Infamous: Second Son is a well planned and much needed release this month for Sony. With Titanfall making waves over in the Microsoft sector the Playstation 4 needed a killer app to match. Second Son certainly didn’t topple Titanfall but it probably played a sizable role in helping Sony maintain its hardware sales lead even as Microsoft launched what could wind up being its biggest exclusive this year. So is it worth your hard earned cash? Let’s take a look.
Second Son takes place seven years after the traumatic events of Infamous 2. The world assumed that it had solved its Conduit problem but of course superhero powers never go away that easily. Conduits (folks with superhuman abilities for newcomers) have begun to re-appear throughout the world. To answer the chaos associated with ordinary joes having superpowers the government has funded the Department of Unified Protection or D.U.P. whose primary goal is to round up Conduits and send them off to a nice secure prison.
All of this of course isn’t of great concern to our hero Delsin Rowe, who mostly spends his days performing minor crimes within the small Native American reservation where he lives. His mostly peaceful existence is of course not meant to last as Delsin soon discovers that not only is he a Conduit, but he is in fact a very special variety who is able to absorb the powers of other fellow Conduits through touch. It’s not long after this discovery that some tragedy befalls his tribe and he must set off to the big (kind of) city of Seattle.
Seattle feels lively enough but is also noticeably small. The game’s map is split up into zones which are all peppered with different activities for you to perform in order to peel back the D.U.P’s stranglehold on that particular neighborhood. There are about five repeating activities that you can do in each zone, these include things like destroying cameras, tracking down a secret agent disguised as a citizen, and spraying inspiring Banksy-esque graffiti on walls. Although the activities are fun enough I began to find them a bit too repetitive as the game went on. Luckily Second Son doesn’t languish in its world for forty hours. Instead the campaign wraps up at a rather brisk ten or so hours, and while I had fun playing, I can also say I was ready for it to be over at the same time.
Graffiti in the game feels a little gimmicky. When it’s time to make your glorious stencil art you turn the controller sideways and shake it like a spray paint can, the speaker built into the controller makes a nice rattling ball sound and then you get to pull L2 to let the coloring begin. Just make sure you don’t hold the controller wrong like I did for the first two or three spray paint segments of the game.
Similar to Killzone: Shadow Fall, it feels like Sony wanted this game to at least be part tech demo. Not only does graffiti make full use of the DualShock 4 but you’ll also frequently be asked to use the controller’s touchpad, usually in times when a simple button press would have worked just fine. It doesn’t particularly detract from the game, but it also doesn’t add anything to the experience either.
Delsin will be spending most of the game’s time with three total powers and they all handle differently and are a lot of fun to play with. For example, Smoke powers will let you breeze through chain link fences and utilize vents to climb the buildings of the city. It’s definitely the weakest of the three powers and you’ll almost abandon it completely once you acquire abilities like “Neon” which will let you simply run up the side of buildings rather than searching for a vent to zip up.
There are of course plenty of upgrades to be found. Each power has its own tree with different abilities for you to purchase. Experience is earned in the form of shards which you’ll primarily be extracting from automated drones patrolling the city. Hunting them down is a fun distraction and because the world is fairly open right off the bat you can stop everything and go collect as much experience as your heart desires.
Combat feels good for the most part. Delsin doesn’t really have anything by way of health upgrades so I was a little bit frustrated towards the end of the game when it starts to throw really tough enemies at you and your only real strategy is to run away and wait for your health to regen before diving back into the fray. The setup makes it so melee strategies are very unappealing, you’ll instead probably spend most of the game shooting from a distance before ducking behind cover.
Delsin is a bizarre character to me, he’s of Native American heritige to the point that he lives in a Longhouse, and because he is a male main character in a video game in 2014 he’s voiced by the noticeably “not native american” Troy Baker. Baker always does a fine job, and his work here is no exception but (and I may be alone here) I still had a bunch of little issues with the character. You may find yourself inadvertently wishing you could punch the stupid smirk off his face whenever he absorbs powers or performs an orbital drop. The man is one chai latte from giving up his life of crime fighting to retire into the back of a fair-trade coffee joint and finish his screenplay while a track off Hospice is funneled into his ears thanks to some Beats by Dre.
Maybe it’s just because I’m getting old but Second Son’s characters feel more like irritating caricatures than people to me. I guess it says something that the character I liked the most is your older “stick in the mud” brother Reggie. Other characters like the super punk rock femme fatale, Fetch, have a nice “grunge” look to them, because you know, we’re in Seattle, and it’s 1994 apparently. The worst character is probably Eugene, who is a basement dwelling, borderline autistic, ‘gamer’. You know, just like you. There’s something terribly ironic and ineffective about putting down “gamers” in a video game. But hey, whatever, maybe you’ll get a hearty laugh out of the part where Delsin promises to teach Eugene about girls.
I would spend some time on the game’s mostly excellent and somewhat rare female antagonist, Brooke Augustine, but I feel like discussing her character bleeds a little too far into spoiler territory. Instead I’ll harp on what I consider one of the biggest weaknesses in the Infamous series: its morality system. You’ll have several opportunities in the game to make good or evil choices and as usual things are very cut and dry. Morally gray is not a mode that the Infamous series is comfortable hanging out in, every choice you make is either the act of a saint or an evil mustache twirler there’s no in-between and there’s never really a logical reason to slant either way. Augustine’s goals do get very close to some ambiguous morality towards the end of the game but ultimately the narrative side steps any points she may have and makes sure you know Delsin is 100% right and there is absolutely no fallout for the choices he makes.
It’s hard being handed a system like this after games like The Walking Dead and The Witcher have given us such complex choices that don’t really have any clear right or wrong answer. Second Son never puts you in a position where you would make a choice because it feels right, it just puts you in positions where you either want to see the good ending or the bad one.
Second Son isn’t a bad game, I had a lot of fun playing with the different powers, and the game even goes so far as to leave a final fourth one locked up until the very end, effectively giving you some inspiration to go out and wrap up side quests and unlock even more abilities. I think there are numerous story problems though and I also wish some of the side missions could have been expanded upon with a little bit more time before release. But hey, if you want to sail around a beautifully drawn city and zap people this is your ticket.
If you’re a fan of the series I doubt this will wind up being your favorite entry but I also think it could have been a lot worse. It’s not the “must-have” flagship title that the PS4 (only kind of) needs but it will do for now.
