Let me say this right off the bat: Infamous: Second Son is not a bad game...it just isn't a very good one. I didn't play the original Infamous, but I did play Infamous 2, which was quite good in that there was plenty of raw fun in running around New Marais and doing some of the side things you could do. Second Son was lacking in just about every way possible. Here is the premise: It has been a few years since the events of Infamous 2, and a new government agency, the "Department of Unified Protection," has started rounding up Conduits (superheroes) and relabeling them, "Bioterrorists." There isn't a lot more to say in an introduction, so lets just get right to it.
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| Delsin Rowe is an insufferable punk. |
I suppose the first thing to discuss is our hero/villain, Delsin Rowe. He is a young Native American who wears a beanie and a jean jacket with all sort of colorful buttons on it. Oh, and he also wears converse shoes and likes to spray paint on buildings. Let me be clear: In this way, Delsin is a little more human than Cole "gravel-voice" McGrath...but come on. All he needs now is a relative who is a police officer and we're go...oh wait...he does have a relative who is a police officer. *sigh* Basically, Delsin Rowe is a walking stereotype the likes of which you see at skate parks and hanging out with their friends in places where they are as visible as they can possibly be. You can see Delsin's report card clearly just by looking at him, and that is a pretty good metaphor for his character. Upon seeing him, I imagined that I was in for a protagonist full of awful jokes and attempts to be witty. I was not disappointed...well, I mean, I was, but you know what I mean. You look at this guy and what you see is what you get. I can't imagine that the team who worked on him was made up of anything but men in their 40's with the unshakable belief that the law is always right...which is kind of contradictory given the content of the game, but still. If you were to ask such a person what teenagers are like nowadays, they would describe Delsin Rowe in detail, and that is a problem. Delsin's character has some touching moments, but they are quickly thrown aside in favor of witty quips such as "better than ice cream" after winning a fight. I'm sorry, sucker punch, am I playing Infamous or Sonic the Hedgehog?
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| Morality is, as it always is in Infamous, embarrassingly simple. |
While we're on the subject of Delsin, I feel it is an opportune time to talk about the morality system. The morality in Infamous has always been laughably binary, but this takes it to a whole new level. With Cole McGrath, his character was vague enough that if you went and slaughtered thousands of innocents, it might have been believable, but with Delsin it makes no sense. That is the price you pay for trying to develop characters a little further; some things just don't make sense if the character does them. At the beginning of the game, we see Delsin have a really sweet exchange with Betty, one of the village leaders. Nothing about what we know of Delsin suggests that he would be ok with killing hundreds of people.
Not only that, but the rewards for following one karmic path or another are disappointing. In previous Infamous games you had access to entirely different abilities depending on your path. However, in Second Son, you get a single move and a different jacket. There really is no reason to follow one karmic path or another, because it doesn't change anything in the plot until the very end. No matter what path you follow, everything from gameplay style to character allegiances are pretty much exactly the same.
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| Eugene Sims is a gamer...which means he wears glasses and is afraid of talking to girls...nice one, Sucker Punch. |
This leads us to characters. Infamous has never been famous for its character development, but it really goes the extra mile in the wrong direction here. The game starts off fooling us, introducing us to Betty, one of the village leaders in the Native American community that Delsin lives in. She is a fantastic character that drives the events of the game forward...for about five minutes. Every time that Infamous: Second Son introduces us to a well-developed character (save for one), they end up getting dropped within a few minutes. The star players in this game are all stereotypes: A junkie, a bald prisoner guy, a geeky video game guy, and the police officer brother who is incapable of thinking anything negative about any law ever. They do not get much more developed from there.
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| Brooke Augustine is incredibly hatable, in a good villain sort of way. |
There is, however, one character that stands out above all the rest: The main villain, Brooke Augustine. We are first introduced to her very early on in the game, and boy, does she make an entrance. Right from her very first line, she is simply radiating with evil, and within the first few minutes of her being there, we grow to absolutely hate her guts. I.
Hated. Her. In a good way, I mean, like, the way a villain should make you hate them. Every time she enters the scene, it is memorable, and she is without a doubt the best part of this game. It is simply amazing that, in a game with so many poorly developed, stereotypical characters, such a strong villain could possibly exist. Brooke Augustine is the head of the Department of Unified Protection despite being a conduit herself, with the power to control concrete. She takes every opportunity she can to torture other conduits with concrete spikes, and she is infamous for the horrific things that happen in the prison she set up. But Infamous: Second Son manages to destroy her as well. At the end of the game, we learn her true motivations, and not only are they as cliche as possible, they don't make sense...at all. But up until the end, Brooke Augustine is absolutely the greatest part of Infamous: Second Son.
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| Seattle looks fantastic, but it is pretty boring. |
Now that we've got all the story stuff out of the way, lets talk about gameplay. Before I get to the powers, I'd like to talk about the map. Infamous is a saga of varied locations. First we were in Empire City (a comic-ized version of New York), then we were in New Marais (a comic-ized version of New Orleans), and with Second Son, we are magically whisked away to the quirky comic book city of...Seattle. Just...Seattle. There wasn't even an attempt to change the name or anything...just Seattle. You see, there is a problem when you try to set a game in a real city in the present day. It sounds all well and good on paper, but it just never works out well. Why? Because it is a
constraint! If you do that, you are bound to what the city looks like with maybe one or two alterations, and REAL MODERN CITIES ARE NOT INTERESTING! For actual exploration and experience, real modern cities are quite exciting, but they are NOT good GAME settings! I defy you to name an open world game that takes place in an actual modern city that is good (meaning, not GTA V, because Los Santos doesn't exist). I've been to Seattle, and it is pretty awesome, but it would be an awful place for an open world game. The beauty of Seattle is in its unique aesthetic and the way it looks in real life. Computerizing it and making it into a game takes all of that away, and it just because a bland, rainy location. This is exactly what is wrong with Second Son's rendering of Seattle. In addition, Seattle is more than just the densely populated city areas! I went hiking there by the sea, and it was fantastic! But Second Son doesn't take any of the unique natural areas available into account. Instead its all, "oooooh look, we have the spaaaaaaace neeeeedle!" In addition, get this: Second Son doesn't even include the cool real-life locations that are within the
city portion of the city! It is literally
just the space needle! Point being, the setting of Second Son is boring, and it takes none of the opportunities it could take to make it more interesting. It
looked amazing, thanks to what the PS4 is capable of, but that just isn't enough.
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| There's a lot to do in Seattle...it just isn't anything engaging. |
When it comes to the map, Infamous has a history of making exploration compelling with collectables and the like. In Infamous 2, I spent entire nights just wandering the map collecting blast shards. Second Son, on the other hand, falls flat in this regard. Sure, there are things to do and collectables to find, but I beat the entire game in 2 nights...TWO nights to get 100% completion, and I was only playing for about 5 hours a night. 10 hours total is not a bad plot length, though I would prefer longer...but thats the thing, though! That
isn't the plot length! That is the plot length plus doing absolutely everything else you could possibly do! And that is shameful.
One thing that I did initially enjoy about the game world, however, was the reactive nature of the civilians. I played as a hero, and thus every time I passed, people were taking pictures of me with their phones and shouting "I want to have your babies, Delsin!" It was a small touch that made the world seem more responsive to my actions...but then the civilians started saying things like, "Yeah! Too cool for school!" and I knew that there was no escape for Second Son's lackluster writing, and that was the end of my enjoyment of that.
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| The neon power is fantastic. The rest...are ok. |
Alright, now we come to the powers themselves. Delsin is essentially Peter Petrelli from "Heroes," in that he duplicates the powers of other conduits. His starting power is smoke, and through the course of the game he also gets neon, video, and eventually concrete. The problem is that, save for neon, most of the powers are not really fun. The smoke just feels...lacking in some way. It is the least mobile power by far and the abilities that it brings are just...so very standard. The video has a refreshing mobility to it, but in combat it just feels clunky and weird. You don't even get concrete until the very end and afterwards, so it doesn't even make a difference if you're like me and 100%-ed before the end. Really, the only compelling power is the neon. It gives this game the sense of mobility that it needs thanks to its movement ability, which is running really fast and running up and over any obstacles in your way seamlessly. The combat abilities that come with neon are by far the best. The neon abilities are based on precision. For example, when you hold down a certain button, you can pretty much instantly incapacitate an enemy by hitting them with a blast on the knee or kill them by hitting them on the head. Call me biased, but I enjoyed the ability to switch between explosive battle and precision strikes on the fly.
One other thing that was enjoyable in certain powers is the karmic power. Essentially, when you build up a big enough karmic streak (kill x amount of people in x time/restrain x enemies without killing a single person), you get to unleash an attack that takes out a number of enemies. For smoke, it is a dive bomb attack that SUCKS! It doesn't feel accurate, and enemies can easily dodge it. For neon, it is a giant attack that puts enemies in floating bubbles that you then blow up in multiple places by way of machine gunning neon. That one is AWESOME, and it is effective. For video, you summon lots of angels that dive bomb enemies, and that one is inbetween neon and smoke in terms of quality. I don't know what concrete was, because there was no reason to keep playing the game after I got that power.
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| Infamous: Second Son has some good qualities, but it just isn't very good. |
So, in the end, how is Infamous: Second Son not exactly a
bad game? It is very easy to crucify this game because it does so many things wrong. It has a boring and poorly designed location, the powers are pretty much hit or miss, the characters are flat, and the greatest character in the game isn't even safe from Second Son's corrupting influence. But the bottom line is that, as long as I was playing with the neon power, it was a joy to run around the city in my neon stream. The neon gameplay was almost like a different game because of how enjoyable it was. In addition, even though Brooke Augustine stopped being compelling at the end, she was compelling enough through the rest of the game to make up for that. These are, however, the only real positives to the game. They save Infamous: Second Son from the status of "bad" game, but they are not good enough to rescue it from "just not very good" status.
6/10
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