Prodeus first playthrough, part 2 (the other regions)
0When I happened upon the first region transition in Prodeus, I assumed I'd reached the halfway point. As it turns out, it may even have been further than that.
The pacing seems to have driven off of a cliff from the first region of the game to the remainder. As opposed to the elaborate graph of over a dozen levels complemented by weapon trial levels, the remaining regions are at most half a dozen levels each.
The funny thing is, I know one or two people who put down the game within the first half, partly from it feeling too "samey" - which this latter portion of the game addresses considerably. (Heck, even the last couple of levels of the first region seemed pretty unique.)
The second-to-last level in the game was hands-down the one I was most impressed by; I almost felt like I was back in Quake. As you can imagine, I was then extremely surprised and disappointed when the game ended after the next level, and rather abruptly at that.
Between what I experienced in the first region with the pointless secret exit I discovered, the way these later regions are paced completely differently, and how the game abruptly ends on a cliffhanger, I can't help but feel like development ultimately got rushed or cut short at the end, and/or the vision changed. Of course, an expansion did get announced last year, which seems likely to pick up where this left off, but I have to wonder if there was ever a more cohesive plan to begin with.
Here's hoping that the dev team learned a few things with how development of the original game went, to make the expansion even better. I'm certainly interested in trying it.