
I’d love a massively multiplayer Infamous game where everyone can run up the sides of buildings and cause massive explosions, but for now it remains an impossible dream. That’s too bad, because the rare combination of Conduits during a few climactic battles is sublime. Although Grand Theft Auto Online demonstrated that multiplayer open-world games are possible, Infamous: Second Son is a tightly crafted single-player experience with no room for X-Men-like squads of superheroes online. Infamous: Second Son is a single-player game, so you won’t be able to team up with other Conduits online, racing around the city and fighting the D.U.P. We hope that Sucker Punch Productions continues to support Infamous: Second Son with more content, because the Conduit’s abilities are refreshingly creative and the world is wonderfully detailed. Infamous does include a bonus pack of missions called Paper Trail that introduces a new character with a unique power, but it’s completely optional. Still, a longer story with even more characters and special abilities would have been even better.

The main story will only take about eight hours to finish in your first playthrough, but you can play it again with a different karma path and spend extra time destroying the D.U.P. Infamous: Second Son is so spot-on in its concept and execution that the only complaint I have is that I wanted it to keep going. Image Credit: Sucker Punch Productions What you won’t like Thanks to the divergent sets of cutscenes, missions, and abilities, the karmic pathways in Infamous really do feel like two separate games in one. If you’re a villain, you can fire choking smoke projectiles that will painfully suffocate your enemies. For example, if you play as a hero, you’ll be able to slow down time and disable enemies with lasers while they float in a stasis bubble blast. Citizens will curse you if you’re rotten or cheer you if you’re their hero, and for extra karma points, you can annihilate drug dealers (good) or street musicians (bad).Ĭertain powers will only be available once you’ve reached a particular karma level, which means you’ll have to replay the game to try them all. Instead of aiming for your opponents’ feet to tie them up, you can aim for the head and watch them explode. The feel changes completely when ethics don’t restrain you. I’ve played the game both ways, and after beating Infamous as a relentless do-gooder, I tried it again as an evil maniac. Not only do your choices change the storyline dramatically, but they’ll also unlock new story missions at critical junctures. In other words, do you want to be Professor X or Magneto? Do you approach each situation violently, slaughtering innocent civilians who get in your way, or do you attempt to “do no harm” by binding enemy soldiers and letting them live? For each life you spare or snuff out, you’ll contribute to your karma points, setting you on a path toward becoming either a benevolent savior or a villainous murderer. Whenever you battle the D.U.P., you have a critical choice to make. for good will add hours to the its overall running time.

Once you complete the main game, the wide-open and beautifully rendered city is still there for you to explore, and shutting down the D.U.P. You can even hunt down flying drone copters, each of which contains an energy shard. The variety of activities is similar to collecting fragments and sea shanties in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, but in Infamous, they all feel like steps on the way toward freeing the people of Seattle. agents, and destroy surveillance cameras. You can also spray paint inspirational (or upsetting) graffiti around town, locate audio fragments through your cellphone, expose undercover D.U.P. Each section of Seattle contains a heavily guarded mobile surveillance unit, which you can destroy to earn energy shards that strengthen your existing powers. While you can always head directly to the next story mission on the map, you’ll find that it’s more satisfying to test out your new powers by sticking it to the Man. As Seattle’s liberator, your goal is to disrupt their operations in a number of clever ways. has blanketed the city with checkpoints, holding pens, and guard towers, and they’re constantly monitoring the city for Conduit activity.

Three top investment pros open up about what it takes to get your video game funded.ĭelsin’s journey to Seattle becomes a liberation story once his overwhelming powers meet the hostile D.U.P.
