StarDestroyer.Net BBS

A new game landed in the Manor, and I've played it alot. My recommendation: If you liked Prototype, get this. It improves in all ways, except replacing Mercer with a far more relatable character of James Heller, a PSTD war vet who arrives home to the NYZ just in time to find his mother and daughter dead.. Because of Mercer and his second outbreak. It's a roaring rampage of revenge, to borrow a phrase, against Gentek, Blackwatch, and Heller's Infected. Without spoiling anything, there's some interesting twists on the way, though near the end the WHAM moments come end to end.

The biggest change is that earning powers, upgrades, and so forth are not earned the same way. EP result in 'levels', where you get one of a variety of mutations that improve you. In addition, wrecking Lair's of infected, removing Field Teams, collecting Blackbox's, and completing optional 'Blacknet' missions earns different mutations, enhancing everything from your mobility to your defense, and your powers. Most powers and upgrades are gotten by consuming specific foes. No more farming EPs and becoming powerful off of simple fights repeated endlessly.

Plus, the 'Tendrils' and 'Pack Leader' powers are simply incredibly fun.

It plays better than P1, but has a really dumb story and is really short/easy. They really fumbled where to go with the plot after P1. 'Nazi scientists' is not good writing, and Heller is a pretty offensive and moronic protaganist.

But the actual game elements are all better. Its a shame that a single brief playthrough will get you absolutely everything and make it nearly pointless to play further.

Haven't bought/played it yet as I am waiting for the budget version.

Do they at least give a good reason why Alex Mercer is the new antagonist?

tezunegari wrote:Haven't bought/played it yet as I am waiting for the budget version.

Do they at least give a good reason why Alex Mercer is the new antagonist?

He does rant about why. Though unfortunately, the full reason is in a comic covering the time between games.

The comic gives the reason in the most cliched trope there is: Discover all the Bad things about Humanity and decide we don't deserve to live.
I'm still holding out for a "Nuke split him into GoodGuy/BadGuy" trope. It'd give us hope that the one we LIKED is still out there somewhere.


Stark does have a point, the game is short. It doesn't feel rushed, you have plenty of action, but you get to the end too soon. They could have done a bit more with it. Complete-tionists who want to get all the goodies and earn all the highest rankings in the Online Challenges get good use out of Game+. There is enough to do that you could avoid the story for some time, but since most of your powers unlock through Story, that is a big sticking point.

And the reason is amazingly stupid so everyone ignores it, beyond it beyond central to how bad the story is. There was scope for really interesting stuff after Prototype since 'Mercer' knows he's both immortal and not even remotely human, and the whole world is in peril, millions are dead and New York is a blasted shell, etc.

So to explore that imteresting situation, all scientists are evil, the green zone has more zombies than the yellow zone, and Mercer has a bizarre plan that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Keeping the people in camps is fine, since the world is probably gripped in backlight paranoia. Black watch being huge or even still existing after they all got eaten and had a 100% failure rate is dubious but tolerable. It's just that nothing interesting is done with these interesting ideas; they're not even slaughting civilians in brutal experiments to save the world, as they arguably we're in the first one. They're just doing it because they can and they're bad.

Going into the game I expected something interesting like Mercer creating Heller to kill him, as he recognises the threat he represents and can't do it himself. Oh well, at least the effortless killing of bad guys is better and the controls are improved.

Tevars point about unlocks is important because it serves to make your options grow in a more linear way (although finding all the collectables is really easy). Some of the most interesting stuff you don't get access to for quite some time, and then the game ends.