One of the first games that I was given for my PlayStation 4 was a physical copy of Infamous: Second Son, but because my console's disc drive got clogged up with dust at one point, I wasn't able to play it (or any other physical PS4 game, for that matter) for years. Now that I finally got that fixed, I started playing through this game shortly after beating Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and while I wouldn't consider this to be a terrible game, I wouldn't exactly say that I liked it. Infamous: Second Son is one of the most aggressively milquetoast games I've ever played, as almost everything about it feels designed to be just competent enough to keep the player from switching the game off without actually being all that noteworthy. The generic visual style and music really didn't help with this, as it just made the game generally feel much more bland and flavorless. Like a lot of these kinds of games, Infamous: Second Son focuses on the player having to fight yet another force of tyranny, and every plot point and character relationship within that journey is as predictable as they can be. None of the characters were very interesting, but my least favorite was easily the protagonist, because on top of the obviously bad idea of making him be part of a fictional Native American tribe, Delsin Rowe was also just annoying, as his constant quips and one-liners consistently got on my nerves.
Aside from the main missions, Infamous: Second Son has five or six side quests that are copied and pasted across the entire map, and while they were initially fun to complete, these missions got very old very quickly, and every moment outside of the main story ended up feeling like this Pavlovian cycle of constantly having to fight the same four or five types of D.U.P. soldiers and reduce their presence in a bunch of districts that barely feel any different from each other. One of my least favorite elements of Infamous: Second Son would easily be its dated and binary morality system, as pretty much all of the in-game "choices" boil down to either killing a person or sparing them. On top of the decisions themselves being lame, my choices didn't even have that much of an impact on the story, because despite how I non-lethally subdued nearly every enemy I came across and got to the maximum level of good karma, Delsin and the rest of the one-note supporting cast still talked about him as if he was killing people left and right. Even for the time, this system feels old, and seeing games that came out before and after Infamous: Second Son execute similar systems with much better and more engaging results only adds insult to injury.
Aside from the story, open world, and karma system feeling underwhelming, the actual gameplay of Infamous: Second Son is fairly competent, but I also managed to find some gripes with those as well. Moving around the buildings of Seattle using Delsin's newfound powers honestly felt quite good, and that especially applies to the fast and fluid neon ability. Although the game's combat system is plagued by the same kind of skill tree that we've seen a billion times before, it was still okay and had some weight to it, although some early upgrades that made me able to one-shot or two-shot enemies and gain good karma out of it made every enemy encounter feel incredibly easy from that point forward while also cancelling out the usefulness of my melee attacks. Even if the combat wasn't technically bad, the aforementioned grind of having to constantly clear out enemy camps made playing the game feel like a chore, and that made me less and less eager to keep playing as I went on. Infamous: Second Son isn't the worst game I've played, but its intense mediocrity left me uninvested throughout my playthrough and flat-out bored by the end of it, and I don't really plan on checking out any of the other Infamous games any time soon.
Aside from the main missions, Infamous: Second Son has five or six side quests that are copied and pasted across the entire map, and while they were initially fun to complete, these missions got very old very quickly, and every moment outside of the main story ended up feeling like this Pavlovian cycle of constantly having to fight the same four or five types of D.U.P. soldiers and reduce their presence in a bunch of districts that barely feel any different from each other. One of my least favorite elements of Infamous: Second Son would easily be its dated and binary morality system, as pretty much all of the in-game "choices" boil down to either killing a person or sparing them. On top of the decisions themselves being lame, my choices didn't even have that much of an impact on the story, because despite how I non-lethally subdued nearly every enemy I came across and got to the maximum level of good karma, Delsin and the rest of the one-note supporting cast still talked about him as if he was killing people left and right. Even for the time, this system feels old, and seeing games that came out before and after Infamous: Second Son execute similar systems with much better and more engaging results only adds insult to injury.
Aside from the story, open world, and karma system feeling underwhelming, the actual gameplay of Infamous: Second Son is fairly competent, but I also managed to find some gripes with those as well. Moving around the buildings of Seattle using Delsin's newfound powers honestly felt quite good, and that especially applies to the fast and fluid neon ability. Although the game's combat system is plagued by the same kind of skill tree that we've seen a billion times before, it was still okay and had some weight to it, although some early upgrades that made me able to one-shot or two-shot enemies and gain good karma out of it made every enemy encounter feel incredibly easy from that point forward while also cancelling out the usefulness of my melee attacks. Even if the combat wasn't technically bad, the aforementioned grind of having to constantly clear out enemy camps made playing the game feel like a chore, and that made me less and less eager to keep playing as I went on. Infamous: Second Son isn't the worst game I've played, but its intense mediocrity left me uninvested throughout my playthrough and flat-out bored by the end of it, and I don't really plan on checking out any of the other Infamous games any time soon.