Maybe the sound effects are too soft, maybe the animation is too restrained and the camera shake and haptic feedback too gentle? Maybe it's something deeper and more mysterious that an idiot like me could never understand. Neither provides the glorious thwack and smash of video game combat at its best, alas. I faced off against a mix of snipers and machine-gun toting baddies - as well as DUP shock troops and a Conduit. For the duration of this demo, though, they were fairly handy at a lot of the same basic things: both have a melee option, both have a ranged option, both offer grenades. Smoke will eventually allow you to do stuff like slip through grates, while neon powers are allegedly tuned towards precision. (Storefront signage gives you the former, chimneys and wrecked car engines provide the latter.) Both come with truly glorious graphical effects - dancing scribbles of pink light and ember-thick orange flame respectively - and hopefully throughout the course of the game they'll grow to give you really distinct options, too. You get a sense that the job might be a bit too big for him, and that's quite exciting.ĭelsin can assume the powers of other Conduits, apparently, and the current demo offers neon and smoke flavours, which you can switch between by charging up at certain hotspots. He's a Conduit - a metahuman, basically - in a world that's cracking down on Conduits, and Baker makes Delsin come across like an outsider: smug but fragile. Delsin's younger, with a gaunt frame that gives him an appealing kind of vulnerability, and he's also voiced by Troy Baker, which means that an entirely acceptable wisecracking script receives a little unearned depth of characterisation too. With inFamous 2's positive karma ending meaning the old leading man's presumably out of the way permanently - although I did notice a sign for Cole McG's Electronics store as I scrabbled around the mid-town streets - the stage is clear for an injection of genuine personality. The good news is that the new hero's a definite improvement. After an hour and two missions? Well, I like Second Son. This week I got to try the whole thing out for myself. It's Sucker Punch's back yard, which should hopefully give the team a kind of home advantage, and it has both the perfect counter-culture ambience to stage a tale of government crackdowns and punkish mutant outsiders, and an ideal mix of flat-roofed commercial districts and gleaming steel towers to climb. There's also a new setting in the form of the Emerald City: Seattle. Power usage seems to be more generous, too.Īll of which makes Second Son an interesting proposition: there's the new hardware it's running on, of course, and there's a new lead, the young graffiti artist Delsin Rowe, who comes with fresh superpowers. Both powers offer ability to scud through the air in a slow descent.
Games like infamous second son series#
inFamous often feels like a comic book series that struggles to sustain the brashness, the immediacy, of an actual comic book. The end result is good-natured and often fun, but the clean edges and the sharp characters that define Sucker Punch's earlier work on the brilliant Sly Cooper games are mysteriously absent.
Your combat powers are a little lacking in impact, and - despite a few good moments - Cole MacGrath, the lead, never had quite enough of a personality to make you warm to him. The missions tend towards the unimaginative. The tech has traditionally been a little shonky, for example, offering bland outdoor environments that blur into a soupy mist before you can plot a satisfying path between A and B. inFamous 2 brought me close to love - mostly, granted, because you could kill street musicians - but it couldn't entirely escape from a handful of problems that had troubled the original. I've always felt I should love them, in fact, given that they blend acrobatic open-world chimney hopping with the crackle and fizz of elemental superheroics. I like inFamous games, but I've always wanted to love them.