Previews// Gamescom 2010: inFamous 2

As Cole starts doing battle with some of the baddies around him both hands come out to shock them with electricity. It's only a slight tweak on the one-handed lightening fire of the first game, but the flow of the movement's pleasing. He's not battling the ...... at this point, however. He's come up against the Militia, a group that's trying to defend New Marais from inhuman threats. They ought to be allies, but they're mistrustful of Cole thanks to his penchant for shooting lightening from his fingers - a trait that, inarguably, makes him not quite human.

"Everything in New Marais is more destructible than we had in Empire City," Oberg promises. To show this off, we're treated to a whole tower collapsing after it's given a bit of a hammering. "We designed Marais from the ground up to be a city that you can wreak a lot of havok in."

To help make the most of that, Cole starts with all his powers from the first game. Cole's looking to grow his powers in the sequel and, according to Oberg, a destructible city is important to that.

"inFamous 1 was all about what it's like becoming a superhero. inFamous 2 is about what it's like being a superhero and everything that implies," says Oberg.

In that vein, having battled The Beast and had his ass handed to him in a face-scarring sort of way, Cole's decided that it's time to level up. New Marais is the place to do this because it's where the Ray Sphere that gave him his powers (and wrecked Empire City) is from. He wants to find the creators of the thing, but when he arrives New Marais is already under attack from the aforementioned Corrupted, inhuman (post-human, super-human, supra-human, sub-human) nasties, while the aforementioned Militia are defending it from anything that wasn't made by Darwinism.

Of course, beating up all the scenery in the world isn't going to help without something deservingly-ugly to smack around. Enter: The Ravager!!! Basically this thing (which, like the swamplands, had never been shown before) is a huge great locust-y bastard. He's got a nasty habit of digging under ground and popping up exactly where you don't want him. He also likes to shoot spores at you, which is a bit unpleasant. In my head, they smell like McDonalds and drains.

"Fortunately," says Oberg, "we've given Cole a new power."

It's called the kinetic bolt and gives you the hand ability to pick up cars and other large objects and hurl them around. The Ravager's behind you, Cole! Cole throws the car! The Ravager disappears! Cole most probably did not kill him! And yet, the demo's ended. It may be a little buggy, this version of the game. Still, Oberg did warn us at the start that the code is very 'fresh', so bugs were to be expected. Try again. This time it works. I'm glad - that Ravager was ugly as hell.

Will the save files from the first game influence the sequel?

"Well, you know, we want everyone who plays inFamous 2 to have a great experience. Even if you haven't played inFamous 1, we want it to be a great experience, so we're still trying to figure out what we're going to try and do in using things. We want everyone who plays inFamous 2 to have a really great experience, so we're still trying to figure out what we're going to use from inFamous 1 - whether or not there'll be a connection there. We don't know yet."

Brought back around to Cole's new look and noticeably different voice, Oberg went on, "We cast Cole with a new actor, partly because in inFamous 2 we're using motion capture to capture all the animations. In inFamous 1 we didn't have any motion-captured animation, we just had a voice actor. Now we have a voice and a motion actor - it's the same guy.

That new actor is not, I was assured, Nolan North. It's Eric Ladin, who you might remember as the voice of Ellis in Left 4 Dead 2. He was also Draper's wife's brother in Mad Men. So, there you go...