If InFamous: Second Son had some tweaks, it could've easily been Game of the Year for the year it released, and even though it isn't, it's still a game that I fully enjoyed and got my money's worth out of. And I hope that Sucker Punch stays on this track of focusing on core gameplay and getting better over time.
Thanks for reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment