Game review: Infamous: Second Son for PS4

I’m going to be making a lot of comparisons between Infamous: Second Son and Prototype, and also to X-Men, because those are the two things that constantly came to mind while I was playing this game. Okay, there’s quite a few differences that help Infamous stand on its own, but time and again, I’d either make an observation that something was like Prototype or X-Men. This is not really a bad thing, and I quite enjoyed playing this game. I liked it so much, I played it to 100% completion, and then played it again to see the bad ending. I even got 90% of the trophies, something I rarely do with most games.

Infamous: Second Son takes place seven years after the first Infamous, with the conduits now being labeled as bio-terrorists. Most are locked away in a special prison called Curdun Cay by a government branch called the DUP. They’re run by a conduit with concrete powers, Agustine Brooke, who in many ways reminds me of Magneto for her ideals and the level of power she displays throughout the game. The story starts off with a military transfer of prisoners from the DUP to the Army, a transfer that goes awry and leads to the escape of three conduits near an Akomish reservation.

The game opens following Delsin Rowe, an Akomish rebel who expresses his creative side by tagging billboards. Delsin gets caught defacing a billboard by his brother Reggie, who is the local sheriff, and their argument is cut short by the Army’s transport crashing. While Reggie runs off to chase after two of the escaping conduits, Delsin rescues Hank Daughtry from the fiery wreckage and ends up absorbing Hank’s powers. When Hank attempts to escape, he is captured by Augustine, leading to the first moral choice of the game. This will lead Delsin down the path of good or evil depending on which choice the player makes. On my first playthrough, I chose the good route. On my second, I chose evil, just to see how it changed the story. I’ll talk more on that later.

The game quickly moves through a short tutorial to Seattle, and here Delsin finds out how much control the DUP can exert to contain the bio-terrorist threat. This is also where he begins to pick up more abilities for his first power, the inaccurately named Smoke. Really, it’s a fire power, but eh, whatever. The thing is, once you have that first collection of powers, the city of Seattle is opened up as a playground for you to run around and blast DUP officers and/or police and civilians depending on your moral inclinations. DUP command centers are scattered around various neighborhoods, and after destroying them and lowering the DUP’s control in a neighborhood, you can unlock a district showdown and force the DUP’s control of a neighborhood down to “zero”. This is not entirely true, though, as you’ll still run across APC patrols and the occasional guard on the rooftops. In any case, freeing the districts is not the real point of the game. It just gives you a way to upgrade your powers and raise your fame or infamy.

The real point of the game is in the story missions, where you will track down the other two conduits, Fetch and Eugene, and absorb their powers much like Rogue from X-Men. You’ll also confront Augustine a few times before the final showdown in the top floors of a skyscraper, and that final fight is a bitch, let me tell you.

Before you get there, you have lots of chances to play with your various powers, smoke, neon, and “video.” (You get concret at the end of the game, and only get to use it against the DUP after the end game. Which is kinda lame.) I like video the most, but I think it’s goofy how this power is really centered around a very limited interpretation of video. Which is to say, all your abilities seem to center around a single video game. But anywho, the powers are neat, and I’ll try not to nitpick too much.

Just like Prototype, this is the kind of game that gets more fun once you’ve spent a few points building your abilities. Initially it’s a bit of a pain getting around town, but once you open up some extra abilities, it turns into an open playground for you to bounce around and engage the enemies when and where you choose.

One place where Infamous: Second Son is different from Prototype is that you could upgrade Alex Mercer to take more damage before dying, and Delsin remains pathetically fragile throughout the game. If he gets overwhelmed in combat, your only option is to run away and hide until you recover. And yeah, Delsin can heal fast, but I still would have liked an option to upgrade my health, especially considering the increasing toughness of the DUP officers and their sheer numbers at certain command centers. It’s really annoying that even without taking over the city, I had an overabundance of spare shards to upgrade abilities, and yet no way to increase my hit points.

Let’s set that aside. I liked the game even with the constant ducking and hiding, and I think a large part of that had to do with the banter between Delsin and Reggie, and with the impressive cut scenes that helped draw me into the plot. There’s an early cut scene where Reggie comments about Delsin’s powers, and Delsin says, “Yeah, the only downside being…” He makes a thoughtful frown for a second, and then says, “Nope! Can’t think of anything. These powers are freaking cool.” Even hearing that a second time, I still laughed, and it’s as much the facial expressions he makes as it is the line itself that makes it funny. The story has several other moments like this, where the writing has a charming wit and it’s coupled with good facial animation. I really liked the story as much as I liked the game play, and that’s something I couldn’t say about Prototype.

Or rather, I liked the “good” story. My problems with the bad story aren’t that Delsin is being evil. It’s that there’s so little difference between the good and bad stories. In particular, I find it odd how Reggie is supposedly a by-the-book cop, but completely ignored Delsin’s criminal activities no matter what he did. There were some minor changes to the missions that Delsin took with the other conduits in choosing to corrupt rather than redeem them, but outside of those missions, the story really doesn’t change much. I was kind of hoping that going evil might result in a vastly different story, and what I got wasn’t different enough to warrant the second playthrough. The bad ending was kind of meh after having been through the good ending.

I also liked playing the good guy because of the reactions of the people around me. NPCs were always walking up and saying stuff like “I want to have your babies,” and that’s way nicer than, “Go home, you freak.” Having said that a few times the NPCs on the evil side still said something to make me laugh, like, “I’m too drunk to die!” or “I can’t die in this outfit!” One guy said, “I know martial arts,” and I shot him in the face, and then laughed and said, “So why didn’t you dodge that?” So it wasn’t a total waste of time. It just wasn’t as different as I was hoping for.

Overall, I like Infamous: Second Son, and I think it’s a good game to show off the PS4 as a next-gen console. But it’s got a limited replayability, and now that I’ve run through it twice, I have the feeling the disc will likely go on a back shelf to gather dust. I give Infamous: Second Son 4 stars, and if you haven’t played it yet, I recommend you give it a shot. It’s easily one of the best launch titles for the PS4.