Here we have a story of a man who by all means has a right to be angry, but rationalizes psychopathic behaviour by using his personal tragedy as a badge. Here we have a story that tries to humanize and redeem our “hero” through the tacky use of a priest deuteragonist, despite the overwhelming dissonance the actual gameplay creates.
It may be a matter of thematic intention that, generally speaking, only enemy Blackwatch NPCs get any dialogue or characterization, and that everyone else in the environment is basically just fodder for Heller to consume. This may be a commentary on the fact that Heller’s universe is one in which people are reduced to chattel, fates resting in a balance of power between Blackwatch, Heller and Mercer. But it’s hard to feel any immediacy when you realize how easy it is to trigger or not trigger certain events in the environment. The precariousness of the scenario evaporates when upon realizing the game is more or less predictable. It becomes a controlled experience on the part of the player, making Heller seem more like a hellion demagogue rather than a flawed man under extreme circumstances.
It could just be that being able to play either bombastically or stealthily is a matter of actualizing the character (after all, Heller needs not consume many innocents if he operates gingerly). But again, I doubt it. Once one has played several permutations of the same mission, or boss fight, to achieve the same goals, one begins to feel a bit listless at the sheer lack of originality. It begins to seem, rather, that a set of interesting gameplay tools—established well-enough in the first game and elaborated upon in this sequel—have bee under-utilized here. I’m still rewarded for consuming innocents, like gangbusters. I can still earn points throwing cars at strike team helicopters. Nothing about any of these disparate parts appear to be unified to any central idea—anything that may inspire me to build momentum other than the ethereal thrill of gliding from building to building and wrecking as much shit as possible.
Hell, it got to the point where I was instigating strike team scenarios just to spice things up.
Prototype 2, after a few molten playthrough instances on my poor laptop, reveals itself as a sandbox full of toys that don’t really play well together. Sure, the landscapes and figures and missions are the definition of redundancy—but any attempt to make these things feel meaningful or purposeful fall apart through a mismanagement of what the game has to offer.
Experiencing a game through multiple instances of shut-downs and reboots is fracturing and frustrating enough. It is enough to have to admit to myself that, no, my laptop is not currently optimized to run this game—and could probably do with an aerosol cleaning, at the very least. It’s quite another to add to this the admission that the game I’m trying to play isn’t particularly optimized either, for compelling or coherent gameplay.
It is enough to bring a piece of technology into an environment in which it feels gauche to even be using it. It becomes just plain spooky when the game one is playing also can’t seem to harmonize its tools with its dynamics.
I’m hesitant to bring up the former Vancouver developer, Radical Entertainment, which faced mass layoffs after the game was released. I know that only a “skeleton team” was left behind at Activision to finish up whatever tasks lay behind, but to what extent that affected the efficacy of the PC port which my laptop struggled to run is not my place to say. But what Prototype 2 may represent, however, is a ton of talent and interesting ideas that didn’t get the opportunity to form into something more; a fracturing of disparate parts that didn’t quite come together.
At around 4 a.m, I shut off my smouldering laptop, gave up, and went to bed. The whole time I had managed to get the game to play, I was anxiously waiting for the black screen to return. Between the exhaustion, the lag—which I still don’t know whether to blame on the game or my laptop—and the overheating, I didn’t get much accomplished on that particular night. I would have to come back to it later, each time being more broken up than the last. I chugged and struggled and ran out my patience over Prototype 2, but eventually, I had to stop consuming villains, collecting objects, throwing metal objects at helicopters. It just wasn’t panning out as I had hoped.
