Infamous: Second Son
Developer: Sucker Punch Productions
Price: $60
Platform: Playstation 4
It feels like forever but it’s only been three years since Sucker Punch dropped the brilliant Infamous 2 on us and now they’ve given us a sequel that take a huge leap in graphics and combat, but unfortunately falters heavily when it comes to the story.
It’s been seven years since the events of the second game and it seems the activation of the RFI didn’t exactly kill all conduits as everyone was led to believe. Since then the government has created the D.U.P. who are tasked with hunting down conduits and placing them in a special prison. The game opens up with troublemaker Delsin and his brother Reggie witnessing a prisoner transport truck crashing and letting loose three conduits on Seattle. Delsin quickly learns he has to power to absorb a conduit’s powers and then they set off to absorb the big bad’s power so that they can fix the damage done to their town.
Unfortunately the story and side characters are easily the most disappointing part of the game. Besides being incredibly short, about half as long as Infamous 2, it just doesn’t feel like it goes anywhere significant. Each mission in the previous game felt relevant to the plot and had these big set piece moments sprinkled throughout but most of the missions in Second Son feel like filler. Second Son also doesn’t add anything significant to the series (plot-wise) like the first two games did and feels more like a minor side story to satisfy us before Infamous 3 comes. The karma moments are also incredibly lame with no impact at all besides two which decide whether you kill a character or not. The karma decisions in Infamous 2 were fantastic in that almost all of them actually made me think of which I wanted to do despite knowing full well I was doing a good or evil run of the game. You could see that both options had their perks which then led to drastically different story missions. In Second Son you don’t get anything close to that with only two karma related story missions that don’t feel all that different at all. You just don’t feel like you make any meaningful decision in the game or impact to the overarching series.
It’s also really surprising to see such a weak cast of characters here compared to how interesting everyone, including the villains, were in the last two Infamous games. Delsin interacts with three other people besides his brother throughout the game and they’re super one-dimensional. The only one with any sort of depth to him is Hank and you see him maybe two or three times. The villain, Augustine, is easily the weakest in the cast who opens up strongly but then falls apart when you learn her motivations which make no sense at all. It seems like they put so much work into Delsin and Reggie’s relationship that they forgot to do anything for everyone else to make players give a shit.
Now the combat is easily where the game shines and damn does it shine brightly. The focus on mobility while still allowing you to attack makes the way this game plays compared to the previous ones like night and day. Gone are the days where you had to hold the aim button to fight and having to decide whether to run to a better position or attack the enemies; now you can do both. It’s very clear that improving the way Delsin moves around the city was a huge focus for Sucker Punch and it also plays into the combat by making things faster paced. You’ll use the smoke powers to dash through fences to get to enemies or the neon dash to quickly sprint around while still staying on the offensive. Now while you can still climb up buildings, gone are the days of mashing the X button. Each power set now gives you an option to quickly scale up buildings such as smoke that lets you zip from a vent in the bottom of a building straight to the roof or neon’s exhilarating dash that lets you run up the sides of buildings. With how fun it feels to move around the city I don’t miss climbing at all.
The controls feel tighter and more polished than ever before. Now while Cole felt strong, Delsin feels powerful. As your arsenal grows throughout the game you truly start to feel like a proper superhero as you dart around the city and smash up enemy camps. The decision to remove the power wheel in favor of having to absorb a specific energy source to switch powers was the smart move since it keeps the pace of combat moving and feels a lot more natural. All of the powers feel different enough from each other to make it worth switching things up constantly with things like video granting brief invisibility that can be upgraded to spawn helpful demon allies or neon allowing you to toss a grenade that levitates enemies so you can easily pick them off. You’ll be actively seeking out fights because they’re just so damn fun and the destruction porn is delicious.
The upgrade system has also gotten a major improvement in the form of a proper skill tree menu. The menu is sleek as hell and super easy to navigate with a sort of web interface. I especially like the clear videos that showcase what an upgrade will do. You’re free to spend your blast shards on upgrading whichever powers you want and now that blast shards show up on your map you’ll be upgrading powers faster than you could in previous games. Keeping certain upgrades tied to your karma level seems kind of silly though considering you can easily get close to the finale level before you get to the second island. It just feels like a sort of arbitrary roadblock instead of a natural one.
Unfortunately it seems like Sucker Punch still doesn’t understand the concept of balance with the good karma powers being significantly better than the evil ones. Now I’m not saying that the evil powers are garbage, far from it in fact, but when good gets things like instant health refills by subduing an enemy (which is super easy to do) and slowing down time the difference between the two is notable.
As much fun as the story missions are, the side missions are a complete chore to work through; especially for those bigger Infamous fans who love to 100% the game. The territory control returns but it just feels like a huge chore to work through due to the menial side missions. Now Infamous 2 didn’t have a huge amount of variety in its side missions, but it had enough to not make them feel like a chore to work through and there were a couple that had some sort of plot to them. In Second Son all you’ll do is destroy hidden cameras, find audio logs, and do these incredibly stupid missions where you have to locate a D.U.P. spy in a crowd of civilians and then chase him around when he runs. Oh yea and karma related side missions are gone in favor of karma related spray painting. This gimmick was pretty neat the first few times you did it but after that it becomes a huge pain to get through with no way to speed up the process. There are also liberation missions you can do that basically amount to “get a power bomb before starting this lame mission so you can end it instantly” since all it does is throw a dozen or so guys at you.
Now some people are going to be disappointed at the removal of the mission creator that debuted in Infamous 2 but I personally couldn’t care less at its absence. I didn’t think there were enough good missions to counter the amount of trash but considering how little variety the side missions have in this game maybe it would have been better to include it here to offset the lackluster side stuff.
The Final Word
Second Son is a fantastic game that improves upon its predecessor in almost every way but a weak story, repetitive side missions, and an even weaker cast of side characters keep it from being something truly amazing.
– MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good
