Barrow_Bug said:
@Vaarna thanks for the reccomend, though Prototype doesn't look all that interesting. Is it any good?
Prototype suffers from having a relatively good plot on paper, with heavy Alan Moore's Swamp Thing references and inspirations, but brought down by very sloppy execution and too much separation between story and gameplay. I mean, look at the ideas they were bringing to the table:
1) The most important element of the story is that the Alex Mercer you play as is not Alex Mercer at all, or even human. He's a sentient new being born out of the virus released just hours before the game starts.
2) However, it doesn't end there. The dead guy who you thought you were was actually the closest thing the story has to a main villain behind it all, and he was by far the worst of the many downright evil people in the story.
3) The important Alan Moore's Swamp Thing element here is that despite being not human at all, Alex Mercer/Blacklight develops heroic and noble qualities as the story progresses, and ends up becoming something of a superhero.
They even tried to include a version of Alan Moore's brilliant "you can't kill a plant by shooting it in the head" moment in the game.
However, where they fucked up was that they separated story and gameplay entirely, with there being no repercussions of the player causing massive collateral damage when the story wants us to see that in the end Mercer/Blacklight is the only party present out to save Manhattan, taking on both the government black ops forces and the other viral spawns. I'm not talking about a "no killing" rule here, but rather that there would be a reason or effort put into avoiding civilian casualties.
Then they fucked up in presenting the story they had planned out, with their execution of it being a disjointed collection of loosely connected scenes where no character is given enough time and important plot threads are forgotten left and right. They try to incorporate a mystery element to the plot, and while the memory flashes you can absorb from specific random people are relatively well done, they end up leaving too much hanging into optional content and the mystery, resulting in an end result of "don't show, don't tell" all over the place.
But, the game still possesses a very well executed follow-up gameplay of the previous game of the developers. It succeeds admirably in creating the image of an immensively powerful super-powered being, and a veritable war raging around you (consoles apparently can have hundreds of combatants duking it out simultaneously, most devs just suck at making it a reality). They also throw in just enough variation in enemies to keep things interesting, so it doesn't suffer from "everyone enemy is the same" effect that plagued inFAMOUS.
Overall, it's still a fun superpower game even with all its flaws. I don't regret buying it and keeping it.
