I see Heller as hating Blackwatch specifically. Particularly after
he got to speak with Mercer and get a different perspective on things.
I don't share your view that he has beef with the world at large. After all, his intel report at the beginning spells it out: he has an unnatural fixation on Mercer as the cause of death of his wife and child. Nothing about his condition would suggest to me that he'd become apathetic about people in general. Maybe he doesn't value his life so much, but I don't see that extending to others. After all, he isn't suffering memory loss like Mercer was, and so he isn't having to develop a moral compass as he goes. His identity is intact, for the most part, and he seemed like a stand-up guy in the intro (if a little naive). He's still him, just now with freaky, unnatural super-powers.
You could make the case that his new found inhumanity might shape his personality going forward--that's something I'll have to see for myself as I progress. My Mercer certainly started acting less human as the first Prototype went on. But as of right now? Heller's still the good guy torn between revenge and altruism, with the two overlapping quite a bit.
That's a nice argument. You won me over. I'm really not thinking about it very hard mate I don't really care about story all that much.
It's impressive enough to me that it made me not feel like targetting civilians.
It's a nice story this time around but that's really not why I'm here.
So combos. Lets talk about combos.
Most attacks share a basic 4 hit combo with two start up attacks a third medium hitter and a last big hitter. Possibly the easiest example is the big ol double tendril whammy if you get to the end of the combo. Why does this merit paying attention to?
Cos you can alternate either of your weapons. you can do three claw attacks straight into the last hit of the tendril combo, for example.
Some of the hammerfist enders are really huge aoes that knock people flying, getting to it after three very fast claw attacks ups your effectiveness when fighting enemies a lot.
For claw/blade, the first two hits of blade are relatively slow, but the third hit is actually a pretty quick four slice multi slash thing before the last overheard chop. So doing two claws then two blades eliminates blades startup weakness. You get fast high damage.
This is very cool because it lets you do all sorts of neat things. Hammerfists tend to knock enemies into the air, so you can claw enemies until the last hit, then that will knock them up into the air, then you can claw leap them mid air. Stuff like that.
It is supremely bad ass to be clawing into some dude then bust out the fourth hit of tendril and he goes splurtch all over the place.
It takes a little bit of extra effort to pay attention to the number of hits but its rewarding in the end.
edit: Sometimes the number of hits you need to do changes depending on the weapons you are combining. It isn't always four.
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Dark Raven XLaugh hard, run fast,be kindRegistered Userregular
Alex was a total douche;
didn't it turn out he really was the cause of the virus out break in the first game? That he was trying to steal it or something, and when he got caught, he threw the vial on the ground. Intentionally causing a viral apocalypse is douche territory.
I like Heller so far. He is an angry guy though - that thing with the keyboard was...odd...
The original Alex was the cause yea but the entity you play as is just the virus itself. After a certain point we have no idea if it's "like" Mercer at all because it's starting to walk its own path
I have stared into Satan's asshole, and it fucking winked at me.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited April 2012
Yeah Mercer was a Thing (as in "The Thing"). You can call a Thing a douche if you like but it wont mean much to it.
The reason Heller is more likeable is because he started out a human and is more relatable. Mercer was already a non human at the very start of the game and this is pretty interestingly reflected in his character. He's awkward with his sister, doesn't understand basic social responses and is very direct and to the point about everything he does. He has none of the stuff you learn from other people as you are growing up. It's pretty interesting that he can speak at all.
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I'm still having a bit of trouble with the movement. Not being able to charge my jump or dash into the ground to achieve immediate top speed is something I haven't quite gotten used to yet, but I'm getting there.
One thing I do like is the dodge. It's so much more usable than the dodge in the first game.
Digging the game so far, but no longer being able to charge your jumps in midair kind of sucks.
EDIT: Holy shit. You can consume in the air?
Awesome.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited April 2012
The jumping mechanic is backwards now. You leave the ground on button press and change how high you jump by letting go early. So instead of holding the button down the whole time you need to let go constantly.
I've actually found once you get used to it that you can do multiple maximum jump leaps really fast, pretty much as soon as you hit a solid surface you can be doing another max leap, letting you get around real quick.
But I'm having trouble because it's almost completely reversed.
I don't like that you can't hit top speed when you dash into the ground. I'm not sure I actually like this movement system yet. I'm really struggling to unbreak my old habits and I don't want to make a judgement until I've fully broken out of prototype 1 and am properly playing prototype 2.
One thing I noticed: glide cancels most powers. If someone is really far away, you can claw leap at them half the distance, then cancel with a glide, dash, glide etc then pounce on them. I've glide cancelled a charged blade attack, the jump animation, lots of stuff. It's pretty cool but I haven't really played with it all yet.
One change I hate is that your jump is no longer reset when you get on a helicopter. I really really dislike this. I think it is poo and yuck. I really hope I can find a reliable way around this. You also can't longshot grab a helicopter you do the pounce instead. I was hoping that the whip would give you two ways to get onto a helicopter. I wanna be able to kill a whole strike team before hitting the ground or any other surface.
I don't think hammertoss is in the game either. Lots of stuff I really loved is gone.
BUT the stuff that is here is really good so I'm not saying the game is bad or anything. It's just completely different.
Right now I really want to unlock everything, get all the mutations, 100% the game, then I'm going to sit down and really play with this movement system, see if I can get the same feeling of constant speed. The auto parkour actually slows you down in this game. But I think dashing into the ground still helps get back to top speed faster, it just doesn't set you at it immediately. Probably because the top sprinting speed in this game is a lot faster than the last game. Dashing into the ground does still let you corner faster though.
A very useful thing to do when running up walls is to do a full charged jump, then cancel the tail end of the jump animation with a glide into the building, then jump again. As long as you hit glide a fraction of a second before the jump you will go up the building pretty fast. Not as fast as the first game but eh. It's still faster than waiting it out because the last second or so of the jump animation slows down a lot.
OH YEAH
Tank. Miniguns. Are. The. Shit.
Oh my god so much destruction.
edit: Okay just had a little test run and I can confirm that with full upgrades dashing into the ground does bring you up to full speed. The timing is much tighter now. You have to be on point. You also need to do it every time you jump because doing anything including auto parkour resets your speed. So it's much more difficult.
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Sadly I have not received my copy yet. Amazon tried to use my old credit card instead of my new one. For some reason. Hope it arrives tomorrow, or I might have to cancel the order and buy it locally. Wanna try this game so bad!
I'll post my full thoughts about it later, but right now I'll say this improves on [Prototype] in every way. The graphics and designs are nicer, the writing is punchier, and the powers are even more visceral.
Dark Raven XLaugh hard, run fast,be kindRegistered Userregular
For all the complaints about how short this is, I only just got to the second island after a solid day's play. I have been dickin' around and hunting collectibles where ever possible though.
Oh brilliant
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Mego Thor"I say thee...NAY!"Registered Userregular
"Don't Stop Me Now" was not me. I just liked it a lot so I posted it everywhere. It was actually Destructoids video review. edit: actually I just realised that was Staying alive. I've only personally seen "Don't stop me now" once and it was someone else who linked it. Anyway the point is I had nothing to do with it.
The stealth consume mechanic is now tied to the triangle option on a ground grab. If you ever want a high profile consume to scare everybody, hit grab twice then consume.
The idea with the stealth consume is 1). Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! DAH DAAAAAAAH! 2). In the situations you can do it nobody knows you are there so they don't expect to see it. 3). people don't see things they don't expect most of the time 4). even if they did sort of notice that something odd happened in the corner of their eye, when they look up they see a slightly angrier looking Private Bob and nothing else, so they go back to what they were doing. We think it's slightly strange because we do it all game so we know its coming and it seems slow and unwieldy because our expectations mean our attention is focused on it every time.
Rats, this is video I was thinking of, but got the music mixed up with that other one;
I like that the animations for Heller's stealth consume are the same ones that Mercer did. I guess that's why I didn't wonder why nobody noticed. Epic Fail; Heller only shoves people when running.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
I'll post my full thoughts about it later, but right now I'll say this improves on [Prototype] in every way. The graphics and designs are nicer, the writing is punchier, and the powers are even more visceral.
I just beat it. Got all the offensive upgrades, power upgrades, movement upgrades and devastator upgrades. Only need a bit of health and stealth stuff.
I am torn on this game.
On one hand it improves all the faults.
On the other hand the way they chose to do this involved simplifying and dumbing down nearly every aspect of the game. There isn't much lasting satisfaction in playing it.
Like, the first few seconds of the above posted vid? You cannot do that anymore. You cannot smoothly destroy multiple enemies in a row like that without falling to the ground first. You cannot blow up an entire intersection anymore killing everything in it. You have to kill vehicles more or less one at a time in a methodical fashion. The only instant kill move on a vehicle is the canned finisher.
You don't need to do it in this one, but a lot of the feeling of power I got from the first game was the fact that I could. And you didn't really need to do it in the first one either. It was just hella rewarding to learn how.
The speed in combat is gone. The instant kills and multiple kills on armored tanks and helicopters are gone, other than devastators which while more powerful than prototype 1, actually have cripplingly short range. The maximum jumping height is about a third of what it used to be.
This is a really great game. It is a well crafted, carefully balanced, meticulously designed game, mechanically. It has an excellent story, alright graphics, the powers feel very nice initially.
But despite all the gosh wow and cutscenes and gore and whatnot it doesn't feel as epic to me. It feels like the gameplay lacks soul. It is constrained and forced to go a certain way. A large part of this is the incredible, incredible gutting of the movement system. If you liked the spectacularly rewarding and satisfying movement system in Prototype don't expect to see it in this.
They didn't need to be so drastic in what they changed. They could have made all the great quality of life improvements and new gameplay features without gutting the complex ones like they did.
Here is a really good and really confusing example of what I mean. In prototype 1, if you had gotten to top speed, then jumped onto a wall, you would run along that wall at top speed. In this game there is only one wall running speed and that speed is slow as fuck. There is no reason to have changed this so what the fuck?
If you hated prototype 1 and liked infamous, pop this in. It's protoinfamoustype 2. You'll love it. It was made for you. It wasn't made for me. I clearly got something out of the first game they no longer agree with and don't feel like including. I probably wont be getting the next one at launch prices.
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Mego Thor"I say thee...NAY!"Registered Userregular
It's disconcerting that two posters have beaten this the day after it came out. Is that all the hidden drops and challenges (released so far) as well, or just the story line?
It's disconcerting that two posters have beaten this the day after it came out. Is that all the hidden drops and challenges (released so far) as well, or just the story line?
I was on easy, ignoring plenty of collectibles, and I got a solid 12 hours out of it.
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited April 2012
I'm pretty sure I have every collectible. Game has a pretty thorough help text.
It's a wonderful game to pick up, smash through, have a grand old time, put aside, pick up the next game in the line, think of fondly later on.
I keep trying new experimental things in the expectation that I would discover some cool new trick to using my powers that would make Heller exponentially more powerful and I keep getting knocked back. There's just no hidden gimmicks. What the tutorials teach you is all you get.
If there was a dream god knock out throwdown match my Mercer from Prototype 1 would leave my Heller in Prototype 2 a smear on the pavement with a single blow. He feels weak as hell to me, even when he's kicking everythings ass.
I got the bulletdive dlc. It's ass. Don't feel bad about not getting it. It does shit damage no matter your height. Height makes no difference at all in this game.
The buttkicker move is pretty awesome tho. BOOT.
We will have to see what these later DLC packs result in. They're gonna have to give him one hell of a boost to satisfy me.
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Yeah, but you're like that kid from The Wizard. Everyone expects you to have all the collectibles.
I honestly don't really care about the changes to the movement. It could use some tweaks, sure, but the rest of the game is so good it more then makesup for any shortcomings.
I got the bulletdive dlc. It's ass. Don't feel bad about not getting it. It does shit damage no matter your height.
Bulletdive DLC? I only see the first 3 challenges available on Radnet so far?
EDIT: Oh, its more of that preordering from a specific place gives you different shit... I thought Radnet was supposed to "reward" people with all the stuff for buying the game early, guess that would be too generous for some game publishers.
I read that these moves are something to be gotten with preordering outside of the Radnet edition "Bio-bomb Butt Kicker, Flesh Cleaver & Bullet Dive"
I live in europe and cant get these at all, I guess? thats great.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited April 2012
You aren't missing anything.
Rather than the movement system I despise the taking out of the height increases damage mechanic on falling moves. It's completely pointless to try and gain height now. They all work like blade in the first game. Who thought up that dumb idea.
All the powers feel really weak against armor. If there are a lot spread out you either use the vehicle finishers or pick up a weapon. The finishers are bad ass but they don't feel like you, the player, have actually done anything cool. Leap on tank, hit triangle, passively watch Heller do the cool thing. Repeat.
I mean, I sound like I hate the game. I don't. I really enjoy it. I just don't think I'll come back to it once I'm done. And more than the fact that they have been changed, what bothers me is that the changes I don't like are haphazard and in some cases nonsensical.
I'm running through insane right now with new game + to max out the few life upgrades. Also I was too busy paying attention to gameplay mechanics to actually hear half of the story properly.
If I had to make a list of pluses for this game I would need to do it with pros and cons. Like, Pros, movement is easier, Cons, maximum movement is nerfed.
Pros No weapon is stronger than any other Cons no weapon feels particularly powerful.
Pros Enemies have been nerfed Cons So has the player character.
Pro useless moves have been removed Cons lots of useful moves have also been removed. They also removed Hammertoss. The fuckers. All they needed was to double the damage on it and it would be golden.
That's basically how I feel about this game. On all levels I see a pro and a con at the same time. The only genuine pros in my mind is the story itself which I really enjoyed. It's very well done.
Oh well I actually enjoyed the Radnet challenges because I like that sort of thing so I have those unlocks to look forward to later. So there's something. Although I noticed that the power based ones don't follow the same rules as normal gameplay. The hammerfists one lets you do a diving spike attack that travels forward really far in a straight line. This power does not exist in the normal game. You can do a very short and wide one on the ground, but no long one and you can't do it out of a dive.
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Dark Raven XLaugh hard, run fast,be kindRegistered Userregular
Hey, about the jumping strength you were talking about earlier, not charging = most powerful jump and so forth? You sure about that? Cause I tried, and tapping is giving me the weak one, holding is giving me a strong one.
Hey, about the jumping strength you were talking about earlier, not charging = most powerful jump and so forth? You sure about that? Cause I tried, and tapping is giving me the weak one, holding is giving me a strong one.
What he means is that you leap when you hit the button. If memory serves, in 1 you'd leap when you released the button, thus you basically wanted to always have your jump button held down so you could go for it.
Also, pulling off a minimum-power run is going to be a lot trickier here, but I think I can pull it off in a few weeks.
Man, I'm playing this on Easy and just enjoying the ride. I have no desire to be challenged by this whatsoever (at least, with regard to difficulty itself--I like trying to protect the squishy humans). Putting this on hard would just run counter to my desire to live vicariously through Heller for the super-powered feel of it all. Basically, I want to be a badass and nigh invulnerable, save for maybe boss fights, because, honestly, I'm not in real life and that's a pretty big fantasy of mine (and any serious super-hero/comic book fan).
Uh, there's plenty of powers that are good against armor, ML. Black Hole and Hammerfists are devestating against armor.
No no no no no.
Go watch that vid. The one from prototype 1.
That's "devastating against armor".
I know hammerfist and blackhole can slowly and eventually wear them down. That's what they are designed for and what I use them for on a single tank or a couple of them. They're not devastating on normal by any means. It takes a combo and a half to down a single tank. If there are five tanks this is a bit of a slog and you really just gotta do the finisher unless you wanna be here all day.
The big dive attack only takes a third of a tanks health. It's incredibly slow compared to the finisher.
Blackhole takes about four. This is all on end game normal tanks, not easy.
Don't you worry. I kill everything without being touched. I know what works. The basic moveset doesn't feel as strong as the anti armor attacks did in the last game. They take too long. They leave you stuck in one place wailing on the same tank for quite a while. That tank is fucked, but if you've got a bunch to go after that guy well...it feels like they gotta get in line and the lines getting really long now.
Now if you pull the minigun off a tank, you can take out three tanks in a quarter of the time + any helicopters that rock up. Hellers actual moves are genuinely slower and less efficient in this game than the canned finishers or the weapons. That's a sad fact that was not true in the previous games.
Although I did find out that fully upgraded a thrown biobomb is capable of one shotting a tank. So add that one to the list of "better than the anti armor powers at killing tanks".
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited April 2012
Yup, that's how powerful Mercer was.
Pretty amazing huh.
Whole intersections of tanks. Vaporised in one hit.
Heller is slow compared to what you could do in Prototype 1.
I know how strange it is to hear me saying this, I loved the first game, defended it and all that. But it's slower. And the weapons are faster. Take the gun off a tank and shoot that tank. It will die faster than you can do those three good hits. It will die in the time it takes you to do one hit.
Do the finisher on the same tank.
Time it if you like.
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They took that power out of the game. And they replaced it with nothing. Tendril, as awesome as it is, is not an equivelant trade in terms of god like power.
Instead, what they did, was bring everything down to the level that hammerfists were in the last game, only without hammertoss. A genius move in terms of game balance and a really annoying one because now Hellers actual powers are all merely above average. What I was hoping they were going to do was bring everything up to close to muscle masses level.
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I kinda have to wait on it since its not out for PC yet
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Sirialisof the Halite Throne.Registered Userregular
edited April 2012
The game itself says its April 26th, but the Radnet stuff isn't unlocked, anyone knows when it will?
Why are they taking a little than a month to release this Radnet stuff anyway, I doubt any of it isn't ready right now, and holding challenges back til later...
Whats the point? (other than improving the "hours person X played this game"?)
Yeah, the game is quite fun but I am really disappointed with the changes to the movement system. It does feel pretty slow and sort of backwards, but I do feel like I can be a little bit more precise with my jumps now that I'm getting used to it (this might also be due to not hauling as much ass, I dunno).
Heller feels weak. As if being slow wasn't bad enough, he's kind of a little girl in combat.
Preorders, DLC, Radnet, Activision. Nuff said.
The city is at least 200% more detailed, and it's lovely.
For some inexplicable reason, all the cutscenes take place in Sin City. Still haven't figured that one out yet.
The fact that you can put stuff down safely without throwing them is great, but considering how useless that usually is, it's probably moot.
Biggest pointless thing from the first game that I'm missing so far is the ability to press grab when running up walls and grab on, stop, and climb around Spiderman-style. Granted, I'm not very far in the game, but I always liked doing that even though it served no real function.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited April 2012
Eh, he isn't really weak in this game because all the enemies got nerfed down along with him. So relatively speaking he's really strong. He's just...slow about it.
On the other motherfucking somewhat awesome wait a goddam minute hand...
Insane difficulty appears to not go the route that hard mode did in prototype, which was have the ai be exactly the same with inflated health and do more damage to you.
Instead, damage and health seems about the same?
Instead I'm seeing a huge increase in amount and rate of fire of attacks here. Rockets all day erreyday you gotta be on the trigger and rebound em all. Enemy apcs and stuff track you faster. Strike teams come in a bit faster. I'm also seeing brand new behaviors from enemies.
I fought the first juggernaught and went to wail on him as normal. He picks me up and throws me! I've never seen that animation in the entirety of normal. So I try again, once again. Then I get a help text saying they block attacks and counter you so time your attacks carefully. They take a bit of strategy to kill now.
So insane appears to require strategic use of your abilities. If this keeps up I might actually start liking this game again. I love me some fair but unforgiving difficulty.
I might even try myself a fresh save run through of insane once I finish this playthrough and see whats up. Gosh I wonder what the bosses will be like now.
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I'd say Mercer is more powerful then Heller, but Heller feels more skilled to me combat wise. Mercer felt like he was all about going crazy on enemies, while Heller feels more like has experiance in combat.
I'd say Mercer is more powerful then Heller, but Heller feels more skilled to me combat wise. Mercer felt like he was all about going crazy on enemies, while Heller feels more like has experiance in combat.
Even though he hits for less, he is able to string together combos that stunlock enemies, juggle and stun even large ones, do fancy grabs and throw grenades all over the place. Mercer was better in the air, picking a target or a group of targets he wanted to hit and "nuking" them before whooshing off at high speed to get height again. You got destroyed if you stayed on the ground for too long or didn't move evasively enough.
Heller's element is getting down and dirty within a more limited air space. Even though his top jump is nowhere near as high as mercer's, within his range he is pretty zippy. Especially with the range of his grab and the properties of some of his moves. He has great recovery on almost all his moves.
Since I've mostly given up on trying to play him like Mercer (although I still try it out whenever I think of a new idea) I'm starting to see his scrapper potential. He can stunlock a great many enemies pretty effortlessly, even on insane. He can zip around the place really easily and most of his attacks have really big aoes.
He's a completely different style. I'm starting to find within his style some really cool stuff you could never do in prototype. I'll do a bit of a writeup after I have a play around some more.
Mercer was more or less king of the sky. You could destroy infinite helicopters more or less. When you were done flying around in the clouds you came down to earth like the hammer of god blowing away the ants below you. But if you were ever stuck on the ground with only a limited air space to maneouvre in Mercer was a bit like a bird with his wings clipped. you could do stuff with muscle mass and armor but it was much more unweildy and difficult to get away without being hit. You had to accept that you were going to take hits when fighting near the ground and prepare for recovery.
Heller has a bit of trouble dealing with strike teams elegantly and sometimes they can be a real pain when they hover up there out of reach, but his mastery of the street level scrap is much higher than mercer's. you can get away with hardly any damage, even if it takes a bit longer to kill them. The lower damage is made up for the aoe's tacked onto it all which lets you beat up a tank and take out pesky rocket infantry or infected near it at the same time. He can also turn the tables on all those rocket guys on the rooftops by grabbing them and biobombing them into the furball below.
I never would have realised this if I didn't play insane. The level of attacks being thrown at me on this difficulty forced me to start getting to grips with his different playstyle. On normal I kept trying to turn him into Mercer lite, but that inefficiency got burned away via game over screens on insane.
A very powerful trick I'm using to move around is to ignore the dodge roll most of the time and keeping sprint held down. When I want to dodge I press away from the attack and quickly hit jump twice (I actually mash it rapidly). This results in a really evasive movement that will avoid most enemy attacks and let you set up a nice air counter to everyone below you, or just get out of dodge entirely if you keep on going. It's a similar trick to what I used to use on the ground in prototype, they just took the idea and made it dead easy to do. Pretty sure the air dash has invincibility just like Mercer's did so this is very safe. Pretty sure this is why that weird little hop is there when you quickly tap the button.
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Right, so, further experimentation shows that I ought to be able to do a Fisticuffs run of this fairly easily. Heller can kick a fair bit of ass even power-free, and doesn't have the heights of his raw punching ability locked in a power the way Mercer did.
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That's a nice argument. You won me over. I'm really not thinking about it very hard mate I don't really care about story all that much.
It's impressive enough to me that it made me not feel like targetting civilians.
It's a nice story this time around but that's really not why I'm here.
So combos. Lets talk about combos.
Most attacks share a basic 4 hit combo with two start up attacks a third medium hitter and a last big hitter. Possibly the easiest example is the big ol double tendril whammy if you get to the end of the combo. Why does this merit paying attention to?
Cos you can alternate either of your weapons. you can do three claw attacks straight into the last hit of the tendril combo, for example.
Some of the hammerfist enders are really huge aoes that knock people flying, getting to it after three very fast claw attacks ups your effectiveness when fighting enemies a lot.
For claw/blade, the first two hits of blade are relatively slow, but the third hit is actually a pretty quick four slice multi slash thing before the last overheard chop. So doing two claws then two blades eliminates blades startup weakness. You get fast high damage.
This is very cool because it lets you do all sorts of neat things. Hammerfists tend to knock enemies into the air, so you can claw enemies until the last hit, then that will knock them up into the air, then you can claw leap them mid air. Stuff like that.
It is supremely bad ass to be clawing into some dude then bust out the fourth hit of tendril and he goes splurtch all over the place.
It takes a little bit of extra effort to pay attention to the number of hits but its rewarding in the end.
edit: Sometimes the number of hits you need to do changes depending on the weapons you are combining. It isn't always four.
I like Heller so far. He is an angry guy though - that thing with the keyboard was...odd...
The reason Heller is more likeable is because he started out a human and is more relatable. Mercer was already a non human at the very start of the game and this is pretty interestingly reflected in his character. He's awkward with his sister, doesn't understand basic social responses and is very direct and to the point about everything he does. He has none of the stuff you learn from other people as you are growing up. It's pretty interesting that he can speak at all.
I'm still having a bit of trouble with the movement. Not being able to charge my jump or dash into the ground to achieve immediate top speed is something I haven't quite gotten used to yet, but I'm getting there.
One thing I do like is the dodge. It's so much more usable than the dodge in the first game.
EDIT: Holy shit. You can consume in the air?
Awesome.
I've actually found once you get used to it that you can do multiple maximum jump leaps really fast, pretty much as soon as you hit a solid surface you can be doing another max leap, letting you get around real quick.
But I'm having trouble because it's almost completely reversed.
I don't like that you can't hit top speed when you dash into the ground. I'm not sure I actually like this movement system yet. I'm really struggling to unbreak my old habits and I don't want to make a judgement until I've fully broken out of prototype 1 and am properly playing prototype 2.
One thing I noticed: glide cancels most powers. If someone is really far away, you can claw leap at them half the distance, then cancel with a glide, dash, glide etc then pounce on them. I've glide cancelled a charged blade attack, the jump animation, lots of stuff. It's pretty cool but I haven't really played with it all yet.
One change I hate is that your jump is no longer reset when you get on a helicopter. I really really dislike this. I think it is poo and yuck. I really hope I can find a reliable way around this. You also can't longshot grab a helicopter you do the pounce instead. I was hoping that the whip would give you two ways to get onto a helicopter. I wanna be able to kill a whole strike team before hitting the ground or any other surface.
I don't think hammertoss is in the game either. Lots of stuff I really loved is gone.
BUT the stuff that is here is really good so I'm not saying the game is bad or anything. It's just completely different.
Right now I really want to unlock everything, get all the mutations, 100% the game, then I'm going to sit down and really play with this movement system, see if I can get the same feeling of constant speed. The auto parkour actually slows you down in this game. But I think dashing into the ground still helps get back to top speed faster, it just doesn't set you at it immediately. Probably because the top sprinting speed in this game is a lot faster than the last game. Dashing into the ground does still let you corner faster though.
A very useful thing to do when running up walls is to do a full charged jump, then cancel the tail end of the jump animation with a glide into the building, then jump again. As long as you hit glide a fraction of a second before the jump you will go up the building pretty fast. Not as fast as the first game but eh. It's still faster than waiting it out because the last second or so of the jump animation slows down a lot.
OH YEAH
Tank. Miniguns. Are. The. Shit.
Oh my god so much destruction.
edit: Okay just had a little test run and I can confirm that with full upgrades dashing into the ground does bring you up to full speed. The timing is much tighter now. You have to be on point. You also need to do it every time you jump because doing anything including auto parkour resets your speed. So it's much more difficult.
Yay!! Glad you noticed.
I'll post my full thoughts about it later, but right now I'll say this improves on [Prototype] in every way. The graphics and designs are nicer, the writing is punchier, and the powers are even more visceral.
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Rats, this is video I was thinking of, but got the music mixed up with that other one;
I like that the animations for Heller's stealth consume are the same ones that Mercer did. I guess that's why I didn't wonder why nobody noticed. Epic Fail; Heller only shoves people when running.
I just beat it. Got all the offensive upgrades, power upgrades, movement upgrades and devastator upgrades. Only need a bit of health and stealth stuff.
I am torn on this game.
On one hand it improves all the faults.
On the other hand the way they chose to do this involved simplifying and dumbing down nearly every aspect of the game. There isn't much lasting satisfaction in playing it.
Like, the first few seconds of the above posted vid? You cannot do that anymore. You cannot smoothly destroy multiple enemies in a row like that without falling to the ground first. You cannot blow up an entire intersection anymore killing everything in it. You have to kill vehicles more or less one at a time in a methodical fashion. The only instant kill move on a vehicle is the canned finisher.
You don't need to do it in this one, but a lot of the feeling of power I got from the first game was the fact that I could. And you didn't really need to do it in the first one either. It was just hella rewarding to learn how.
The speed in combat is gone. The instant kills and multiple kills on armored tanks and helicopters are gone, other than devastators which while more powerful than prototype 1, actually have cripplingly short range. The maximum jumping height is about a third of what it used to be.
This is a really great game. It is a well crafted, carefully balanced, meticulously designed game, mechanically. It has an excellent story, alright graphics, the powers feel very nice initially.
But despite all the gosh wow and cutscenes and gore and whatnot it doesn't feel as epic to me. It feels like the gameplay lacks soul. It is constrained and forced to go a certain way. A large part of this is the incredible, incredible gutting of the movement system. If you liked the spectacularly rewarding and satisfying movement system in Prototype don't expect to see it in this.
They didn't need to be so drastic in what they changed. They could have made all the great quality of life improvements and new gameplay features without gutting the complex ones like they did.
Here is a really good and really confusing example of what I mean. In prototype 1, if you had gotten to top speed, then jumped onto a wall, you would run along that wall at top speed. In this game there is only one wall running speed and that speed is slow as fuck. There is no reason to have changed this so what the fuck?
If you hated prototype 1 and liked infamous, pop this in. It's protoinfamoustype 2. You'll love it. It was made for you. It wasn't made for me. I clearly got something out of the first game they no longer agree with and don't feel like including. I probably wont be getting the next one at launch prices.
I was on easy, ignoring plenty of collectibles, and I got a solid 12 hours out of it.
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It's a wonderful game to pick up, smash through, have a grand old time, put aside, pick up the next game in the line, think of fondly later on.
I keep trying new experimental things in the expectation that I would discover some cool new trick to using my powers that would make Heller exponentially more powerful and I keep getting knocked back. There's just no hidden gimmicks. What the tutorials teach you is all you get.
If there was a dream god knock out throwdown match my Mercer from Prototype 1 would leave my Heller in Prototype 2 a smear on the pavement with a single blow. He feels weak as hell to me, even when he's kicking everythings ass.
I got the bulletdive dlc. It's ass. Don't feel bad about not getting it. It does shit damage no matter your height. Height makes no difference at all in this game.
The buttkicker move is pretty awesome tho. BOOT.
We will have to see what these later DLC packs result in. They're gonna have to give him one hell of a boost to satisfy me.
I honestly don't really care about the changes to the movement. It could use some tweaks, sure, but the rest of the game is so good it more then makesup for any shortcomings.
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Bulletdive DLC? I only see the first 3 challenges available on Radnet so far?
EDIT: Oh, its more of that preordering from a specific place gives you different shit... I thought Radnet was supposed to "reward" people with all the stuff for buying the game early, guess that would be too generous for some game publishers.
I read that these moves are something to be gotten with preordering outside of the Radnet edition "Bio-bomb Butt Kicker, Flesh Cleaver & Bullet Dive"
I live in europe and cant get these at all, I guess? thats great.
Rather than the movement system I despise the taking out of the height increases damage mechanic on falling moves. It's completely pointless to try and gain height now. They all work like blade in the first game. Who thought up that dumb idea.
All the powers feel really weak against armor. If there are a lot spread out you either use the vehicle finishers or pick up a weapon. The finishers are bad ass but they don't feel like you, the player, have actually done anything cool. Leap on tank, hit triangle, passively watch Heller do the cool thing. Repeat.
I mean, I sound like I hate the game. I don't. I really enjoy it. I just don't think I'll come back to it once I'm done. And more than the fact that they have been changed, what bothers me is that the changes I don't like are haphazard and in some cases nonsensical.
I'm running through insane right now with new game + to max out the few life upgrades. Also I was too busy paying attention to gameplay mechanics to actually hear half of the story properly.
If I had to make a list of pluses for this game I would need to do it with pros and cons. Like, Pros, movement is easier, Cons, maximum movement is nerfed.
Pros No weapon is stronger than any other Cons no weapon feels particularly powerful.
Pros Enemies have been nerfed Cons So has the player character.
Pro useless moves have been removed Cons lots of useful moves have also been removed. They also removed Hammertoss. The fuckers. All they needed was to double the damage on it and it would be golden.
That's basically how I feel about this game. On all levels I see a pro and a con at the same time. The only genuine pros in my mind is the story itself which I really enjoyed. It's very well done.
Oh well I actually enjoyed the Radnet challenges because I like that sort of thing so I have those unlocks to look forward to later. So there's something. Although I noticed that the power based ones don't follow the same rules as normal gameplay. The hammerfists one lets you do a diving spike attack that travels forward really far in a straight line. This power does not exist in the normal game. You can do a very short and wide one on the ground, but no long one and you can't do it out of a dive.
What he means is that you leap when you hit the button. If memory serves, in 1 you'd leap when you released the button, thus you basically wanted to always have your jump button held down so you could go for it.
Also, pulling off a minimum-power run is going to be a lot trickier here, but I think I can pull it off in a few weeks.
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And this game sure does scratch that itch.
No no no no no.
Go watch that vid. The one from prototype 1.
That's "devastating against armor".
I know hammerfist and blackhole can slowly and eventually wear them down. That's what they are designed for and what I use them for on a single tank or a couple of them. They're not devastating on normal by any means. It takes a combo and a half to down a single tank. If there are five tanks this is a bit of a slog and you really just gotta do the finisher unless you wanna be here all day.
The big dive attack only takes a third of a tanks health. It's incredibly slow compared to the finisher.
Blackhole takes about four. This is all on end game normal tanks, not easy.
Don't you worry. I kill everything without being touched. I know what works. The basic moveset doesn't feel as strong as the anti armor attacks did in the last game. They take too long. They leave you stuck in one place wailing on the same tank for quite a while. That tank is fucked, but if you've got a bunch to go after that guy well...it feels like they gotta get in line and the lines getting really long now.
Now if you pull the minigun off a tank, you can take out three tanks in a quarter of the time + any helicopters that rock up. Hellers actual moves are genuinely slower and less efficient in this game than the canned finishers or the weapons. That's a sad fact that was not true in the previous games.
Although I did find out that fully upgraded a thrown biobomb is capable of one shotting a tank. So add that one to the list of "better than the anti armor powers at killing tanks".
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Pretty amazing huh.
Whole intersections of tanks. Vaporised in one hit.
Heller is slow compared to what you could do in Prototype 1.
I know how strange it is to hear me saying this, I loved the first game, defended it and all that. But it's slower. And the weapons are faster. Take the gun off a tank and shoot that tank. It will die faster than you can do those three good hits. It will die in the time it takes you to do one hit.
Do the finisher on the same tank.
Time it if you like.
Uh. No. No she didn't.
But this was followed a few minutes later with "in a few mikes I'm gonna be wearing your fuckin' face" so s'all good.
The Excessive Force one?
I hope so.
If true it will be very sad.
Just to get everyone on the same mental frame of reference, when I say heller is slow, I am comparing him to this.
And this.
And hell lets just throw this one in there even though it's longer.
They took that power out of the game. And they replaced it with nothing. Tendril, as awesome as it is, is not an equivelant trade in terms of god like power.
Instead, what they did, was bring everything down to the level that hammerfists were in the last game, only without hammertoss. A genius move in terms of game balance and a really annoying one because now Hellers actual powers are all merely above average. What I was hoping they were going to do was bring everything up to close to muscle masses level.
Why are they taking a little than a month to release this Radnet stuff anyway, I doubt any of it isn't ready right now, and holding challenges back til later...
Whats the point? (other than improving the "hours person X played this game"?)
Yeah, the game is quite fun but I am really disappointed with the changes to the movement system. It does feel pretty slow and sort of backwards, but I do feel like I can be a little bit more precise with my jumps now that I'm getting used to it (this might also be due to not hauling as much ass, I dunno).
Heller feels weak. As if being slow wasn't bad enough, he's kind of a little girl in combat.
Preorders, DLC, Radnet, Activision. Nuff said.
The city is at least 200% more detailed, and it's lovely.
For some inexplicable reason, all the cutscenes take place in Sin City. Still haven't figured that one out yet.
The fact that you can put stuff down safely without throwing them is great, but considering how useless that usually is, it's probably moot.
Biggest pointless thing from the first game that I'm missing so far is the ability to press grab when running up walls and grab on, stop, and climb around Spiderman-style. Granted, I'm not very far in the game, but I always liked doing that even though it served no real function.
On the other motherfucking somewhat awesome wait a goddam minute hand...
Insane difficulty appears to not go the route that hard mode did in prototype, which was have the ai be exactly the same with inflated health and do more damage to you.
Instead, damage and health seems about the same?
Instead I'm seeing a huge increase in amount and rate of fire of attacks here. Rockets all day erreyday you gotta be on the trigger and rebound em all. Enemy apcs and stuff track you faster. Strike teams come in a bit faster. I'm also seeing brand new behaviors from enemies.
So insane appears to require strategic use of your abilities. If this keeps up I might actually start liking this game again. I love me some fair but unforgiving difficulty.
I might even try myself a fresh save run through of insane once I finish this playthrough and see whats up. Gosh I wonder what the bosses will be like now.
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Even though he hits for less, he is able to string together combos that stunlock enemies, juggle and stun even large ones, do fancy grabs and throw grenades all over the place. Mercer was better in the air, picking a target or a group of targets he wanted to hit and "nuking" them before whooshing off at high speed to get height again. You got destroyed if you stayed on the ground for too long or didn't move evasively enough.
Heller's element is getting down and dirty within a more limited air space. Even though his top jump is nowhere near as high as mercer's, within his range he is pretty zippy. Especially with the range of his grab and the properties of some of his moves. He has great recovery on almost all his moves.
Since I've mostly given up on trying to play him like Mercer (although I still try it out whenever I think of a new idea) I'm starting to see his scrapper potential. He can stunlock a great many enemies pretty effortlessly, even on insane. He can zip around the place really easily and most of his attacks have really big aoes.
He's a completely different style. I'm starting to find within his style some really cool stuff you could never do in prototype. I'll do a bit of a writeup after I have a play around some more.
Mercer was more or less king of the sky. You could destroy infinite helicopters more or less. When you were done flying around in the clouds you came down to earth like the hammer of god blowing away the ants below you. But if you were ever stuck on the ground with only a limited air space to maneouvre in Mercer was a bit like a bird with his wings clipped. you could do stuff with muscle mass and armor but it was much more unweildy and difficult to get away without being hit. You had to accept that you were going to take hits when fighting near the ground and prepare for recovery.
Heller has a bit of trouble dealing with strike teams elegantly and sometimes they can be a real pain when they hover up there out of reach, but his mastery of the street level scrap is much higher than mercer's. you can get away with hardly any damage, even if it takes a bit longer to kill them. The lower damage is made up for the aoe's tacked onto it all which lets you beat up a tank and take out pesky rocket infantry or infected near it at the same time. He can also turn the tables on all those rocket guys on the rooftops by grabbing them and biobombing them into the furball below.
I never would have realised this if I didn't play insane. The level of attacks being thrown at me on this difficulty forced me to start getting to grips with his different playstyle. On normal I kept trying to turn him into Mercer lite, but that inefficiency got burned away via game over screens on insane.
A very powerful trick I'm using to move around is to ignore the dodge roll most of the time and keeping sprint held down. When I want to dodge I press away from the attack and quickly hit jump twice (I actually mash it rapidly). This results in a really evasive movement that will avoid most enemy attacks and let you set up a nice air counter to everyone below you, or just get out of dodge entirely if you keep on going. It's a similar trick to what I used to use on the ground in prototype, they just took the idea and made it dead easy to do. Pretty sure the air dash has invincibility just like Mercer's did so this is very safe. Pretty sure this is why that weird little hop is there when you quickly tap the button.