YMMV / [PROTOTYPE 2]

• Anti-Climax Boss: Most bosses aren't difficult. Even the final boss is pretty easy, just so long as you don't use the exact same power he's using.
• Base-Breaking Character: Fan attitude towards Heller seems to fall into three camps. Those who like him just fine. Those who resent him for replacing Mercer. And the one's who flat out hate him, seeing him as unlikable, and one dimensional, with a grating angry black man shtick that borders on Ethnic Scrappy territory. There's no real in-between with these three camps. The only thing everyone seems to agree on, is that He isn’t as memorable of a character as Mercer.
• Broken Base: Since the earliest trailer the base was split between the people who were very upset at Alex being the villain and those who just wanted more Video Game Cruelty Potential. This continued on well past the game's release.
• Contested Sequel: Did the changes to the gameplay make up for the story? Was replacing Mercer as protagonist and giving him a face heel turn a wise decision? It's spawned quite a bit of debate.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Blackwatch is full of psychos, but Starnes, the guy who makes jokes about celebrity-lookalike infected 'celebrity headshots' and claims infected females look "pretty hot if you put a bag on their heads," goes all the way around the block and to pure comedy.
• Epileptic Tree: Many (if not all) fans have come up with multiple reasons as to why Alex became the Rogue Protagonist. Most have come up with ideas that suggest that this was a separate version of Alex from the explosion that survived, with the chance of The Atoner Alex returning in a later game.
• Even Better Sequel: Even if the story was more contested, many, if not all critics agreed that the gameplay was vastly improved from the original.
• Fan-Disliked Explanation: The tie-in comics are considered to do a poor job as to explaining why Alex is a Rogue Protagonist, and thus people prefer to ignore it and come up with their own ideas for why.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Not just the comics (as mentioned above), but the game itself, in some circles. Those who hate the story, Alex's characterization, or both prefer to just pretend there was never a sequel at all.
• Game-Breaker: Immunity to bullets and the shield. The shield in particular has an incredibly generous window for countering attacks, and if you pop it out too early the counter will fail but you still won't take damage. And since only a vanishingly small handful of enemies can hit you through the shield it's basically god mode on demand.
• Narm: The redesigned uniforms of the standard Blackwatch troops look rather silly.
  • The writer's attempts to make Blackwatch seem evil are so over the top that they almost seem like parodies at first, made more extreme due to the fact that they are supposed to be taken seriously. Yahtzee puts it best: "If you take the time to track down the collectible audio logs, you'll find that approximately one hundred percent of the things record someone at Blackwatch talking about how much he loves throwing schoolchildren into jet turbines and rubbing the greasy remnants into his prostate...you have to wonder where Blackwatch could possibly be finding this seemingly inexhaustible supply of emotionless psychopaths".
• Narm Charm: Besides the Blackwatch evil seeming hilarious (possibly intentional), there's also Heller's side of the dialogue during the final encounter with Mercer.
  Heller: Enough of your fucking weird, fucking rambling, shit! Give me my daughter!
• Player Punch: You may or may not feel anything about the eventual fate of Luis Guerra since all he does is just feed Heller information and provide off-screen assistance, just that he and Heller knew each other for a considerable time by the start of the game.
  • Mercer's status, as well. When Heller finally kills him, the player gets to look out of Mercer's eyes while being eviscerated!
  • When Maya is kidnapped by Galloway. James was SO CLOSE to saving his daughter, only for her to be snatched away from him.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: Several reviews have reach this conclusion - the plot is simplistic and overwrought (and ditches the conspiracy plot from the original), but the combat, graphics and other gameplay are tighter and more polished than in the first game. Some fans of the first game feel this way too, believing the gameplay to be as good or better as the first, but resenting the story developments.
• Porting Disaster: The PC version has problems with AMD graphics cards, more specifically, it has an incompatibility with AMD's Catalyst AI that triggers memory leaks that cause the game's performance to degrade over time, eventually freezing the game and sometimes, the computer itself. However, turning Catalyst AI off (which can be a bit difficult if one doesn't know how to do so beforehand) fixes it.
  • Attempting to run it on anything newer than Windows 7 introduces progressively more difficulty the newer the OS, in general. The game seemingly wasn't designed with large numbers of CPU cores in mind, and between that and other modern hardware advancements it can be an absolute chore to get it to run at all. There are guides on Steam for how to try and fix this, generally boiling down to "only give it access to one/four/eight cores in Task Manager's Details screen, set the executable to run as admin without fullscreen optimizations in Win 7 compatibility mode, and pray."
  • The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One ports of the game actually run worse than their prior-generation predecessors.
• Realism-Induced Horror: While most of the Blackwatch troop's audio logs come off as cartoonishly evil, there is one that hits closer to reality. A Blackwatch soldier confronts a mother and her young son. The Soldier takes the son's silence as a sign of infection, but the mother pleads that he's autistic and doesn't talk. The soldier ignores her and guns the kid down, to the mother's horror. This becomes deeply uncomfortable given the number of autistic kids killed by the police who take the children's mannerisms as a threat.
• Replacement Scrappy: A subset of the fanbase does not like James Heller, more or less because he replaces Mercer as the player character, but also because his personality leaves a lot to be desired.
• That One Sidequest: The divebombing Radnet events can be this, depending on how they're set up. In particular, one in the yellow zone is set up in such a way that you need pixel-perfect aim to take out an 'X' formation of targets in one hit. The corners are just far enough apart that you'll only hit two out of four unless you hit the target dead center, forcing a second dive to hit the stragglers. This makes it nigh-impossible to pass the third round, meaning you'll just barely reach gold. Thankfully, if you're only interested in the Mercer Skin, you only need a bronze medal.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: A lot of fans were disappointed that they were not playing as Alex.
  • A lot of complaints from fans of the first game revolve around Alex's Zombie Apocalypse Take Over the World Assimilation Plot and personality as being completely different from his personality in the first game - with no explanation for his Face–Heel Turn being given in the game. Oh, and the ending, where Alex is torn limb from limb and consumed after being mocked and humiliated in battle, with the memory received just further hammering home his complete about-face in personality was also negatively received. Most of the fans were hoping that this was actually a Trailers Always Lie situation.
  • While for the most part the gameplay is an improvement over the first game, the reworked controls and new abilities meant ditching numerous old ones, including multiple kinds of Devastators (only the Tendril Barrage can be used), Musclemass, Armor (hinted to be DLC later on, though this turned out to merely be cosmetic so it does nothing but make the character look different), Patsy and numerous Awesome, but Impractical moves that were either superfluous or not strong enough to bother using against their intended targets.
  • The vehicle designs have taken a step back; gone is the awesome Apache gunship from the first game, replaced with a fictional helicopter design. The Blackhawk helicopter is weirdly proportioned and the tank (while still an M1 Abrams like in the first game) is now fitted with a large minigun and plows on the front and back. Vehicle targeting has also been reworked and there is no option to manually target enemies when in a vehicle.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: No mention is made of two somewhat important plot points from the first game — PARIAH (who is reduced to a single Freeze-Frame Bonus namedrop), and that Alex is not Alex, just BLACKLIGHT in the form of Alex. Everyone, including him, acts as though he's just a human who gained powers and the Evolved are similar, rather than exploring the existential questions raised in the first installment.

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