Infamous: Second Son

Delsin Rowe never asked to be a superhero. The tagger from the Akomish reservation outside Seattle spends his days spraying stencils on walls and needling his brother Reggie, a sheriff's deputy who wishes he would grow up. Then a prison transport crashes on the reservation, a Conduit named Hank escapes, and Delsin grabs his arm. Something passes between them. By nightfall he can pull smoke into his hands and throw it back out as fire, and his tribe is dying from wounds inflicted by a government agent who came looking for the escapee.

That setup pushed Sucker Punch Productions in a different direction than the two PlayStation 3 games. Cole MacGrath's story had run its course by 2011, so the studio built a new lead, a new city, and a new engine around the PlayStation 4. Seattle in the game is an occupied city, locked down by the Department of Unified Protection and dotted with checkpoints, mobile command centers, and cameras that track Conduits like Delsin. The game shipped on March 21, 2014, roughly four months after the console launched, and it carried the visual load of showing what the hardware could do.

Four power sets drive the whole experience. Smoke is the starting kit, letting Delsin dash up vents and launch himself as a burning cloud. Neon, stolen from a runaway named Fetch, turns him into a streak of pink light that can run up the sides of buildings. Video, pulled from a punk rocker called Eugene, fires digital streams and lets Delsin hop between satellite dishes and antennas to cross the skyline. Concrete, the last one, arrives near the endgame with heavy melee swings and armor plating. Each set rewrites his traversal, his ranged attack, his melee combo, and his Karma-specific finishers.

Karma runs the length of the campaign. Delsin either calms panicked citizens and subdues enemies or executes them and terrorizes the streets, and the choice reshapes missions, dialogue, and which version of each power he unlocks. The game is strictly single player. No co-op, no competitive mode, nothing online beyond leaderboards and the usual sharing features. [edit]

Movement is the real hook. Delsin climbs buildings by holding a button and letting the parkour animations carry him up ledges and air conditioners, then launches off a rooftop with whatever power is equipped. Smoke gives a short vertical burst and a dash through vents. Neon turns him into a sprinting blur that runs straight up walls and across water. Video lets him hover briefly and then snap to the nearest antenna or satellite dish, chaining hops across the city. Concrete is the slowest and heaviest, good for brawling and not much else.

Combat splits into a ranged shot, a melee combo that ends in a finisher, and a handful of unlockable tricks like a smoke grenade or a neon stasis field. Enemies are D.U.P. soldiers with body armor, riot shields, turrets, and the occasional Conduit. Delsin absorbs ammunition by draining environmental sources: burning cars and chimneys for smoke, neon signs for neon, screens and security cameras for video, and chunks of ruined pavement for concrete. The system keeps him moving instead of camping behind cover.

Karma choices show up constantly. Heal a downed civilian or drain their energy. Spare a surrendering soldier or execute him. Those decisions push a meter toward Hero or Infamous, which gates certain story missions and changes how the public reacts. Hero Delsin gets cheered and photographed by bystanders who occasionally help in fights. Infamous Delsin gets rocks thrown at him and a different set of finishers. The world itself is divided into districts that Delsin liberates by clearing D.U.P. checkpoints, hidden cameras, and mobile command centers, each one revealing more of the map and cutting down enemy presence in the area. [edit]

Brooke Augustine runs the D.U.P., and she runs it from Seattle. When she learns that Hank escaped into Akomish territory, she pays the reservation a visit and demands answers. Delsin's grandmother Betty and several other tribe members end up in the hospital, afflicted by a concrete-based power Augustine uses like a poison. Delsin heads into the city with Reggie to find Hank, hoping to force a cure out of him. Instead he finds the city sealed off, its citizens under curfew, Conduits rounded up and shipped to a detention facility called Curdun Cay.

Along the way he picks up allies. Fetch, a neon Conduit with a grudge against drug dealers who hurt her brother, becomes a reluctant partner. Eugene, a shy kid who projects video constructs of himself as a hero called He Who Dwells, runs a pirate broadcast from a hidden studio. Both of them were tortured at Curdun Cay under Augustine's watch, and both hand over their powers after Delsin helps them settle scores. The three of them eventually break into the facility itself to free the Conduits held there.

The ending depends on Karma. On the Hero path, Delsin chooses to spare Augustine and turn her over to face justice, and he uses his abilities to heal the Akomish elders, including Betty. On the Infamous path, he kills Augustine and then drains the powers of every Conduit in Curdun Cay, killing them, before returning home to find that his tribe has disowned him for what he has become. Reggie dies in both versions, sacrificing himself during the escape from Curdun Cay, and that loss lands the same way no matter which path the player took. [edit]