Parent's Guide: Infamous: Second Son - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

Infamous: Second Son is a third person adventure game that puts you in the role of Delsin Rowe, a young rebel without a cause, who suddenly gets one when he's bestowed with super powers. When a police van carrying three "conduits" - ordinary people with super powers that let them control certain elements - Delsin's life is turned upside down when he runs into, and has a fight with the prisoner, which ends in the crook's powers being transferred to him.

Thrust into a world where conduits are demonised by an overly aggressive government, Delsin quickly finds himself on the wrong side of the law, hunted by a group called the DUP. Worse still, the leader of the DUP - a conduit herself - found her way to the reservation where the rest of Delsin Akomish tribe live, and attacked them with her concrete power - something that will eventually kill them if Delsin can't reverse it. And so, the young hero sets out on a quest for redemption.

The gameplay's mainly split into two parts, which you can complete in whichever order you'd prefer. You can take on story missions, which see you completing specific objectives (hunting down other conduits for information, performing mild detective work, or scaling Seattle's Space Needle), or, you can take on the DUP in Seattle itself, destroying security cameras, sabotaging posters, and eventually taking out bases to push their forces out of areas, and reclaim them for the people.

As you'd probably expect, playing as a super hero is a lot of fun - with phenomenal cosmic powers, you have the advantage going into any battle - you can fire smoke at your enemies, leap off buildings without taking any damage, scale walls like a modern day Spiderman, and miraculously heal yourself when you land. All these make the game easier for newcomers to pick up and play - but this is still probably too complex for those on the younger age of the spectrum. While your melee attack will auto target enemies, it's not as useful as your ranged moves, which require some pretty hefty dual analogue skills. That said, for those who enjoy similar third person games like Tomb Raider, Uncharted, Crackdown, or to a lesser extent, things like Disney Infinity, they should have few problems here.

Everything here is fully subtitled, although the subtitles themselves are confusing, with no labelling of who's saying what line. When two characters are in conversation, it can sometimes be a challenge to follow what's happening reading the subtitles alone.

Although it seems to have been positioned at a teen-and-up audience, Infamous: Second Son is light on questionable content. There's very little in the way of swearing, with very infrequent "b**tard" and "b**ch" being as strong as it gets. In terms of sexual content, again the game is very light on content, with a red light district where passers by make occasional references to "being laid" being about as strong as it gets.

When it comes to violence, Infamous is similarly unoffensive. While the lead character can attack bad guys with a chain (made of smoke), or by zapping them with streaks of neon, there's no visible blood, and combat is suitably over the top.

One of the areas that Infamous delves into that other games usually avoid is that of drugs. Drugs are prevalent throughout the Infamous world, although they're never encouraged - instead, you're rewarded for breaking up drug deals and destroying their stashes of drugs. Characters also make references to drugs, with regular protests around the city - "pot leads to bioterrorism"

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Playstation 4