Infamous second son secret agents4/26/2023 ![]() Weirdly enough, I think the thing I’ll remember most about Infamous: Second Son is the particle effects. She has that infuriating essence of a villain where you always feel like you’re falling into her trap, no matter what you do. Perhaps best of all is your antagonist, Augustine, a woman of absolutely no remorse who makes it quite clear from the beginning of the game that she doesn’t care about anyone’s petty morality. ![]() There’s something delightfully cyberpunk-y about a group of wayward kids with happenstance abilities working together to take down the authority. The other conduits you meet are all messed-up young adults in their own right. His brother Reggie is a lawful-good cop that serves as Delsin’s foil, as well as his closest partner. Sucker Punch nails Delsin’s devil-may-care charms, as well as his precarious balance of self-importance and duty. Those earlier games were always a little too big for their britches, and the meaninglessness of Second Son’s openness feels disappointingly last-gen.īut still, the narrative remains very strong. If you’re familiar with the previous Infamous games this shouldn’t come as a surprise. In fact the only side-quests that have any meaningful story hook come from tracking down audio logs. These are all generic, and strewn through the world in a failed effort to make it look lived in. The way you do that is through blowing up security cameras, destroying surveillance trucks, and tracking down secret agents. (the occupying military police) and it will be unlocked for fast travelling purposes. Free a district of the city from the D.U.P. The side-quests are repetitive, simple and fairly inconsequential. The streets are fairly uncluttered with people or cars, and you’ll be unable to walk into any buildings. It’s an environment built for combat and mobility - immersion comes second. They’ve given you a bigger open world and more toys to play with. In this sense Sucker Punch have iterated on the Infamous franchise in the most obvious way possible. ![]() Without giving too much away, you’ll quickly find yourself running at light speed and wielding the rupturing power of video torrents. These are unlocked over the course of the story, and add up to a pretty diverse arsenal of pain. ![]() It’s a large, beautiful open world, decked out in trademark local signifiers (I saw a neon Sub Pop sign.) Delsin is something of a superpower sponge - by merely grabbing the hand of a fellow conduit (essentially the game’s term for X-Men,) he’ll black out for a few moments and gain whatever specific power they might’ve been carrying. A personal tragedy draws you and your brother to Seattle for vengeance, and also to acquire a very specific power that can help save the people of your hometown. Structurally Second Son is similar to the previous Infamous games. Delsin made me angry, but he also made me laugh, and that’s the point. While those mysteries certainly still persist, this is a game about a man and his family, a man and his place in the world, a man and his struggle to transcend the lumberjack flannel under his patched-up vest. Why him? Because he’s foolish enough to embrace the burden? Because he’s relatable in his aimlessness? Because Cole, from the earlier Infamous games, was far too boring? All are valid answers, and all add up to the same conclusion - Second Son isn’t about any huge inter-connected conspiracies. So there’s something distinctly Peter Parker-ian when he suddenly finds himself able to smoke-dash through vents and fling fiery chains. There’s no one you’d trust less with a sudden surge of responsibility, much less super powers. 24 and jobless, a punk without a scene, buoyed only by his anger and his exasperated older brother. Catch him graffiti-bombing old billboards in his microscopic hometown. Combine all this and more with a distinct lack of relevant titles and it's not surprising to see that PS4 "won" the console wars and Infamous Second Son was one of the first signs of Sony's upcoming domination.Delsin Rowe is a nobody. The DRM controversies which prohibited play between people from different countries, paranoia caused by the Kinect camera that was always on and mic'd even when you weren't using it, lack of backwards compatibility, the always online requirement and general confusion in what the console represented lent itself for an easy opportunity for Sony to swoop in and capitalize on the mayhem, which they did brilliantly. After dominating the previous generation, Microsoft dropped the ball HARD with Xbox One. If we take a minute and look back at that period you'll remember chaos, a lot of it. Hmm, maybe "opened" isn't the word I am looking for because it wasn't a launch title but it came out during PS4's infancy and became one of its flagship games. It's fitting to see Sucker Punch Productions close out the eight generation of consoles with Ghost Of Tsushima, after all, they opened it almost seven years ago with Infamous Second Son.
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