Infamous: Second Son - Hands on from Expert Reviews

For this hands-on preview we got to play two short levels from early in Infamous Second Son, there was no image capture allowed, so images have been provided by Sony

A little later than we'd have wished, we've finally got our hands on Infamous: Second Son. It's the first big PS4 exclusive post-launch and with Titanfall being released around the same time for the Xbox One, it's a fairly big deal in terms of the competition between the two new consoles.

Having done a quick survey of our team, no one had huge experience of the series. We won't be alone though, Infamous 2 has sold a respectable 1.64m copies (estimated stats from VGChartz) to date. Which means the vast majority of PS4 owners, around 5.3m won't have played its predecessor. This isn't a big deal though, as the franchise is being rebooted with a new protagonist, Delsin Rowe, and is set seven years later.

You can see why the authorities aren't too keen on Conduit powers

The setting is Seattle in the near future. Delsin is a super-powered 'Conduit' able to channel the environment around him into incredible powers. The government isn't too keen about such unregulated abilities though and so has imposed a police state, enforced by the Department of Unified Protection (DUP) that suppresses all Conduit activity with deadly force - although it has its own licensed Conduit power-users as we'll discuss later.

The demo opens with a moral choice, with Delsin able to choose the fate of a fellow Conduit, Abigail 'Fetch' Walker. She's a loose cannon who has been murdering local drug dealers, you can either help her out or turn her energies against anti-Conduit elements and their DUP friends. The motion capture and scripting of this sequence look to have been done simultaneously, a la Naughty Dog, to capture the actors' performance in full - it looks pretty slick. The choice you make decides the next mission you take on and also how the wider story develops.

We tried both missions, which we're hoping are representative of the game as a whole, rather than the best it has to offer. The gameplay was fighting-centric in a large urban open world environment. We asked whether there would be other open world areas beyond Seattle but nothing is confirmed to date.

FIRST ROUND

The first mission involved exploring a small docks area, looking for drugs packages, which are roughly marked on a map, and then marking those houseboats for destruction. Unfortunately there's a small army of heavily-armed drug dealers that are shooting at you from all directions. We found this rather bewildering at first, trying to get to grips with the controls and ending up in the water more often than not - which frustratingly asks you to click the touchpad in to get teleported back to dry land.

Neon gives you a small bullet time effect so you can aim and fire accurately on the move

We quickly got a grip on Delsin's powers though. There were two power sets available in the demo, Neon which can be absorbed from lights, and Smoke taken from chimney stacks. Neon allows you to shoot blasts of light with R2, while pulling L2 instigates a short bullet time effect and tightens up your view for aiming. You can also dash for a limited time, either on the flat or straight up walls to quickly scale to the roofs of buildings. Melee attacks are charged up into a lightsabre-esque 3-hit combo.

Using these in combination, we quickly got airborne on the houseboat roofs, destroyed the snipers using the light blasts and then performed a jump and slam into the ground to disorient nearby drug dealers before finishing them off hand-to-hand - once down you can execute or incapacitate them, which again has an impact on your morality and the story. If you take too much damage, and you can take a lot, it's easy to dash away and hide to recover.

SECOND TAKE

The second mission saw us heading into town to breakup some anti-Conduit demonstrations, capturing their leaders and inevitably getting into scraps with the DUP at the same time. This allowed for far more travel across the city, and it's really empowering to zoom up the sides of buildings and do a double jump with hover to bridge the gaps between them. From the top of a tall building you can accelerate your stomp move all the way down to the floor with far bigger results.

Delsin super-powers his chain with vicious results using the Smoke power

We also switched to the Smoke set of powers for this one. Smoke also has a ranged attack (faster firing with no bullet-time effect) and a powerful melee attack plus a dash. You can zip straight through most buildings via air vents, rather than going over them, but it didn't seem to overly affect the way we played. Of course each set of powers is likely to solve specific problems, or be effective against certain types of enemies, and there are going to be lots of different ones, and possibly upgrades for them; however, from what we saw there was little variation between the two.

Taking on a Conduit-powered DUP in a pedestrian-filled traffic tunnel

Fighting the Conduit-powered DUP members brought some challenge to affairs with huge mini-gun armed brutes that used rock power to protect themselves, while others used similar powers to lock your feet to the floor, where you're a sitting duck for gunfire.

Seattle looks great and so do the particle effects

Looking at the plot, there's certainly potential for a good yarn, although from what we've seen Delsin looks a bit too sulky teen rebel for us to take seriously. The morality system looks interesting though, with both your narrative choices and you in-game actions (you can choose to help civilians that get caught in the crossfire) feeding into your character and his outcome.

We did have some fun playing the demo, but aside from the presentation, notably the brilliant looking particle effects that accompany the powers, there's little we got shown that demands the 'next-gen' tagline. You can destroy some barriers and DUP structures (defensive walls and towers), but the world isn't really interactive (it's no Watch Dogs) and the demo didn't show us any interior explorable areas beyond a long and fairly open tunnel filled with abandoned cars and DUP troops.

In short, the demo shows little ambition in terms of gameplay beyond the usual open-world staples of going there, beating them up and grabbing that; and the combat didn't feel demanding or varied enough to justify such an approach. It's only a short demo of course, but the final game will need to provide far more variation in the way you use Delsin's powers in order to prove it's more than just a pretty open-world beat em up.