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Hi everyone. So I'm taking a look at Infamous Second Son today.
This is the first of the next gen releases for
Infamous and it's obviously a PlayStation 4 exclusive.
You can certainly see the developers have gone all out with this title.
Now if you're not familiar, the Infamous series kind of places you the protagonist as
a guy with special powers and the
general government doesn't really like that
too much and so in Infamous Second Son they've set up a
you know, special department of security of sorts
and who is, you know, going to deal with the bio terrorists,
what they call conduits, people with special powers in this game. Now
effectively this is very much a superhero
game, you know, but with a twist. You can choose your alignment of
good and evil through the deeds you do. So if you happen to kill
hostages and civilians or make negative choices
then you'll go to the evil side and likewise if you make good choices if you
save the civilians
save the people you encounter and try and help them then
you will gain good alignment. Simple as that. Now where this plays in is really
into your power choices
and how you're able to kind of expand your arsenal. As you travel through the
game you'll acquire new powers from
other people or other characters in the game as it were and
you then also have crystal shards. Now these shards are
you know, dotted around the map in various ways. I'm not going to tell you all of them
for the simple reason that some should be found on your own but effectively they kind of
come from two key places from finding
flying drones, shooting them down and collecting the crystals and from these control points
and there are control points dotted in each sector on the map. The map is
completely open world
and you can travel through it exactly as you feel, completing and opening up various bits
as well as obviously having a story which you can go to the various story rally points
start the next part of the story and so on. Now as you kind of move through the game and run
up enough powers and you kind of start leveling them up, certain
options will be locked to you, depending on your alignment.
So this creates quite a nice little bit of replay opportunity. Once I finish playing
through the evil alignment
I'm going to play through the good alignment because some of those good powers
are awesome. All the powers kind of have a core set as it were, can be used
either alignment but it's really how those powers open up.
Some up those paths will be blocked to you if you have an evil alignment
and so on. Now one thing that really has to be called out here is the quality of
the graphics.
I mean, whoa! We really haven't seen anything like this on even a
PC before and it's quite clear that Sucker Punch the
developers have gone absolutely all-out on their particle effects
and part of that comes down to, you know, the powers that we have in this game
are very colourful kind of powers, You know, you're going to need a lot of
really beautiful particle effects especially
for the neon power set which is just beautiful to play with.
I mean it really is. It's an absolute feast for the eyes. Now
as part of having obviously these very heavy particle effects
the frame rate is not consistent it has to be said.
But it's not as hitchy as we've seen in some other games recently.
It is running at 1080p, 30 frames per second.
Fantastic, you know. Really 1080p has to be the minimum and then developers can
choose
30 or 60 frames per second and get the frame rate as stable as possible at
those ratios. Now what we're really seeing from
the kind of frame rate on Second Son is not a disaster actually
it's dropping by one or two frames a second
very occasionally and it's usually when you've got a lot of heavy particle effects going on
a lot of on-screen action. Because you kind of get a lot of on-screen enemies at once
then, you know, it's not like you're being attacked by three or four people you're
being attacked by thirty-odd
with all of the particle effects going on with you dashing around using your various
travel powers it can't feel a little hitchy at times
but at no point did we see the frame rate completely crash out
so that is obviously a major bonus point there. The game is
reasonably stable with its frame rates and not to a point where it ever drops under 24
frames a second.
So at no point do you ever kind of feel that the immersion is being broken by this
hitching and again, at no point did we actually see any screen tear.
Fantastic. Now, when we actually come onto the kind of game play itself
this is a fast and furious game. Combat is
a kind of duck in, dive back out again
and constantly trying to stay in and out of combat so that you can really
not take too much damage. Because of the way the combat system works here
you will be attacked from all sides usually and
because of that you're going to have to make heavy use of your travel powers to
effectively
zip in between all of the enemies hitting them with melees, hitting them at
range overcharging your superability etcetera and
basically trying your best to kind of have
a combination of being in cover, being far enough away from the enemy and being up close
and personal.
Now this can get a little bit tricky as the game goes on especially as,
you know, your opponents computer-controlled characters, the NPC's,
become obviously much more many and their powers become
much greater as well. Because they don't just have guns they've also kind of have
slimmed-down versions of your power sets and that can cause a few problems
especially when you get up close and personal. Now one of
the things to really mention here as well is the NPC's who have
a really nice variety of kind of
different combat mechanics, you know, from
up close and personal to the long range guns, to snipers to
attack helicopters. Oh my God they're really quite tricky!
But also the boss battles as well. When you want to complete each
district as it were and completing a district basically means going through
and not only knocking out things like communication towers and the command
centre
but also completing smaller little challenges like side missions
effectively. Complete all the side missions in an area
and you can then call out the boss of that area to defeat him.
Defeat the boss and ultimately what that allows you to do is then fast travel
through those locations later. Now this becomes quite important
towards the sort of latter half of the game really because otherwise you're kind of stuck on the
wrong side of the river and this is a mistake I made
and then effectively you're going to have to do quite a lot of walking, well travelling
with your travel power
to get back across the river to then to and complete an area
so you can then get your fast travel for that area. So, you know, before you actually go across the river
do unlock at least one of those districts first completely so you can use your
fast travel later. It will come in handy. Now
overall this game is an absolute stunner and it
really does show how you should be doing next gen right now.
Finally we have a game that actually feels like it's respectful of the tag
next gen. Not just from the previous gen, we've added some more NPCs, tarted up
the graphics a little bit and
you know, maybe even have done something with the frame rate. Actually this is a game which feels like
it was built specifically for
PlayStation 4 in its next-gen. Something you can't
quite necessarily say with Killzone in my opinion
but this one it definitely feels like it's got it all going on
and it's a beautifully well rounded package. There's quite a lot of replay value
here as well so
for my mind it actually is worth the price they're asking for. They
reckon that there's sort of 10 to 12 hours
of single player gameplay here. That's obviously doing one alignment I
believe. So if you go down obviously the good side or the
evil side and ultimately then you can do a replay through
and check out the other side. This helps the replay there is only an
additional 8 hours once you obviously know the game and you know how all the bosses are going to
work
and so on. And those boss battles are
interesting but not going to blow your mind necessarily.
It's the usual kind of affair with these kind of boss battles. Watch for the patterns
find out where the weakness is, take the boss out, it's as simple as that. Rinse, repeat.
But overall the way the game has been put together,
the animation system, the beautiful, beautiful particle effects
it really does make for a fantastic game and one that
you're not going to regret if you check this one out. You know? There's plenty of
gameplay here. There's a
really good fun time. There is no multi-player, that has to be said
so, you know, all the focus here has really gone into the single-player aspects
and beautifully done at that. One area which
does occasionally have issues is the
kind of texturing and animation used for some of the characters.
At times it looks absolutely A1. I mean you're talking photo real.
Blink and you'd think you're watching a TV programme but at another times sadly it
steps into uncanny valley.
This is especially true on the protagonist's character.
His face is really kind of smooth, overly smooth almost
and he's wearing a beanie hat. And unfortunately at times it kind of almost looks like
well, about as smooth as a baby's bum kind of thing.
It just looks uncanny and it's really stepping into the uncanny valley
but at other times when you aren't sort of catching the side of the face
the clothing animation
and texturing is just phenomenal. I
don't think you're going to see anything better in a game
and just thinking, one of the things I was thinking when I was playing this game and
obviously this comes from it being a Sony first party title, but
it's got a certain element of Uncharted going on. So
Drake's Fortune and so on. The Uncharted series obviously has a
very good sense of humour to it and a lot of narrated dialogue that kind of helps
bring the world to life and Sucker Punch have kind of brought that in here as well.
The story is really cool and so are the characters actually.
You kind of get this really fun banter going on
and also the character. the protagonist that you play, he's also kind of
throwing out little one-liners, a little bit like Spider-Man and it
all kind of works really nicely. It helps the world not only feel lived in but gives you
an actual connection and a reason to give a damn about these
characters.
You know, unfortunately a lot of games these days kind of eschew
backstory and anything that helps to push the characters along and your
reason for living and existing in this world
and kind of just ignore all the battle. It comes quite superficial. Here
it actually feels like it matters - at least a little bit anyway.