inFAMOUS: Second Son - Review

Title: inFAMOUS: Second Son

Format: PS4

Release Date: March 21st - World Wide, May 22nd - Japan

Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

Developer: Sucker Punch Productions

Original MSRP: $59.99 US

MSRB Rating: M

Well, it's time: Sony has finally delivered its first well-known First-Party game for the newest generation of consoles with the newest iteration of the inFAMOUS franchise. The team at Sucker Punch have made some huge strides in development, but is all of the "new" hype that I'm unintentionally giving it, or will this game go the way of Knack and miss out on the recognition that it may deserve? Here's my review:

*Author's Note: I've no experience with the past inFAMOUS games, so this review will not be comparing this game to the prior two, but rather my experience solely with Second Son*

Seattle, 2016. Looks pretty nice. 

Story: In the third iteration of the inFAMOUS franchise, the game opens 7 years after the events that took place in inFAMOUS 2. Since then, the Department of Unified Protection (D.U.P.) has gotten stronger, begun rounding up Conduits for processing, and has garnered support from most of the populace. You play as Delsin Rowe, as 20-something punk who is a talented graffiti artist, constantly getting in trouble with the law, and the newest hero/villain in the series. After acquiring your powers from a Conduit in an interesting way, you meet the main antagonist of the game: Broke Augustine. She causes harm towards the people in your village by shooting gravel shards into your people's bodies and gives you your first Hero/Infamous choice. After making your choice, your path begins. All of this happens within the first 15-30 minutes of the game. It's a strong start to the game and draws the player fairly quick into the game world. 

The main story's content varies depending on whether you choose to be good or evil. Delsin's mannerisms change as well. If you choose "good", Delsin is more compassionate towards people. As for the "evil" route, he's a bit more cynical and angry. All of this is somewhat expected in a game that gives you a moral-alignment choice.

One of the Conduits, Fetch, has the power of Neon

After the initial cut scene where you meet Augustine, your main mission of confronting Augustine begins. Whether you choose Good or Evil, the context of this story changes. Along the way, you meet up with other Conduits who will add to your arsenal of powers. With each Conduit, you are faced with an alignment choice regarding their future. Although the choices are black and white (red and blue), the choices themselves as to what you do with each person are interesting. 

Game play: If you've played any open-world game within the past five years (specifically Saints Row IV), you'll be familiar with the mechanics of Second Son. You have free range over the city's outer exterior as a human, and even more freedom once you start improving your powers. Jumping, climbing and running are all par for the course. Although some of the jumping mechanics can seem a little "floaty", the control scheme is tight and controls are responsive. 

Each Ultimate move does present some variety. The
Neon move captures enemies, stuns them, then has
you annihilating everything in front of you.  

The powers themselves are unique, yet similar. You have a long-range attack, a glide, a sprint, a heavy special attack, and your main melee weapon. Although visually impressive, they kind of leave a lot to the imagination. There are differences in speed and strength to the attacks, but they are all practically the same.  Your weapon (and the color of your controller's LED light) change depending on whether you've decided to play as Good or Evil, adding a nice touch to the game. 

There's three different powers you can acquire in the main game: Smoke, Neon, and another power I won't reveal for spoiler reasons.This is a welcome change to the typical Fire, Ice, and Electric powers that are in most games. Smoke gives you a teleportation power that makes me think of Nightcrawler from X-Men, and the sprint that comes with your Neon powers can be upgraded later in the game to last forever.  Once you finish the game, you receive the choice of whether or not to begin a new game, or play Janitor around the town and clean up the rest of the collectibles that are littered around Seattle. 

It's not as fast as the sprint from Saints Row 4, but
man is it pretty. 

As with most "moral-choice" games, you're practically locked into your moral path after you make your initial choice. There really is no moral ambiguity to the choices; everything is pretty much cut-and-dry from the beginning. You're almost encouraged to make a "pure" run of either Good or Evil. One specific moment comes to mind: right before the very last mission, it appears as if you have the "option" to pick Good or Evil as your final moral choice. Since I was running a "pure good" game, I figured "Eh, I'll save right now, do both endings, and get a better idea about the choices." Well, that didn't happen. If you decided to run a "pure" game, you're practically locked into your moral choice from the beginning. You can go around the city and farm civilians and enemies to switch your alignment, but it would take an incredibly long time. Short version: don't expect a plethora of morality choices like you would see in a Fallout game.  

This level of detail/quality has set the new standard
of how games should (and hopefully will) look. 

Visuals: Since this is a Sony First-Party game, the bar for visual quality has been set quite high, and Sucker Punch delivers as best they can. Simply put: the game looks great. Running in 1080p and 60 FPS, there wasn't really a point in which I said: "that doesn't look amazing". Animations, aside from the awkward jumping/wall scaling, are fluid. Melee attacks look, and feel, like they should. There's a noticeable difference in how you swing your weapon with Smoke powers, as opposed to Neon. 


As I said before, the city can be fully traversed. Each building has a high amount of detail on its walls, as well as its roofs and signs that are hanging outside of them. Couple the fully explorable environments with the fully loaded city and minimal loading screens, and you've got a feast for your eyes. 

Everything you see, even the Space Needle, can be traversed

If I had to pick out a gripe regarding the visuals, it would have to be the NPCs that are hanging around Seattle. There's only about 30 or so different people with re-skinned clothes multiplied over the city. Since they're a small team (around 100 people, give or take), I want to give them a pass; However, when I see environments, textures, and scenery like this (not to mention the water, which looks really good despite being unable to swim in it), it makes me wonder if they were rushed or simply didn't have the time or energy to put in that extra level of detail. 

An interesting mini-game has you tagging specific areas
within the game's world. You have two choices, either
morally good or bad, and that decision will add to your
karma alignment. This one is a "good" tag.

Audio: Troy Baker (Bioshock Infinite, The Last of Us, Final Fantasy XII, Saints Row 3 and 4, and hundreds of other roles) takes up the mantle of Delsin Rowe, and does an excellent job at bringing the character to life. Delsin is a punk, and Baker does the character justice. An early interaction between Augustine and Delsin gives you an idea how these two characters play out in the rest of the game.  

Some of the Conduit's dialogue/actors are weaker than Delsin/Baker. Augustine (voiced by Christine Dunford), although may be a somewhat cheesy B-Movie villain at points, really invokes an overpowering sense of anger and hatred both from and towards her. The moments in which she is "monologue-ing" towards Delsin are some of the more impressive vocal performances within the game. 

Environmental noise is somewhat limited. I expected more seagulls and hipsters to be sounding off than what I experienced. That doesn't necessarily mean that's bad, but the "city" does feel empty, like I said before. What is there is pretty polished. When a D.U.P. vehicle pulls you over because they see you using your powers, you will know it from the sirens, bullets whizzing by your head, and the group of Agents communicating with one another. The D.U.P. agents themselves sound a bit like the Combine from Half-Life 2 when they are trying to track you down. Some noises are noticeably "stock" sounds, such as bullets, cars, and people cheering. Hopefully in the future, Sucker Punch will add more depth to their audio files, such as NPC reactions/interactions and environmental noise. 

Online/Multiplayer: An interesting concept that the guys at Sucker Punch have come up with is a 6-week long mission that has you interact with both the game and an elaborate chase through specific websites in order to find out the back-story of a Conduit made of paper. Each week a new mission is added to the game, which explains why there's a 300+ megabyte update every week.  This DLC project will take place over a 6 week span, and by the time this review posts, it'll be week 2 (maybe 3) of this content. Supposedly, the problems that were plaguing the DLC have been fixed, however I went back a few days ago and received the same error message as before(an inability to connect to the online database). It could just be my internet connection, as I've heard that others have gotten further into the mission. 

Pros: Striking visuals, compelling story, freedom to get lost within the city, tons of collectibles, fairly easy to Platinum the game, great voice acting, and the environment is simply fun to play around in. 

Cons: Powers (although interesting and fresh) could use more variety among them, jumping/grabbing animations are a little off, some missions are locked due to karma levels, would like to see a more "neutral" option in a future game, could use more background audio throughout the city.

Final Score: 8.0/10 - A great job at a "new" IP that's on its way to being perfect. 

Agree/Disagree with the score? Have a suggestion for a game? Questions about the ratings system, or anything in general? Ask me on Twitter @AdHocMan, or on Google+ at +ZacHockin

Next week - Mercenary Kings for PS4 and Steam