When boss fights suck (Prototype)

Note to Prototype‘s designers: turning a boss fight into an hour-long slog without checkpoints, with a monster that has an instant-kill attack and in a game where the controls can often guess entirely wrong what the player is trying to get them to do, is A BAD IDEA.

I am talking, of course, about the infamous fight with an enormous tentacle creature in Times Square, about two thirds of the way through the game. The fight itself isn’t particularly complicated – the player has to take out three smaller parts of the large tentacle before they can damage it; this can be accomplished with hit and run attacks. A LOT of hit and run attacks. What worked for me was going around a corner and consuming hunters until my health was maximised, then running out, using the most powerful attack I had on the closest part of the creature, watching it reduce its health a pitifully small amount, and then running back around the corner before its instant-kill fireball attack was activated. And doing it over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over. You can’t do more at once, because if you try for TWO attacks there’s a fifty percent chance you’ll get knocked off your feet and killed in the blastwave.

It’ll take you four or five times hitting the main tentacle to kill it, and each of those times is prefaced by a twenty minute fight with the three smaller parts – run in, run out, heal, run in, run out, heal etc. It takes FOREVER. And there’s one checkpoint after the first time you damage the main tentacle, and then none. So, if the finicky targeting system gets you stuck against a wall when you’re just about to finish off the last tentacle component after an hour of playing, and you are killed, you have to DO THE WHOLE BLOODY THING OVER AGAIN.

Checkpoints are stupid, and should be replaced on modern consoles with at-will saves, but if you ARE going to rely on them, then bloody well make them more frequent than NONE IN THE COURSE OF AN HOUR OF PLAY. One every five minutes would be good.

Also, if you’re designing a boss battle, make it interesting. As soon as the player is doing the same thing, over and over and over again, end it. Don’t just give the monster ludicrous amounts of health and make it a time-consuming war of attrition. Where’s the fun in that? That fight would’ve worked fine if each of the parts needed one or two attacks, and the monster itself could be killed in at most three major attacks. Half an hour on one boss fight is fine. More than that, particularly when you don’t actually have any ideas to vary the challenge, and it’s just boring repetition – well, that’s bad game design.

Memo to potential purchasers: if you’re thinking about buying Prototype, have a real think about how much tolerance you have for the above sort of bullshit before laying down money for it. Paying $100 for that kind of frustration kind of burns.

UPDATE: Seriously, stop it. It doesn’t deserve this kind of commercial success.

Psychopath in a cardigan

I may have been a bit hasty dismissing Prototype as just a mashup of Spiderman 2 and The Incredible Hulk that looked quite last-gen, involved you playing as a boringly generic slacker character with (again) superpowers, and was, to be frank, fairly forgettable. I overlooked one of the game’s fundamental charms.

Because last night I met Agnes:

You can see her here, resting her pink fluffy cardigan on the turret of a tank whose former occupant she consumed after ripping it open:

Agnes is 67, likes crochet, Mr Offensive Stereotype (her cat), bingo, and throwing commandos at each other.

She also enjoys running up the sides of buildings, taking down military attack helicopters with her bare hands, throwing trucks at young people and gliding gently through the air with her arms outstretched, looking for unsuspecting passers-by to disembowel.

And nothing cheers her up after a long day on her weary old legs more than senselessly slaughtering hundreds of people in an implausibly bloody rampage. Well, other than a nice hot cup of tea.

Oh, Agnes. You were fun to play – until I consumed the next innocent pedestrian and took over their identity instead.

Red Faction and Prototype (even though this isn’t a review site)

Two new games this week, both kind of enjoyable, both eminently missable.

I picked up Prototype last night and, whilst initial impressions were that it was a lame, clumsy ripoff of certain Playstation 2 games – Spiderman 2 and The Incredible Hulk in particular – it does get better. It’s still a very obvious riff on both those games – the similarities with Spiderman 2 go much deeper than the same-scale fairly low-res New York with shiny glowing “exploration rewards” at the top of buildings, and go all the way to the controls – the only thing missing are actual webs. The vehicle throwing and general destruction feel very like that generation’s Hulk game.

But it’s oddly satisfying nonetheless.

The other new game is Red Faction, which is essentially Bad Company on Mars. Like that game, you can demolish pretty much any building on Mars’ surface, and much of the gameplay involves smashing things with a sledgehammer (again, quite satisfying). Unlike earlier Red Faction games, the environment itself – the planet – can’t be damaged at all. You can’t dig holes in rock, or move so much as a grain of Martian dust. Which is a pity, because the landscape is basically a red dusty version of an old-style hedge maze. Until you get the jet pack in the game’s final third, there’s a lot of tedious driving in zig zags from one side of the map to the other to get to each mission.

Still, when you get annoyed, you can always hit a brutal fascist in the face with your sledgehammer, and collapse a building on his friends, so it’s not all bad.

They’re both quite passable games – but they’re not essential. You wouldn’t be missing much if you skipped them entirely.

I’d suggest you finish the games you’ve put aside before you look at spending money on them, to be honest.

UPDATE: No wonder Prototype reminds me so much of Hulk – turns out it’s by the same people.

Prototype reaction

So – you’re the T-1000 with psychic powers.

What’s supposed to be the challenge, then? Do you just have to avoid getting lured into an industrial smelter?

They’re going to go the Force Unleashed‘s miserable and lame “some enemies are immune from your attacks” route, aren’t they.