Bright Lights, Big City: inFamous Evolves With Second Son

It shouldn’t be surprising, as it’s really something completely logical, but the more time I spend with inFamous: Second Son, the more I see the common ground with the first two entries.

A fifteen minute session, as I had a few weeks back, is only long enough to highlight a few key points and give an all-too-brief taste of what the game is about. Coming from that play time, it was nice to come back to pick up the controller and play some more.

The combat is just as good as it was then, as I primarily played with the neon powers this time around. The immediacy of having the reticule and no longer needing to aim keeps ranged combat nice and fast. However I noticed some differences, perhaps through being set later into the game’s unlock tree, so I now found that I could zoom in with the left trigger, highlighting enemy heads in the process and briefly slowing down time.

Further to this, the neon powers now had a basic melee attack to match the smoke powers, as Delsin swings his chain which is now encased in a glowing beam of light. It left highlighted marks on an enemy’s body, amidst the fast-paced and fluid melee enabled by the dash move.

It brings the neon abilities more in line with the smoke powers, leaning to more subtle differences than I had previously thought. The power-based glide jump is supplemented by the ability to dash in midair which when using smoke propels you forward a short distance, so you can start gliding again and cross the gaps between rooftops. The neon dash lasts a lot longer but slopes down towards the ground, though it then brings with it the ability to run up walls without air vents, giving you more motion and letting you traverse the city even quicker.

Together, they feel like a natural evolution of Cole’s skill-set from the first two inFamous games. Combat is freer and a touch faster paced, for one thing, but it’s also notably more fluid and easier to get around the city without having to rely on the power grid. Neon powers in particular let you get to the tops of buildings far quicker than Cole ever could, avoiding most of the floaty climbing mechanics that still hide under the surface.

But if the core gameplay has evolved, the morality system’s return could be too close to what went before. During combat, you’ll be able to more heroically restrain your foes or decide to execute them as a more ruthless anti-hero. Enemies might even try to surrender to you, with your decision to give quarter going to your moral standing. However, there are also the more important binary decisions.

The demo started with Fetch, Abigail Walker, the neon-powered girl first revealed in a trailer from last August. Presumably having just been caught and defeated, she’s at the mercy of Delsin and his brother, Reggie. As the cutscene played out, hints at parts of the game’s story and the characters’ motivations come out through the dialogue, very well acted and then rendered by the endlessly stunning game engine.

Fetch has been hunting down and killing drug lords, you see. Vigilante justice, but illegal nonetheless, and Delsin insists that she be kept free rather than locked up as Reggie would want. It’s at this point that the choice to redeem or corrupt comes about, changing the tone of the cutscene that follows and altering the missions that come after it.

In redeeming her, you join her attempts to crack down on the local drug trade, following up on a lead she has at a nearby docks. While she provides supporting fire with her sniper-like neon laser beams, you head in on the ground and battle your way through the drug gang’s guards to find boathouses with dolphins painted on them.

Tagging them with some slightly humorous street art – with a gimmicky press of the touchpad – pointing back to Delsin’s roots as a graffiti artist, while freeing the hookers being used as human shields gently emphasises the more heroic path you’re taking on the way to the mission ending pyrotechnics, with Fetch focussing her neon laser beams and blowing up the stashes. This then leads to a nice and simple van following mission, the staple of any open world game, with the nice twist of having Fetch’s neon light beautifully arcing from rooftop to rooftop ahead of you.

Deciding to corrupt Fetch leads to a very different mission objective, focussing on the Lifeline rallies and they’re anti-conduit protests. Smashing up the protest is all well and good, pitting you against the DUP in the process, but it’s really the ringleader that you want to have a go at.

Breaking up further protests brings more powerful DUP to fight against, with many of them making use of seemingly conduit-based jetpacks and a handful also able to control a ring of floating rocks, somehow. Taking on these much more mobile and slightly more resilient enemies is more challenging, culminating in a fight through a tunnel filled with wrecked cars, panic civilians and DUP troopers, but it’s really how the final game explains this that has me intrigued.

This longer demo gave me a much better idea of how inFamous: Second Son is going to play out; a lot like inFamous 2. Many areas have been improved in the core gameplay mechanics, but these were tied to some fairly standard missions for this demo. More interesting is the way that Sucker Punch will wield the PS4’s graphical prowess and motion capture to tell their particular brand of branching story.