Age of Gaming E05 - inFAMOUS Second Son

Age of Gaming - Discussion of PC, PS4 & Console Video Games - Starwalker Studios

Today I’ll talk a bit about inFAMOUS Second Son on Playstation 4. I also have a great tip on sharing your PS4 games with a friend or family member.

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What I’ve been playing

Dragon Age Inquisition – jury’s still out for me on this game

Destiny – the expansion is definitely not worth it

Resogun

Tomb Raider Ultimate Edtion

Sharing Games

Here's an easy tutorial with screenshots on how you can share PS4 games you buy on the Playstation Store.

inFAMOUS Second Son

Buy inFAMOUS Second Son on Amazon and help support the show.

Open world action-adventure game.

Available on PS4.

This is a great game to get on PS4.

Great graphics, great animation, great audio, motion cap is pretty good as well.

Story is ok. Pretty straight-forward and tropic, nothing ground-breaking or especially evocative. However there IS a story (unlike Destiny), but not nearly as good a story as The Last of Us.

The game is a LOT of fun! You feel very powerful zipping around the city blowing shit up left and right.

The structure of the game is very similar to games like Batman Arkham City. You have an open world with numerous story and side missions you can do. You can also just run around fighting crime if you want. I really like this because during any given session you can advance through the story if you like, or just fuck around. Either way you’ll be gaining power and unlocking abilities.

I love the fidelity of the graphics. I love that it’s in Seattle. Having lived in Seattle myself, there were many places I recognized, and that was awesome. Climbing to the top of the Space Needle was super cool. If you’re a resident or fan of Seattle, you have to play this game!

I love the comments NPCs make as you pass by, whether your character is good or evil. Some of them are downright hilarious.

This game is all about freedom. I love just exploring the city and fighting whatever foes I come across. Then, when I’m in a more serious goal-oriented mood, I’ll focus on clearing a specific area.

I like that you’re progressively retaking the city during the course of the game.

Placing graffiti around the city is kind of fun (at least the first few times), but seems a little irrelevant to the game overall. Also the fact that there are good and evil graffiti you can do seems silly and forced.

I like the different powers you can unlock, and the different types of powers, e.g. smoke and neon. Just when I’d mastered smoke and might’ve started getting a little bored with it, I got access to neon. I like that you can switch between them. My only criticism that there are quite a few abilities that are analogous between the different types of powers, and I would’ve preferred they were all unique, but this is a minor complaint.

There are things I like and don’t like about the morality mechanic. I like that your choices not only affect how NPCs interact with you, but also affect the powers you can unlock.

There are two ways you advance your character. You earn your skill points to gain new abilities by draining power from generators and drones and such throughout the game. It’s nice because you can seek these out to unlock more skills as you like.

Certain skills have a prerequisite of a certain level. You either gain light side or dark side xp that levels you. This is where the morality mechanic comes into play.

However I don’t like how polarized black and white the morality is. You can’t really roleplay your guy, because any choices that aren’t black or white will ultimately slow your progression through your abilities. You basically have to choose good or evil and stick with it if you don’t want to be earning negative progress toward unlocking your abilities.

So good karma is blue, evil karma is red. If you decide to be good, anytime you do something bad, you gain red karma, which basically cancels out your blue karma. So whatever alignment you choose, whenever you do something of the opposing alignment, you’re effectively earning negative xp that is slowing your progression.

I’m not sure if you can earn negative xp to the point you lose a level or not. This would be interesting to test. If you can’t lose a level, and you’re good, then as soon as you leveled maybe you could go on an evil rampage without setting yourself back xp wise. However it will change how people in the city react to you.

So trying to play a more realistic middle-of-the-road character will slow your progression and basically penalize you as far as the mechanics of the game. Mechanics-wise you’re better off doing one extreme or the other. I understand this from a mechanics point of view (you either have to avoid hurting civilians or have to deal with the police), but from an RP story point of view, it’s very unsatisfying.

This black and white morality is really old-fashioned, out of date and over simplistic. I hope in the future we see less and less of this in modern games, as it doesn’t really have a place in the world anymore.

I tried starting the game with a good and evil character. Seem pretty balanced as far as difficulty. With a good character you have to be more careful not to kill civilians, however this is balanced by the fact that with an evil character you have to fight the police on top of everything else.

Overall I’m really enjoying this game. I’ll have to give you an update once I’ve finished it. The gameplay is really fun, and I love the open world aspect of it (note this is real open-world, not fake open world like in Destiny, you really can go anywhere, there aren’t any invisible walls that will kill you if you cross them).

The black and white morality system is tiresome and does somewhat lessen the enjoyment of this otherwise excellent game. However, it does work with the mechanics in an interesting way and does fit in with the over-simplified world view common in comic books (which this game is very much like). So if you’re into that, you may enjoy the morality aspect. However for someone like me who enjoys RP and story elements in games, it does kick you out of the story a bit.

The story could be better, but it’s not bad. Again very tropic and simple and comic book like. But a lot of people like that. Just don’t expect anywhere near the depth of a game like The Last of Us.

Most importantly though, this game is a lot of fun, and is a great example of why PS4 is awesome. I highly recommend it if you haven’t already played it. If you enjoyed Batman Arkham City, you’ll probably like this game as it’s structured in a similar way.

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