inFamous: Second Son

I beat inFamous last Thursday. I’m still mad about it. Let me tell you why.

I’m a sucker for super heroes. I have been ever since my cousin gave me some Spider-Man comics in elementary school, about the same time that I discovered the X-Men cartoon on Fox and the X-Men Arcade game. Something about the genre has always resonated with me, and I’m not sure if it’s seemingly ordinary people being capable of extraordinary things, or the battle between good and evil with a very large special effects budget, or the fact that it shows that even extraordinary people have to deal with mundane issues, and those are sometimes the hardest to overcome. One way or another, super heroes and video games have always been two things I eat up with a shovel, but for some reason, they don’t play nice together. The arguments for why this is and what can be done differently to resolve them could fill a thesis paper, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I’m here to talk about one of the latest attempts at the genre for PS4, and one of its flagship titles: inFamous Second Son.

Right off the bat, Second Son rubs me the wrong way by putting me in control of Delsin Rowe, a Native American hooligan, as he vandalizes public property with graffiti. I’m not an anti-hero fan in general, but I understand what they’re getting at with the character, and hey, heroes have come from worse backgrounds, so I’ll roll with it. In the first hour or so of the game we meet not only Delsin, but his county sheriff brother Reggie, the main antagonist Augustine, and an escaped inmate who gives you smoke powers by accident named…I can’t actually remember that character’s name. Which is another one of my big problems with this game. As I played through it, saving the city of Seattle from the fictional DUP government agency devoted to neutralizing the threat of super-powered individuals and their extensive takeover and invasive surveillance of the city, I realized around the 60% mark that I didn’t care about any of the characters in the game. Fetch, the neon-powered sniper ex-junkie came across more irritating than troubled to me, and Eugene, the video-powered hermit and video game nerd similarly left me wondering why I didn’t just let him go hide in his basement for the rest of the game. I couldn’t tell you the name of the woman who provides Delsin with his primary motivation to hunt down Augustine and take her powers to undo the damage she did to his tribe’s people. I’m totally down with the reason for doing it, but I’m not actually resonating with the people who are the reason. It’s a strange disconnect for someone who is controlling a budding super hero to have.

Another strange disconnect I experienced is in the gameplay itself. In Second Son, you receive a wide variety of powers and multiple power sources over the course of the game, which range from the ability to turn into smoke to move through porous barriers and into air vents, to the ability to turn into living neon to run at super speeds, to the ability to render yourself invisible while simultaneously generating a digital hologram of an angel to fight your enemies while you move into a more advantageous position. The powers in Second Son are cool, and they’re at their best when they’re allowing you to truly transcend the possibilities of mankind. The problem I have is when combat begins, and suddenly, all those powers boil down to a lot of aiming and shooting smoke bullets or neon lasers or video artifact sword missiles. Sounds cool, but in practice in more often than not left me feeling like a bumbling amateur than a super cool power man. The game repeatedly sets up scenarios which beg for you to make a tactical approach, do a big chunk of damage up front, and fight your way through the rest of the enemies, who are mostly semi-powered DUP agents who more often than not are just shooting you with guns. The problem I have with that is that it doesn’t take more than two or three DUP agents shooting at you to turn into a situation that is very difficult to win, and if there happens to be a lieutenant in the mix who might have concrete armor and a minigun, or the ability to burrow underground and blast you with concrete shrapnel, or some other more special enemy, you really need to devote all of your attention to them to really stand a chance, and in the scenarios where you’re likely to meet them, you have well over a dozen DUP agents to deal with at once. This results in a battle plan resembling a Scooby-Doo chase sequence more than the climactic battle in any modern super hero movie as you stealthily take out a couple cameras, move in to the structure, take out one or two DUP agents and then get noticed, take heavy fire, run for your life to a nearby escape route, hide on a rooftop, drain some more power, and try again, often repeating the process three or four times, assuming you don’t die and have to start over. This humiliating process is mitigated if you happen to approach the base with your super powered nuke ability that you gain from performing karmic acts around the city, but at that point the battle plan is just land near the biggest threat, nuke him and most of his buddies, shoot one or two more agents, and then mop up the rest who surrendered. It feels powerful, but it’s hardly engaging.

Maybe it’s my fault. I’m not a big shooter fan, and with all the mobility options the game gives you, my tendency is to play this game like Devil May Cry: leaping into the thick of battle and beating enemies down with my chain, zipping from enemy to enemy and dodging their attacks intelligently and using ranged attacks mainly as a way to keep other ranged opponents busy until I could devote some proper face-punching attention their way. This game very clearly discourages that approach in practice, when DUP agents frequently surround you and gun you down without hesitation, but all the tools to actually attempt to fight with a melee focus are given to you. In fact, the very first combat scenario you experience in the game is exactly that, arming you with nothing but your smoke dash and a chain against a clearly superior foe, who you can force to retreat using only those tools. It’s a strange, misleading combination of mechanics that I wish played nicer together, allowing Delsin to feel more like a proper badass super hero, and less like a dude who has to bumble through multiple disastrous battle plans until finally he just gives up and starts dropping nukes on his enemies.

The final sequence of the game combined all of those gripes into a particularly galling series of enemy fortress infiltrations, chasing down an AI character twice, beating Augustine in a boss fight twice (three if you count her final form), and all of my super-powered buddies coming together at the end to close the DUP’s show once and for all. Admittedly, having three super heroes take down the DUP agents riddling their central tower was a spectacle and a half, and was probably the only time in the whole endgame sequence where I wasn’t seething at my television, but everything surrounding that point was infuriating, and at that point in the game, the only reason I continued to play the game was so that I would have closure and I could put it away without being tempted to pick it up again for the sake of finishing it.

I really wanted to like Second Son. Parts of it I seriously enjoyed, like Delsin’s ability to rocket around the city using his various powers, or how frivolous the drug dealers wound up becoming once you worked out a system of taking them out, or the spectacle of using some of his more potent abilities. However, the heart of the game never resonated with me, my favorite missions had nothing to do with the game’s central gameplay, and the game itself seemed more interested in punishing me for using the first tools it taught me to use than allowing me to have fun being a powerful super hero whose very narrative role is to overcome the greatest threats almost without effort, doing things that ordinary humans can’t accomplish, even when acting in concert.