Infamous: Second Son
I've been interested in this game for a while. If you've ever seen one of those social media posts of pics that "go hard" or whatever? That's the vibe this game gave to me as a kid. And in my sophomore year of high school, my friend was a fan of the game and he showed me all the playable abilities on YouTube. I finally caved and downloaded the game (free with one of the PS Plus tiers) when Penny Parker, one of my favorite streamers, mentioned it in relation to Prototype (a similar game by a different developer). I also had high expectations because Sucker Punch's other projects included Ghosts of Tsushima and the Sly Cooper games, which I've heard fantastic things about.
The game has a really fun opening - spray painting police billboards in your punk rock getup and doing parkour on the docks of your tribe's hometown. Then you accidentally get some guy's powers and inherit smoke abilities, which let you dash through most objects in an invulnerable ashy form. After a tough decision when the main villain arrests you, you cross the bridge to Seattle and the world is open. The goal? Augustine has encased your tribe's limbs in concrete with her own abilities, and it's up to you to inherit her own powers and use them to heal your family.
The draw of this game is unlocking new abilities that allow you to progress further, and upgrading those abilities to become stronger and faster. For instance, you can fire smoke projectiles, and if the conditions are met, you can upgrade your smoke projectiles to knock down enemies with just a headshot (usually takes 5-30 hits depending on the enemy type and weapon type). You can dash through the air with Smoke Dash, and upgrade it to dash twice in the air.
The movement in this game is really solid - Smoke Dashing through a vent to reach the top of a builiding instantaneously, then dashing forward and hovering onto a high-speed train to reach your next destination. I won't spoil them, but some of the later abilities get even crazier, especially with the proper upgrades. In order to upgrade your abilities, you'll have to find Shards, which can be taken from Department of Unified Protection (D.U.P.) tech. That means destroying toll booths, shooting down DUP drones, and blowing up DUP Mobile Command Centers, heavily protected vehicles you'll have to push through a small army to get to. But the upgrades are worth it, and by postgame, you're pretty much unstoppable.
Remember that "tough decision" I mentioned earlier, before the world opens up? Well, that's a choice between confessing that yes, you inherited powers from an escaped superhuman convict, or staying silent and letting your entire tribe take the blow. These two choices don't change the events, but they will determine which morality you begin with, good or evil. This affects the kinds of upgrades to your abilities you can get (for example, having a faster fire rate with evil, or faster healing rate with good), what happens in the story, how Delsin acts in dialogue and cutscenes, and which side missions you'll want to be doing.
There is a LOT to do on the map, some of it busywork to get the 100%, like shooting down DUP cameras or taking down secret DUP agents hiding in the crowds, but there's also a lot you can do that isn't neccessary, yet will build up your good or evil karma (unlocking more abilities and giving you cooler jackets). An example of a good sidequest being busting a drug deal and nonlethally subduing the dealers, and a bad one being harming and/or killing a group of anti-superhuman protestors.
Honestly, I did want to give this game a fair shake, and replay the whole thing on "Infamous" mode after my emotionally fulfilling "Hero" playthrough. But it was clear that this is the kind of game you play once, maybe twice, ever. It's just very slow, there's no way to skip cutscenes and there's no such thing as a New Game +, so I can't just blow through all the enemy encounters. And while it's a great game, a lot of it feels like doing similar chores over and over, chase missions and whatnot. And the combat could really use some more abilities - the same three-hit combos, light ammo and heavy ammo were not doing it for me. The most fun ability is the postgame one, which is extremely powerful and lets you decimate every encounter. When every enemy feels like a bullet sponge, the final power really helps the postgame stuff from feeling like a slog.
That's not even counting the boss fights. Goodness gracious, these are some bad ones. One of them has you destroy each and every neon sign in the room to deprive your opponent of their Neon ability, and THEN you have to wittle down their health bar as they teleport across the screen over two or three minutes. Another can only be defeated with heavy bullets, and you have to jump back and forth across platforms to recharge at - with precision platforming in this game so rare, it came as a shock. The final boss has some cool ideas, but really lost steam halfway through once the goal became "dodge under its legs, wait for your heavy ammo to recharge".
What Infamous: Second Son lacked in combat, it made up for with its writing. Keep in mind, I played the Hero story, so some things may vary from other playthroughs, but at least in what I played, Delson is a young, strong-willed protagonist who loves his brother and his tribe, is learning new powers, and shoots quips with his enemies at an insanely fast rate. The childlike wonder in his voice when his mission involves climbing up the side of the Space Needle to beat up some bad guys is one of my favorite moments in the story. Nolan North does a great job, and on that note, the entire voice cast is astounding, especially Travis Willingham as Delson's brother, Reggie, who brings so much love and comedy to this game. The juxtaposition between Delson, a laid-back graffiti artist with a long list of arrests, and his brother, the police chief responsible for each one of those arrests, is obvious, but that divide between them makes it all the more heartwarming when Reggie comforts his brother, who is terrified of his brand-new abilities, in a hug. Or at the end of the game, when Delson avenges his brother's death at the hands of the antagonist, Augustine.
The conflict, yes, is between you and the main antagonist, Augustine, who leads the DUP and locks up superhumans like you. But the real tension lies in the public opinion of Delson and the other superhumans, and how the governemtn and the DUP influence that opinion. While the official term for supercharged humans in this game is "Conduits", the government has coined the term "Bio-Terrorists", believing Conduits to be too strong to keep on the streets, or alive at all. You're labeled a terrorist as soon as you recieve your powers, even though you've done nothing but save people. The questions this game asks about how our governments deal with threats and minorities are very real and well-stated. I especially love the graffiti art that Delson can put up around the city - depending on your morality, it can either be light-hearted and funny, or vulgar and violent - though either way you'll generally end up making some kind of statement about law enforcement and the abuse of power in government.
The graffiti sections are very fun - you turn your controller sideways, hold it like an Aerosol can, shake it, and press R2 to spray with motion controls over a stencil. Very much screams "I am an early PS4 game and I will insert needless touch and motion controls into cutscenes and gameplay". (Speaking of which, the way you refill your abilities is with tapping the touchpad at a chimney, neon sign, etc, but it feels natural so I didn't mind). The fact that you're putting your art on public property without permission does make the Hero path a little questionable, but all of your graffiti on that path will be good-natured or humorous and I love seeing the art, so I didn't think much of it. There must be at least 50 or 60 unique pieces betweeen the good and evil variants for each individual tagging location.
For me, the best part of this game was the addicitng gameplay loop of doing sidequests to get better powers and using those better powers to do more side misisons and so on. It's a really fun, addicting ten or so hours, maybe thirteen if you're doing 100%, and double that if you want the full experience of playing through both stories. I highly do NOT reccommend that last option though, because there's really not much to justify replaying. Although I will say, the final cutscene of the evil route is breathtaking.
To put my thoughts in summary, Infamous: Second Son is a really cool game, and if it had the combat of Insomniac Spdier-Man or Batman Arkham, I would give it a 10/10. It's still great, the combat is easy to overlook when so much cool stuff is happening, but when you've cleared up the main story it definitely slows down a bit. I reccommend it!
8/10
P.S. Do NOT do the Paper Trail mission. Apparently it used to be a cool ARG type thing, but the website for it went down, so now it's just a string of side missions that make zero sense.
