The studio is tangibly more comfortable, the new lead is more personable, the tone isn't too heavy or forced. Second Son is a fresh start on home turf - Sucker Punch's home town of Seattle, proudly going by its real name. The developers at Sucker Punch Productions haven't quite seemed at ease with the tonal jump from their Sly Cooper cartoon capers to the teen-rated angst of inFamous in the past they struggled to pin down a personality for the star Cole MacGrath or an atmosphere for Empire City and New Marais, the games' impersonations of New York and New Orleans. Still, this is a more authentic and lively game than its two predecessors. Nirvana's grunge classic Heart-Shaped Box plays as the credits roll, but it's a cover version. But the stakes are strictly personal, the counter-culture clothing just borrowed threads. Granted, the tone has shifted from the conspiracy, catastrophe and convoluted timelines of DC Vertigo to classic X-Men, where superheroes are given a derogatory classification ("mutants" then, "bio-terrorists" now) and hunted by the authorities, serving as avatars of disaffected youth and the persecuted underclass. Banksy's subversive street art is a token inspiration - our new hero is Delsin Rowe, a delinquent youth with a gift for stencil art, which you can apply with a rattle and spray from the controller - but like its predecessors, Second Son is pure comic-book at heart. So is inFamous: Second Son a rebellious, politicised action game for the Occupy generation? As you might have predicted, not really. "Which of us would have the courage to fight to get our freedoms back?" he asked. "Our security comes at a high price: our freedom," he declared, before linking current affairs back to inFamous lore - an unruly superhero universe where the emergence of super-powered humans in present-day USA causes chaos and unrest. He touched on the troubling extent of government surveillance that was dominating headlines at the time. He mentioned that he'd been tear-gassed in 1999's anti-globalisation riot, the Battle of Seattle (an event he's been invoking in interviews for a while). Announcing the third inFamous game at the unveiling of PlayStation 4 last year, director Nate Fox got political.
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