The 'Shroom:Issue LXIII/Crocodile Style Reviews: Difference between revisions

by {{user|Crocodile Dippy}}</div>

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{{ShroomStrongContent|harsh language, vulgar content, spoilers}}

{{nonmario

So for those of you not in the know, ''Prototype'' was a supervillain sandbox with an interesting premise that failed to elevate anywhere beyond being a simple murder frenzy – a very fun one, mind. It was frequently compared to another supervillain sandbox released around the same time titled ''inFamous'', but I've always felt more of an affinity towards the scruffy-voiced walking tesla coil due to better narrative and coherent characterization, two very important facets ''Prototype'' sorely lacked. As nonsensical as the morals choice system was in ''inFamous'', it at least gave Cole McGrath some semblance of consistency with his personality, whereas ''Prototype'' dedicates many of its cutscenes and dialogue into depicting the protagonist as a misunderstood, semi-benevolent good guy forced to do bad things for the greater good, despite gameplay allowing you to slaughter thousands of innocent civilians with little consequences for no better reason than it being hilarious. Lo and behold, the sequel is more of that and then some!

Not that the plot made any sort of sense to begin with, resembling a jumbled conspiracy wall more than anything else. It's never really explained how they managed to stop the first outbreak or how the second outbreak managed to occur, and I fail to see the purpose behind Mercer enlisting selected Blackwatch and Gentek bigwigs as his mutated subordinates to get intelligence and tear the organizations down "peacefully" from the inside when he's depicted as a laughably evil cartoon villain; he doesn’t even need their help, considering he's basically a god. This makes the entire goal of killing Mercer even more ridiculous, conveniently ignoring the big twist in the last game that he was really the virus itself all along and not just an infected human, even showing at the climax that he can restore himself so long as there's some semblance of the virus still left. And there's still the matter of Heller's moral indignation; effort is put into characterizing him as more sympathetic and benevolent to the squishy mortals than Mercer was, but when he's throwing buses at civilians left and right it comes across as very insincere and like he has split personality disorder or something, which is just as well because everything else in this bloody game is schizo as well.  There's one overblown scene where he prepares to kill the Blackwatch colonel once and for all to find out the whereabouts of his daughter (who turns out to be alive, by the way), but decides to spare him upon overhearing that he has a wife and daughter whom he hopes to return to when the New York crisis is over; what about the families of the seven hundred thousand soldiers you killed to get to this colonel, you hypocritical fucking prick? I don't think "they didn't call you while I was readying myself to disembowel them alive and eat them cell by cell, so I didn't know" would ease their mourning.

The story just really bugged me in particular because so much of the gameplay is just fluff, having not really changed much from the original. The difference between Heller and Mercer is purely cosmetic, as you still run and glide around a large sandbox to reach the marked objective on your mini-map – killing everything along the way – and spend those missions either infiltrating military bases, slaughtering them and their infected experiments, or some combination of both. Say what you want about ''inFamous 2'''s lack of gameplay evolution, at least there was a whole new well of powers to use; ''Prototype 2'' instead settles for slightly tweaked versions of the powers from the original game, the only glaring innovation being that they've introduced a grand total of ''one'' new power-up! Save some ideas for the next game, mates! Your friend could swap out the disc for ''Prototype 1'' while you weren't looking and you probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference, except that the combat all of a sudden feels right.

The upgrade system has had somewhat of a makeover, certainly for the better; rather than manually upgrading powers at your own leisure a la ''God of War'', now experience gained from completing missions, eating important personnel, or just killing people indiscriminately is automatically pooled into a single level up bar so Heller can evolve and gain new skills of your choosing like Pokèmon for sociopaths. It feels more balanced and like the developers actually cared to put some order into the disorganized nightmare that was the first game's skills menu; you even upgrade your powers by ''actually using them'', I can't believe they didn't do that in the first place. What is still a bother are the side missions, which continue to maintain the issue of resembling tedious mini games rather than legitimate add-ons to the story, which is annoying because completing these missions are the only ways to get the optional stats bonuses. I question the training regimen of Blackwatch when their soldiers simply stand around in patterns waiting for Heller to come crashing down on them like he's playing supervillain bowling. Some of the rewards get really obtuse, too; how the fuck does racing across the rooftops to pick up intel improve Heller's defensive qualities?

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