If there was one thing I was sure I'd enjoy about Infamous: First Light, it was the story.
First Light, the downloadable follow-up to Infamous: Second Son for PlayStation 4, provides the background on Abigail "Fetch" Walker, who was introduced in the original game. She was the neon-siphoning super-being that you had to chase, take down, befriend and help redeem as you played through Sony's post-apocalyptic superhero adventure.
Discovering how Fetch came to be should have been fascinating, but it was pretty boring. Luckily, I found myself enjoying *First Light'*s much-improved gameplay design.
Moving through First Light’s urban landscape is like rocketing through Second Son's in double time. Actions that were loose or jumpy in Second Son feel streamlined for perpetual motion here. Fetch's drizzly, quasi-militarized Seattle has no quick-travel points because she’s zippier than the PlayStation 4’s hard drive.
It just feels good to zip around the game world, whether you're ribboning up the side of a building or lancing through the air high above the skyline. First Light explains the origins of a killer, sure, but it's also about hurtling through a sandboxed space like The Flash, sprinting in long, sinuous arcs and timing leaps and boosts to tag collectibles while maintaining your momentum. It's like connect the dots with antigravity parkour instead of a pencil.
*Second Son’*s Achilles heel was its repetitive mission structure. First Light rectifies this by reducing the number of missions and simplifying their solutions. You complete them too quickly to notice the repetition. Your playground's smaller as well: Second Son's Seattle has been lopped in half, with just the northern section traversable. If you're a completist the story should last three or four hours.
That leaves the game's new Challenges. Finish story mode and you'll have roughly two-thirds of Fetch's powers unlocked. If you want the rest, including some of the game's toughest achievements, you'll have to slog for them in Curdun Cay's battle arenas, or by kicking around Seattle: stop some drive-by-shooting, hit so many enemies while in the air, dispatch hundreds of bad guys with a specific special ability, and so forth.
It looks like grinding. And it sounds like grinding. And I'd call it grinding, only it doesn't feel like grinding: Sucker Punch makes melee so satisfying and the skill point payouts so generous that it's more like an opportunity to chain a bunch of kick-ass superpowers in combat jams.
Fetch should have been a more interesting protagonist than Delsin from Second Son.
He was a wannabe hooligan in a beanie, a sulking anti-hipster with authority issues. She was calamity reified, an ex-junkie prone to panic attacks and moments of homicidal insanity.
When we meet Fetch midway through Second Son, she’s a demented killer reeling from the loss of her brother and reveling murderously in her godlike abilities. Telling her origin story in First Light was an opportunity to dig a little deeper in the dirt, a chance to give us a look inside the mind of someone broken and driven to butchery.
Instead, First Light trots out another superhero potboiler that lets Fetch mostly off the hook. The writers motivate Fetch by stealing what she wants (her brother), then they gate him behind a misogynistic kidnapper who spends the game goading Fetch from a cell phone like a drawling (literally) frat boy.
The Infamous series' trademark good-evil seesaw doesn't exist in this installment, lending Fetch's victims the moral gravitas of tenpins.
It doesn't help that what passes for character development winds up crowbarred into the cutscenes, dragging you along for the ride. The sense that you're playing as a tormented woman sucked into a psychogenic maelstrom never registers during missions that amount to picking off opponents in slightly different ways. As you put this tortured soul through the game's paces, Fetch seems, at most, slightly perturbed.
Even the narrative framework comes off as forced. The game cuts between Seattle-based flashbacks, set before Fetch loses her brother, and her two-year incarceration in Curdun Cay, a prison for superhumans overseen by *Second Son'*s lecturing villain.
The writers use the prison segments as training sessions to unlock new abilities for Fetch to deploy in subsequent flashbacks. But the interplay between the two timeframes feels gimmicky, the gameplay slaved to a backward-forward story slaved to a progression-related contrivance.
I'm not asking for Herman Melville's X-Men or Flannery O'Connor's Superman. Nor does every tortured protagonist need to be Carrie White. But the storytelling feels too by-the-book, a series of tutorials on the road to the better battle arenas, jury-rigged into a developmentally flat narrative.
First Light delivers where it matters---when you're tapping buttons and swiveling thumbsticks---but reduces its lead to a generic victim whose murderous motives and emotional journey never quite add up.
