#prototype 2 hate
nonbinaryzoit replied to your photo:
just a heads up that prototype is $5 on steam,…
I don’;t get the hate for Prototype 2. the most consistant complaint I’ve seen i’ve seen is that they dislike the protagonist which is fair, but at least he HAD a personality, which is still a 100% improvement over the first game’s.
if you think alex legit did not have a personality then like… sorry to be blunt but replay the game and pay more attention i guess. i dont actually know what to tell you there, he really obviously does.
meanwhile heller’s characterization is hilariously bad and wildly inconsistent at every junction. like we start out with the usual sob story blah blah military man IM GONNA COME HOME SOON MY WIFE AND DAUGHTER… IM GONNA BE HOME REAL SOON… DADDYS COMIN HOME… GONNA BE HOME SOON… THIS IS NOT A SETUP FOR TRAGEDY AT ALL before his wife and daughter are, predictably, shoved straight into the fridge
and that’s the most effort the writers could be assed to put into his characterization, because afterwards his personality bounces around wildly, ultimately only servicing whatever the fuck they need him to do plot-wise. some highlights (spoilers, obviously, and p2/heller hate):
1. despite being a military man being supposedly part of heller’s core identity, killing a bunch of military men who used to be his comrades about 5 seconds ago with absolutely zero remorse, not even a flavor dialogue line to preserve the illusion of moral ambiguity
2. constant fatphobia, misogyny, you name it! take a shot for every time heller calls somebody a b*tch lmfao. and such delightful lines as threatening to skullfuck the villain. thats real classy
3. did i mention the misogyny? let’s talk about every time he menaces sabrina galloway either physically or verbally and calls her slurs, implies she’s a great big sl*t with a bunch of STDs etc, all for the great big crime of… i dont know, existing as a woman who acts kind of flirty, lmfao
like she says she’ll double cross him or whatever but she’s pretty fuckin open about it and gives him information in the interim, and this… gives him free reign to treat her like dogshit i guess while she acts blissfully unfazed and continues to flirt with him (nice writing. this is absolutely how women act)
4.this whole mess, tldr heller releases a hot ass plague in the middle of a perfectly uninfected suburban neighborhood because he just can’t be bothered to give a fuck, so much for being a Loving Father i guess? lmao
5. BUT OH WAIT the writers remember that shit suddenly towards the tail end of the game. he overhears a blackwatch employee (gasp) has a wife/kid and hesitates on killing him. blackwatch man has a family??? heller has a family!!! heller remembered to have 2 drops of empathy!!! now maybe this wouldn’t be so bad … except the guy in question is the actual head of “Cartoon Nazis” Blackwatch, because prototype 2 has the subtlety of a hammer, known for delightful cartoon villainry like blackboxes in which they command people to shoot autistic children in the face (yes, this actually happened)
6. like, let me re-emphasize this, he is king shit of cartoon nazi organization. and heller decides to let him live because turns out cartoon nazi man who we have ample proof does not actually have any regard for human life has a child, uguu. like.. where was any of that… earlier in the game… lmao
honorary mention: the way they absolutely slaughtered alex’s characterization and everything that made the first game’s writing unique. Nice!
i did not feel an ounce of empathy for heller or his characterization at any point in the game beyond the beginning, only an increasing level of disgust. he felt so fucking shallow. i am honestly baffled again and again every single time everyone says he is better than alex mercer or that prototype 2 was actually better. i can like, literally, i could go on for hours on why this game is offensively bad. the slurs everywhere when prototype 1 had fuckin none aside from like, the occasional bw officer saying ‘you son of a b*tch’ - there are so many actively really awful things about this game. it’s like ‘toxic hypermasculinity: The Game’ where everything has to be bigger, badder, and more violent to appeal to codbros so activision wouldn’t shelf their company (lot of good it did them lmfao)
(there’s also what feels like some weird racism there to me - the way prototype 2′s very white devs said ‘we need a big masculine badass!!!’ and promptly reached for a black man when black men are so constantly treated by society as inherently violent and hypermasculine - but im not really qualified to talk about the nuances of that when im white, maybe im off base, i dunno.)
if you look into the content behind prototype, you’ll see a lot of active thought and care went into alex’s characterization and the internal logic of the game. if you look into the content behind prototype 2, you see a lot of gimmicky advertising and a bunch of dumbass dev interviews saying “umm murder your maker!!” 50 times
sorry my friend but prototype 2 is - in my humble opinion - a very bad game and heller is a bad character with bad writing
i have more posts about this in my tag on my personal if anyone is interested in Further Reading
