The inFAMOUS games on PlayStation 3 are undoubtedly my favorite games of all time. The first installment grabbed me and I was in for the whole ride. Loved almost every moment of its story, gameplay and open world. InFAMOUS 2 took this a step further with a more polished presentation, a great story, an incredible open world, and some compelling additional content. Long story short, I'm a huge fan of this series. Second Son was exciting when it came out, as we got to see a new protagonist in this gritty superpowered saga on the PlayStation 4. As a standalone game, Second Son is a pretty good time. The game plays good, looks even better, and works well as a launch title. But once you start to dig deeper into what this game is and what it has to offer, the more cracks start to unfortunately appear.
Let's start with the good. The strongest aspect of this game is its visuals. The graphical fidelity, art direction, and VFX still look AMAZING to this day as it did back then. This game also has some of the best cinematics I've seen in a game - the motion capture and cinematic direction is quite literally top notch. The atmosphere and soundtrack is also quite strong - but inFAMOUS games have always had great atmosphere and soundtracks. The gameplay is also quite good, if not a bit simplified and a little less nuanced compared to the previous games.
Now for the bad. The story and content. While I wasn't expecting Second Son to be better than the first two games in terms of storytelling, I was expecting an interesting and fleshed out standalone narrative. Interesting it is and some of the writing is entertaining. But the overarching story is very flawed. In fact, the story and the game's content feel quite rushed. Characterization of our main cast is pretty shallow and inconsistent, the karma system messes up the logic of the story even more than it ever did in the previous games, the worldbuilding is pretty flat (which is a HUGE downgrade from the previous games that were RICH with history and fleshing out their locations), and our supporting characters don't get the screen time they very much need. Also one of the more serious themes of the game gets pushed to the side and barely touched. Then there's the content of the open world. While inFAMOUS 1 & 2 didn't have masterpieces of side content, what was there was fleshed out enough to be worthwhile and interesting. Side missions and collectibles may have been a bit repetitive, but there were gameplay benefits, additional narratives, and good worldbuilding that came with them. Those side missions also allowed for a few hours worth of additional content, with the average side mission being around 4-10 minutes. Second Son completely downgrades all of this. Side missions are now split up into categories, allowing for even more repetition (with little to no worldbuilding except for one mission type). They can take a few seconds to complete and they don't really come with many gameplay or narrative benefits. Also the world design is a lot lackluster. Empire City and New Marais in the first two games had a lot of variety in locales and a lot of interesting interactive elements. The way NPCs interacted and moved around in the open world also added a lot more nuance to the world - but this isn't really present in Second Son. Also the gameplay design almost dismisses most of the world design, making it so that you can speed past the most of the locales without ever interacting with many of the world's elements. The open world is more of a obstacle than a living breathing world. Which also removes some of the challenge that the open worlds had in the previous games, such as tough platforming and strategic traversal.
InFAMOUS: Second Son isn't a bad game - standalone or sequel. It's just a huge downgrade. It's visual and technical presentation is the biggest appeal and upgrade in the series, but everything else has been watered down in terms of quality and fleshing out certain aspects. It lacks the compelling plot of inFAMOUS 1, the fleshed out characters of inFAMOUS 2, and the open world of both. Which is a shame, because this game REALLY could've been much more, given the time. It tries to do so much, but the quality is watered down as a result.
