The Platinum Road #8 - The Adventures of Cole McGrath (Infamous and Infamous 2)
Scrolling on my phone, I saw an article on PushSquare about games being delisted in August. I was curious so I clicked. Imagine my face when I saw Infamous 2. I thought it was August 2027! Now with a very short time limit (T-minus 30 days), I’ve dropped all my plans and I’m heading into the world of Infamous before it’s too late.
Stage 1: Making the Best of a Bad Situation
A brief overview of the story - You play as Cole McGrath, a courier in Empire City who is tricked into transporting a scientific bomb, one that explodes and gives him the power to control Electricity. Striking a deal with an FBI agent upon trying to escape the quarantined city, Cole must track down another FBI agent, John, and recover him safely.
The games main selling point is that you can choose to be a good guy or a bad guy which affects the moment to moment as well as having minor and major karmic choices to make. The direction and tone of the story is carried by these decisions as is the powers you can unlock. Going to need two playthroughs, one of which on Hard, to cover both Karmic paths.
The first day of playing only amounted to two hours thanks to a comedy of things happening - I thought my playstation was going to blow up so I turned it off to clean. Lacking the right screwdriver to open it, we had to go to Jade’s dads. Turns out it’s clean, it just gets warm so the fans work overtime. I’ll sort that out at some point. The other thing was that my charging cable for the controller (of which my controller won’t work without) doesn’t reach where I sit on the sofa. My neck and back couldn’t take an extended play session so a new wire has been ordered.
I didn’t really have a game plan going in other than I do a Hero playthrough first and that I started on Medium. Beating the first mission, the game put me onto Hard instead so I guess this will also be my hard playthrough.
The trophies for this game are linked to progression in a lot of cases - major decisions, boss fights, full upgrades, collectibles and cumulative power usage and stuff. In short, it’s going to be hard to quantify trophy progress but I’ll try. As for Collectibles, I’m fetching them as I go and making notes on the ones I need.
You unlock powers gradually and so far I’ve unlocked the power to heal/subdue/drain downed people as well as a grenade power. There’s a trophy for both healing and draining but I’ll only be doing the former in this playthrough and the latter obviously in the evil playthrough. There’s also a trophy for sticking 50 enemies with it. We already have access to the shockwave power for knocking enemies off of buildings and the power drop move, so we have a few different things to keep in mind save we progress.
(That catches us up to when my wire arrived, for anyone at home cares)
My hard playthrough wasn’t too bad at all, only a couple points of spiked difficulty throughout the playthrough - including the final boss fight. Sure there were some more difficult sections but nothing frustrating, it just required some more careful play in sections. I couldn’t go willy nilly into fights as I would have been absolutely obliterated.
Throughout this first playthrough, there was a mix of just stumbling upon trophies and kind of working towards them. There’s a fair few combat trophies that I got - ‘Fish in a Barrel; (50 Kills in Water), ‘Red Baron’ (100 airborne enemy kills), ‘Get Off My Cloud’ (Knocking 100 enemies off of building) and ‘Road Kill’ (25 kills from ontop a vehicle). There’s also various movement and miscellaneous trophies I obtained from exploring - AC/DC (Drain a bunch of electricity), ‘Drop Everything’ (500 meters Thunder dropping) and Electric Hobo (Travelling on the trains). Don’t ask when I got any of them because I don’t know.
Something I had to actively work on throughout the game to avoid grinding was both ‘Doctor Cole’ (For healing 250 injured civilians) and the various Stunts (that I keep wanting to call Skill Points thanks to it’s similarities to those from Ratchet & Clank despite this being Sucker Punch and not Insomniac, again something I have to remind myself of), There are 21 stunts to perform, predominantly combat based, and while the pause screen told you the next one to unlock, you can unlock them in any order as long as you fulfill the requirements. Some are a lot easier than others and I did do some the checkpoint resets to get some done at opportune times. I never had to excessively grind for any of these thankfully. It’s quite annoying that you can’t see which ones you’ve done nor a list of potential Stunts.
Stage 1.5: Tidying up the streets
Towards the end of my playthrough, I chose to beeline the story to make sure I got the trophy for beating the story on Hard. the aptly named ‘Hard Finish’ Once that was out the way, I could switch to easy to finish up the things I had to do. I already did all the side quests in Neon and the Warren (Islands 1 and 2) for ‘Community Organizer’ and ‘Civic Leader’ respectively. Finishing the side quests in the Historic District and thusly freeing all three islands earns us ‘Urban Designer’
On my travels, I got some of the remaining travel based trophies - ‘Frequent Flyer’ for Thruster usage and ‘Hotfoot;’for a whopping 25km on the train tracks. Originally I was keeping track of the individual blast shards I was collecting because it was a faff to keep pausing things. Dead Drops are the other collectible and I was just getting those at random too (30 odd is a lot less than the 350 Blast Shards). Before I fully committed to the Shards, I had earned ‘Junior Geologist’ for 25% of the Shards and ‘You’re So Sly’ for getting all the Dead Drops in the Historic District
With map printout in hand, Dead Drops and Blast Shards here I come…
Stage 1.5.1: Can’t make it here or anywhere
Despite having my map printed out and me combing the map, I somehow only managed to get 346 in 5 hours 10 minutes. Making it to six hours for only another two blast shards. I don’t have it in me to spend another upwards of six hours to find the remaining two. When I eventually go back for the Hard mode playthrough, I’ll try it again.
Stage 2: Doing right Bayou
We move onto Infamous 2 which is the game that caused this panic, with it’s five trophies related to the User Generated Content. Luckily it can be accessed like an hour into the game. Blasting through those trophies is easier than ever with people making creations designed to be beaten in seconds.
I’m being really cheeky and also playing the UGC that gives you all the blast shards so you don’t have to prowl around for them. This will take hours off the platinum time and it’s only going to be available for another few weeks so when in Rome. To compensate, this first playthrough is also on Hard. Completing this earns us ‘Pain Builds Character’
It’s merely an hour or so into the game when the UGC unlocks and getting the five trophies takes roughly 45 minutes more. As I said, I did the mission that unlocks all the blast shards (and I don’t feel bad about it). The trophies here are for playing 10 and 25 missions, 5 new ones and one for creating your own. Thankfully, there are creations that can be done in literally 2 seconds and some of these are new enough for new creations. Once those are done, all you have to do is save a template as your own creation. Doing all this earns ‘Level Up’, ‘UGC Curious’, ‘UGC Veteran’ and ‘Trail Blazer’. I’m happy to get these done since the servers are shutting at the end of August. If I quit now, I can always get the Platinum.
In terms of missables, there’s not really anything since I’ll be doing two playthroughs but two I did get in this playthrough were ‘Return to Sender’ and ‘Knockout in the Blackout’. The former was for blasting a rocket back at a helicopter - plenty of chance to do this in the Main quests and Side quests. The latter requires you to kill 50 enemies in the powered down areas while not on a mission. There is three areas you can do this in - Ascension Parish, Flood Town and Gas Works. I probably shouldn’t have done it on Hard but I did, dipping in and out of Ascension Parish on suicide runs. I got 50 in about 4 runs.
There’s trophies for major story events and doing the Good Karma versions of missions. Apart from the misc trophies mentioned in the next section, everything was just obtained through normal gameplay.
Stage 2.5: Swamp Sweep
Things just went really well here. Going for the remaining Dead Drops took me across both islands. One was at the Cathedral, gliding down from the very top earns us ‘Nothing Can Bring Me Down’. I was at the Clock Tower for Dead Drops and through to the Gas Works for the last one I needed. Climbing to the top of the Ice Tower is the third of three highest buildings you need to climb which awards us ‘Mountaineer’. Thunder dropping from the top of the Ice Tower also gets us ‘Thunder Flop’
A brief detour before leaving Island 1 earned us a power up which I used on some cars leaving the Gas Works for ‘Take Them For A Spin’. With that done, returning to the start of the game for the final Dead Drop gets us a double whammy of ‘‘Back to the Bayou’ and ‘Well inFORMED’. With that, onto my bad boy playthrough.
Stage 3: The Devil went down to New Marais
There’s not really much to add on an Evil Playthrough other than it’s kind of harder than doing a good playthrough in places. Obviously I was playing on Easy so the general combat was easier and the Evil Karma missions actively encouraged you to cut loose and go crazy. Despite this, I had to run around for 10 minutes before the final mission to get to full negative Karma for ‘Truly Infamous’. It’s a lot easier to heal people than it is to go around just beating people up (Not morally, purely gameplay wise).
Apart from the trophies for the Evil Karma versions of missions, full evil and the evil ending there was only a couple other trophies I needed to get. ‘The Cleaner’ is given for completing the three assassination quests, the Evil Karma version of Good’s Vermaak defector storyline. I didn’t realise a couple side quests I had done were part of this questline until I stumbled upon the last mission in the sequence.
The one trophy I didn’t get on my first playthrough which surprised me was ‘Extreme Makeover’. Turns out normal destruction of things isn’t enough and instead it’s 30 instances of ‘BIG Destruction’. Once I double checked that online and went to the grind spot - railyard in Flood Town, it only took me one run to get the trophy which I appreciated. Seems like it would have been a fairly easy grind either way.
Stage 4: The Good, The Bad and The Busywork
My sole remaining trophy prior to the platinum was ‘With Great Power Comes Even Greater Power’ for getting all the powers. There’s conflicting things online but I was under the impression that you could do this over two playthroughs (even though you gain access to everything at the end of the second playthrough). Here lies my blunder.
Since I played my Hero playthrough on Hard, I got less XP so by the end I didn’t have enough for some of the stronger powers. Blasting through Evil on Easy netted a ton of XP in addition to the 15K you get for doing both playthroughs. I used that XP to buy the remaining powers (Both Evil and Good since you get access to both). The one remaining power up was Blast Shard sense, which is locked behind 60 side quests.
The Good playthrough had it available but I just needed like 300XP to unlock. Some grinding in the UGC missions for half an hour. I bought the upgrade, waited for the trophy to pop…. and nothing. I looked online to see what the problem was. Turns out I’m stupid. All powers for the trophy is all the neutral powers and all the Karmic powers (of one type). Mixing and matching wasn’t going to work.
I had two options - grind around 9K XP in the UGC on my Good playthrough (Mind you 300 took like half an hour) or do another 46 side missions in my Evil playthrough. While annoying, the side quests were the lesser of two evil. So I did that.
Buying the last power for ‘With Great Power Comes Even Greater Power’ and the rather annoyingly named ‘InFAMOUS 2 Platinum Trophy’
Only managing to get 1 of the 2 platinums is a bit of a shame but getting the UGC content done in 2 was the main priority and even then I still got a Platinum trophy out of the time I spent. Infamous 2 joins Second Son for completion while the original Infamous joins First Light for the games I need to go back to. Hopefully we see a new Infamous eventually, maybe around the PS6.
For a Breakdown:
Infamous Hero Playthrough - 18:55
Remaining Side Quests - 1:35
Collectibles - 6:00
For a total Infamous playtime of - 26:30
For the other Breakdown:
Infamous 2 Hero Playthrough - 18:50
Collectibles and Misc - 0:45
Infamous 2 Evil Playthrough - 8:35
XP Grind and Side Quests - 3:25 (0:30 + 2:55)
For a total Infamous 2 playtime of - 31:35
A grand total playtime across Infamous and Infamous 2 - 58:05
