

What's inFamous 2's biggest surprise? It's that the protagonist seems to enjoy his super powers a little more on this outing - and so will you. Instead, it's cheerful, energetic and colourful, and it casts Cole as a kind of loose-limbed, white-trash avenger: an ornery hero in a wife-beater who lamps the baddies with a pair of motorbike forks and then turns off his phone to grab a bit of downtime watching a Western on TV. This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies.

Despite the fact that the sequel kicks off with Cole MacGrath's defeat by the Beast (the cherry-flavoured Dr Manhattan-alike he had been created to ward off) and a subsequent retreat south, the game that follows refuses to brood over failures and disappointments. Sucker Punch's first open-worlder provided a promising superhero template, but it locked players into a dour backstory where the fizziness suggested by your newfound electrical powers was lost beneath the grim rubble of a destroyed Empire City. Pummelling community theatre folk may be one of the more basic missions available in inFamous 2 - but it feels like an emblem of the game's single greatest shift in direction. So ignore the big changes for a second: forget the new setting, the new characters, and the inevitable range of new abilities. Hopefully that will be fixed with a patch. The only problem, actually, is that inFamous 2's developer Sucker Punch awards evil, rather than good, karma points for doing all this.

Most of all, it just feels right to blast the saxophone from a jazzman's wretched saxophone-caressing hands. Can you blame me? It's great to see trust fund percussionists winging through the air, launched from those stupid plastic drum kits, and it's a pleasure to knock human statues off their wonky-apple-box perches. In fact, after I've concluded this "article", I'm probably going to wade back in and finish off a few more. I can't even pretend to be ashamed of this. I come to you today as a man who has killed many, many street performers.
