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I like inFamous games, but I've always wanted to love them. I've always felt I should love them, in fact, given that they blend acrobatic open-world chimney hopping with the crackle and fizz of elemental superheroics. inFamous 2 brought me close to love - mostly, granted, because you could kill street musicians - but it couldn't entirely escape from a handful of problems that had troubled the original.The tech has traditionally been a little shonky, for example, offering bland outdoor environments that blur into a soupy mist before you can plot a satisfying path between A and B. The missions tend towards the unimaginative. Your combat powers are a little lacking in impact, and - despite a few good moments - Cole MacGrath, the lead, never had quite enough of a personality to make you warm to him. The end result is good-natured and often fun, but the clean edges and the sharp characters that define Sucker Punch's earlier work on the brilliant Sly Cooper games are mysteriously absent. inFamous often feels like a comic book series that struggles to sustain the brashness, the immediacy, of an actual comic book.
All of which makes Second Son an interesting proposition: there's the new hardware it's running on, of course, and there's a new lead, the young graffiti artist Delsin Rowe, who comes with fresh superpowers. There's also a new setting in the form of the Emerald City: Seattle. It's Sucker Punch's back yard, which should hopefully give the team a kind of home advantage, and it has both the perfect counter-culture ambience to stage a tale of government crackdowns and punkish mutant outsiders, and an ideal mix of flat-roofed commercial districts and gleaming steel towers to climb. This week I got to try the whole thing out for myself. After an hour and two missions? Well, I like Second Son. I just don't love it yet.
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