Infamous: Second Son Is as Much Fun to Play as It Is to Watch

Delsin feels good.

Since seeing Infamous: Second Son at E3, I’ve walked around telling people how impressed I was with how it looked -- the way Delsin’s jean vest fluttered in the wind, the particles when he divebombed the baddies, and so on. Today, I played Infamous: Second Son, and now, I’m going to walk around telling people how impressed I am with how it feels.

There’s something different about Second Son, and it’s the fluidity of movement. Sure, the parkour in Infamous and Infamous 2 was great, but there’d still be those moments where you were trucking through Empire City, hit a brick wall, and have have to climb up brick by brick. Infamous: Second Son is all about streamlining that process, and it seems to work well. Delsin can still parkour his heart out, but as I began to hoof it up the side of a building, developers from Sucker Punch nudged me toward a vent. I smoke-dashed at it, flew up through the pipe, and was suddenly soaring above Seattle.
There are all kinds of little shortcuts that get Delsin moving. One second I was charging up my projectile smoke blast (taking the place of Cole’s TK), and the next I was scaling a tower in a few limber leaps and coming back down with an area-clearing attack. Delsin’s combat and traversal are symbiotic -- one feeds into the other, allowing you to get around and do some damage in the same breath.
This feeling isn’t limited to Delsin’s smoke power; it’s all encompassing. When he runs into another superhuman conduit, he can absorb his or her power. Today, I got to fool around with the neon he takes from Fetch.

Not every use of the power is in this early version of Second Son, but the one that is -- and definitely stands out -- is the neon dash. Holding circle turns Delsin into a jumble of pink and purple particles that can move at super-speed down the street, up walls, and all around the city. He basically looks like the Flash moving at lightspeed.
While everything (like that super-run animation) is open to change as we move toward Infamous: Second Son’s February release date, the game currently packs a new heads up display that has icons for imprisoned civilians, places to recharge smoke, and a musician (I’m not sure what that last one’s all about yet).
These additions join the use of the DualShock 4’s touch pad.

Touch gimmicks and new hardware seem to go hand and hand, but using the pad in today’s Second Son demo gave me hope that Infamous wouldn’t be another Uncharted: Golden Abyss. Tearing open doors with a swipe, lifting condensers on top of tanks, and recharging both neon and smoke with my finger felt natural. Even the thing I bitched about at PAX -- i.e. dropping into first-person to use my finger to match Delsin’s finger on a scanner -- didn’t feel terrible. I wonder about it breaking up the fluidity of gameplay if it pops up elsewhere, though.
That’d be the worst, because right now, fluidity is the best thing Infamous: Second Son has going for it. And it has a lot going for it.

Infamous: Second Son

Published by: Sony Computer Entertainment

Developed by: Sucker Punch

Genre: Action

Release Date:

United States: March 21, 2014

UK: March 2014

Australia: March 2014

RP-T+ for Rating Pending, Targeting a Rating of Teen or Above

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