inFamous Second Son Trailer Previews Smoke Abilities, Destruction

A really weird super power to have is one based on smoke. However, the new main protagonist in inFamous Second Son will start the game with smoke abilities and scale his powers from there. The new developer video gives gamers an awesome look at how Delsin Rowe, the young graffiti-artist turned super-villain handles his new smoke powers.

The cool part about inFamous games are the open world aspects and the sort of poignant but underplayed importance of choice and moral weight. I'm curious how Sucker Punch will handle the character development in the very complex world for which they have set Delsin Rowe – it's quite obvious that things aren't necessarily black or white but you can definitely see how Rowe will fuel a lot of villainy throughout the campaign.

As for the powers themselves... I'm completely unsold on the smoke abilities. Personally? They're a lot lamer than the electrical powers Cole sported in the first game and while the graphics and visuals look good, the powers themselves seem lame. However, the smoke ability is just the first power that Rowe encounters and we have no idea how the other abilities scale with his smoke or what sort of combinations players can throw out with additional abilities.

On the flip side, the way the smoke abilities are used and the animations associated with them is what's pretty cool. The animation artists did an amazing job with a lot of small, subtle things that Delsin does to bring his character to life. The little jeté during the upward teleport jumps looks slick and the momentum-based effects that Delsin reacts to while moving across the city are impeccably cool.

The small things really help bring inFamous Second Son to life and are mostly likely going to be the things that help draw players in, whether they like certain powers or not.

So far, though, Sucker Punch has been extremely tight-lipped on a lot of the details of inFamous as far as gameplay variety and diversity goes. It's obviously going to be bigger than the second game but there's no real info on how big. In a way, this is a definitely a good thing considering that as the game draws closer to release players will have more to look forward to and discover on their own... something that completely disappears with some games that have massive marketing campaigns where the entire game is spelled out in a matter of developer diaries and trailers, ala Assassin's Creed games.

inFamous Second Son will, unfortunately, not be a launch title for the PlayStation 4 but it will arrive sometime during the first half of 2014. Gamers excited about the title can keep up to date by paying a visit to the official inFamous website.