MEC Notes

It's cool how you can springboard off practically anything now.

Wallrunning is super lame, no arc on it

Tons of things have this wide snap-to radius around them, which makes it hard to tell what's going to happen when you press a button. Original game had very small snapping radii and you sorta had to aim attacks. Also I miss being able to attack anywhere

traversal attacks are neat, keep with the theme of moving through enemies.

I like being able to shove enemies into each other, even though it feels kind of awkward to do

Combat is still lame. Everything locks you into canned animations with the enemy. Doesn't really make use of space at all. Very slow. Typical of AAA productions. It's funny how AAA games just don't get combat systems. Because everything is a canned combined animation with the enemy, you can't move during attacks, makes everything feel really stiff. You can't hit them and send them reeling, you need to hit, have them accept the hit, show the reaction of the hit from both parties, then let you free. Combat can be simplified down to dodging behind them and pressing light attack or heavy attack as strikes your fancy. There's a stale moves system, so don't do the same attack type too many times in a row.

you slowly slide down walls after wall climbing, like a cat, makes sense I guess given the complaints about wallclimb turn jumps in the prior game.

Almost none of the unlockable movement options are new, they're old stuff.

Shift boost takes the place of sideboosting. Not as interesting. Press a button, now you're full speed. Press the button as you turn or you lose all your speed. It was billed as being like drifting, but it isn't really.

level design is way weaker, more straightforward, less bits and bobs sticking out, open world probably skewered this.

input frequency is way lower, seems like the whole game is just holding W, pointing the mouse, and pressing space to latch onto huge snap-to zones.

There's no reason to not just shiftboost all the time. It doesn't slow you down, so you might as well spam the button.

New easier skill roll, hold shift on landing to get significantly less landing lag, but still a fair amount. Buy skill roll upgrade to actually shorten it.

Shiftboost seems to exist to encapsulate the previous uses of sideboosting from ME1. Press shift boost to gain speed, press shift boost to dodge enemies, press shiftboost to round corners without losing speed. They took the utilities of the previously implemented advanced technique and implemented them in a simpler to execute way.

Lack of wallboosting makes the environments way more flat. The previous game was about maintaining speed and searching for things to boost off of to gain speed here and there. In this game it's more about finding the straightest line from point A to point B and not tripping.

The new grappling hook is implemented well. Feels nice. Lets you tap to engage, tap to disengage, swing with a bit of freedom. It's employed with appropriate restraint.

I think the open world structure serves the primary focus of the game fairly well, as predicted, but the level design took a massive hit. They have missions based on speed, delivering packages, and dashes, all over the city, which is really neat, but again, because there's no advanced movement, no way to speed yourself up, there's a very small level of variability in how missions can feasibly be approached. You can find these tiny little time-savers all over the place, but they have an extremely insignificant impact. On one dead drop mission I came just short of the goal many times in a row, I found a ton of tiny optimizations to save time, then I tried going around another way and there was a straight shot to the finish and I won with 6 seconds to spare. I think that implementing more nuanced level design is totally possible here, but they just didn't bother, and they don't have enough mechanics to really take advantage of it even if they did have it. There's a bare minimum level of multithreading in the levels, so the game works as a pathfinding challenge, but they could have stood to add more to each individual level like there was in the first game.

Probably the best thing about the side missions are they integrate a real speedrunning challenge into the main game in a short replayable fashion.

You can grab ledges while coil jumping. What is the tradeoff of coil jumping anymore?

Some of the traversal animations are a bit slow, like the bars to turn around corners. Doesn't feel great.

Feels like there isn't really the gradual buildup of speed there was in the first game, or really varying speeds at all.

Can't fall as far without needing to roll, kinda lame. Also wallclimbs are slower and get you less distance upwards.

It's hilarious how far flying kicks will snap onto enemies, even if you'd otherwise land nowhere near them.

I think the designers got the gist of what the game is actually about better than the designers of the original game and did a good job packaging a variety of events and subquests neatly that fit that vision, but the content overall is just weaker.