distortedreality said:
If true that's a real shame.
The first game wasn't brilliant, but it was a lot of fun.
I've put a good 4-5 hours into it yesterday, and Prototype 2 does some things very well, and some things very poorly. Overall, I rather enjoy it, but it's neither the best nor worst game of all time.
First off, the good:
-You now have a reason to hunt "Web of Intrigue"-equivalent people down, as they give you missions which end with upgrades
-The upgrade system as a whole is much refined. Instead of just getting XP and using that to buy things outright, they introduced a leveling system for the "core" stats (hp, movement, regen, etc) and the remainder of the upgrades (gun upgrades, powers, etc) work like the military upgrades in the first game: find a guy and eat him to level up that ability.
-The combat is much improved. Instead of getting an offensive and defensive ability, they actually expanded on it and allow for more customization. You get a defensive ability by default (after you unlock it) and can map offensive powers to 2 keys and can create combos and whatnot with them. It allows for quite a bit more depth to the combat (though the enemies, so far at least, still can't take more than a hit or two).
-Locating targets is much easier. Instead of the retarded vision modes no one used in the first game, they replaced it with a "sonar" type thing, where you use it and the world goes orange, and a ring of "normal" expands from your target and you can use that to find them. It's actually a really neat mechanic.
And now for the bad:
-Movement mechanics are much clumsier than in the first game. In the first, you had 3 primary abilities to move around the city: Jump, Glide and Air Dash. You could charge a jump to vary the height, press the jump button to glide for a bit, then air dash to change direction and/or reset the glide timer, and using that you could (with a decent starting point) float across 2/3 of the map without once slowing down. In the sequel though, jumps can't be charged (or at least not very well, you can't "store" a jump like you could before) which makes bouncing off rooftops much harder. On top of that, the controls for glide and air dash were reversed. In the first game, the jump button triggered glide while tapping the sprint button triggered the dash. They swapped it in 2, so that you need to tap the sprint button (which you're already holding down if you're trying to get anywhere) to glide and use jump to dash. It's far less intuitive than the original game and makes moving around much less fun (though it's still pretty awesome once you get the hang of it).
-The graphics are meh at best, I've seen a lot of shoddy textures and the occasional weird collision between models. It's certainly playable, but i was hoping for more of an improvement over the original.
-The story is all kinds of confusing. The first game's story was nothing special, but it was fairly clear cut: Something unleashed a virus that infected Mercer, go figure out wtf is going on. In 2, there's all sorts of conspiracies and twists and all that kind of bullshit that just makes it hard to get invested into the story. The problem is more presentation than content, if that makes any sense, but it's definitely there.
-They don't do nearly enough to explain the controls. They tell you the basics, like "this is the jump button", but there's a whole bunch of other controls you need to figure out on your own (like how to assign buttons to powers that I mentioned earlier). The controls themselves are usually decent to good (barring the movement controls), but they don't do nearly enough to explain them.
