I think by now you understand me, dear reader. Third-person action-adventure games are my jam. When the PlayStation 4 was first revealed to the world, one game stood out as a bright shining beacon to me: Infamous Second Son. The first Infamous was a pretty solid game, but Infamous 2 was great. More powers, more choices, better movement and animation, less sad and sour Cole. Hell, I picked the game for our Best Exclusive PlayStation 3 Games This Generation list.

The last time I saw the game at E3, I couldn't play it. Someone else played while I watched, fingers flexing. This week, I finally got a chance to play Second Son and while my demo wasn't huge, it was worth the wait. Sucker Punch co-founder and director of development Chris Zimmerman took me through my test run.

The demo started with new Infamous hero Delsin Rowe at a Department of Unified Protection (DUP) checkpoint, trying to sneak into Seattle with his brother. The very beginning of the demo was a little gimmicky, requiring the use of the Dual Shock 4's touch pad to move Delsin's finger onto the fingerprint scanner. Of course, the scanner flags Delsin as a Prime Conduit - natural super-powered being, as opposed to the DUP's artificial Conduits - dropping both brothers into a super-powered warzone.

Ready for you to bring it all down.

That's where I finally gained full control and noticed one big change in the game: instead of holding R1 and then hitting another button to use your basic Bolt attack, you just hit R2. There's no aiming and then firing, you just fire. R2 fires your basic Bolt and holding R2 down gives you a Blast. These are both with Delsin's starting Smoke powers, with the Blast mimicking Infamous 2's Alpha Blast: short range, big destructive power, and a bit of pushback.

"There'll be things that are familiar to Infamous players, but we've designed the game from the ground up so that if you're not an Infamous player you'll have a good time."

"You'll notice that - we believe that a lot of game developers will make this same decision - all the stuff that was on R1/L1 in the last generation was only there because R2/L2 sucked. Now they're good, so many things like firing a gun have moved to the button that actually feels like a trigger," explained Zimmerman. "Infamous 2 turned into a button salad at the end. We wanted to make the game more approachable. It got a bit hardcore. We felt would could give the hardcore gamer the experience they were looking for without having the controls be so complicated."

"We didn't build the game for those that played Infamous 1 and 2," he added. "If you played them, you'll have a deeper, richer experience, but you don't need to have played those games. New hero, new setting, it's seven years later. There'll be things that are familiar to Infamous players, but we've designed the game from the ground up so that if you're not an Infamous player you'll have a good time. That's why it's not called Infamous 3."

Combat in the demo was primarily against armored DUP soldiers, who came in the gun-only variety or the gun-and-Stone power variety. The latter have a version of the Ice Launch from Infamous 2 and an arcing Stone Grenade attack. That means these guys will frequently take the high ground against you, but that's okay because Second Son has environment destruction. Using the Smoke Blast against a DUP outpost can bring the entire thing down, with DUP personnel still inside. Probably feeds your Bad Karma, too.

While I was using powers and tearing down DUP infrastructure, I couldn't help but notice all of the next-gen effects. There was the debris and flames from exploding structures and vehicles, in addition the lighting and particles of Delsin's Smoke powers and the DUP's Stone powers. When the game gets really crazy in combat, there's a lot of colored lighting and bodies flying every which way. Seattle looks amazing and even if the citizens aren't perfect yet, at least they're present (unlike the recent Batman Arkham Origins). The motion-captured facial performance for the lead cast - which includes Troy Baker as Delsin - is improved according to Zimmerman, who is proud of the Second Son engine rendering 15,000 vertices on Delsin's face, 30 times a second.

"The game's designed to let you play how you want to play. If you like Neon, you'll play more with Neon."

"We couldn't have done this before," Zimmerman said, obviously excited. "When you're doing superpowers, things like particles are coming out. One Smoke Dash is like 15,000 particles. We're running that all through the GPU. I've gotten it to 150,000 particles, that's my record. At one level, as an engineer, I'm like 'that's awesome, that's a lot of numbers.' The GPU is handling all the drawing and the particles. The CPUs are handling everything else. The animation, which on PS3 was an SPU thing, is now all purely CPU. For PS3, there were things that you'd think we'd run through the GPU that was actually didn't. All of the lighting in Infamous 2 was done on the SPUs, not the GPU, because we had extra bandwidth there."

Sucker Punch noticed how much fans enjoyed Infamous 2's Ice Launch, so movement is a larger priority in this game. The aforementioned Smoke Dash can move over obstacles and through grates. Delsin can also enter vents to quickly get on top of buildings. But the best movement power is when Delsin decides to draw in Neon. Drawing in a different elements changes Delsin's powerset, but switching back is just as easy as taking in smoke again.

Neon changes Delsin's Bolt into an attack with a longer range, like the Artillery Bolt in Infamous 2 without the arc. More importantly, Delsin gains super-speed as his dash move while in Neon. It's a damned cool effect: bright pink after-images show Delsin's path and a wicked neon trail glows behind him. Even better, Delsin can run up walls while in the mode! It's pretty great to run up a building out of a firefight, turn around, and see your neon trail behind you.

"You'll get a different feeling with Neon than you did playing with Smoke," said Zimmerman. "The dash is different, the different attacks that you have. It means that the game changes up on you a little bit. The game's designed to let you play how you want to play. If you like Neon, you'll play more with Neon. For the most part, we don't force those decisions."

Neon is friggin' awesome.

The Karma system wasn't in the build I played. Zimmerman said it "absolutely exists," but Sucker Punch doesn't have it polished enough to show off yet. There's more powers than Smoke and Neon in the game and even more moves within those powers, but the studio is holding its cards close. Even I asked about the return of user-created missions and Zimmerman declined to answer if they'd be returning.

"With Infamous 2, we felt like we talking about too much stuff before the game was shipped," he told me. "When the game was out, people that had followed the coverage were a little bit disappointed, because there weren't enough surprises for them. This time around, we're being more circumspect about the game."

After clearing out the DUP soldiers, I then had to destroy one of their mobile command posts in the area. This required me jumping on top of the post, grabbing its engine with the Dual Shock 4's touch pad, and then jamming on R2. Once that was done, the DUP dropped in a heavy armored trooper with a minigun. At Zimmerman's behest, I defeated him using the 'orbital drop' power shown in the previous trailers, thus ending my demo.

All in all, it was a pretty awesome demo that only increased my appetite for more Infamous. Unfortunately, Second Son is missing the PlayStation 4's launch window. Instead the game is coming on March 21, 2014, a few months into launch. Zimmerman seemed appreciative about the extra time to make the game great.

"It is nice to have a little bit of extra time to finish the game," he said. "It's hard to do games that hit launch because the hardware is still under development. From a business standpoint, it's nice to know that there's something cool coming out. Often times with system launches you get this massive dump of games right at launch and then a year where nothing happens."