<\/div>Walther Dahl is the corporate equivalent of a special-forces agent. He’s here along with his robot sidekick Kaspar to take control of the station.<\/p>\n
He shows up just as you return from your errand scanning the coral.\u00a0 That is, he shows up just a few minutes before you finally solve the Typhon outbreak. If he showed up ten minutes later, he wouldn’t have needed to show up at all.<\/p>\n
I hate this part of the game. I hate it tonally. I hate it mechanically. I hate it thematically. This part is dumb and it does not belong in this story. At least, not in this<\/b> part of the story.<\/p>\n
Let me explain.<\/p>\n
This is the Wrong Point in the Story for This Bullshit<\/h3>\n
<\/div>Do you remember the scene in Aliens where the stupid corporate lawyer dudes are sitting around complaining about the destroyed ship in the previous movie? To the audience, the Xenomorph represents this massive next-level threat to our species, and these doofuses are worried about the premiums on their spaceship insurance. They’re miffed they lost this one ship which is – in the grand scheme of things – a very small part of their holdings. Their concerns feel so trivial.<\/p>\n
And that’s fine. It’s a really good scene! It drives home how much this experience with the Xenomorph has changed Ripley’s perspective. This is a great way to start the movie. These guys still think their spaceships and mining contracts are relevant, but Ripley has seen the scale of this new threat, and in the face of that threat the loss of a single ship doesn’t even register.<\/p>\n
But imagine if you took that scene – if you took those lawyers and all of their dumb lame bullshit – and dropped it into the story right after the moment where Ripley duct tapes a flamethrower to her gun and right before the scene where she starts roasting aliens and wrecking their shit. That’s<\/b> what this visit from Walther Dahl feels like.<\/p>\n
It’s been a while since I’ve done a numbered list, so let’s do one of those to explain how much Walther sucks.<\/p>\n
1. Walther is unworthy as a late-game threat.<\/h3>\n
We’ve spent the entire game fighting these spooky monsters. They’re strange. They’re alien. They represent a monumental threat to all of humanity due to how fast they can tear through the population. On the other hand, they represent incredible possibilities for humankind in the future. Not just in the form of neuromods, but a better understanding of the universe we live in.<\/p>\n
The universe is vast, and we don’t know what sorts of threats might be out there. We’ve basically conquered and tamed life on our homeworld. We’ve been on top of the food chain for a long time. But we have no idea what the food chain looks like on a galactic scale. Perhaps we’re a planet of mice in a universe filled with snakes, cats, and owls.<\/p>\n
It’s easy to sit here and say we shouldn’t study the Typhon because they’re just used to make neuromods and neuromods will only be enjoyed by an elite few because blah blah <\/i>blah class warfare<\/em>. But once you’re talking about creatures that hunt across cosmic distances and can devour a planet within the space of a few days or weeks, none of that matters. An alien has shown up and it has the capacity to eat civilization itself<\/i>. You can’t expect the audience to care about such a pedestrian threat at this point in the story.<\/p>\n If one of these things reaches the surface of the Earth, then that’s it. Everyone you love<\/a>, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, the aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species, will have existed in order to create this momentary snack for a passing alien. That alien will burp and move on, and the universe won’t care one bit<\/i>.<\/p>\n That’s<\/b> the threat that the Typhon represent.<\/p>\n And now we’re supposed to be worried about some corporate bootlicker and his robot sidekick? Give me a break.<\/p>\n Up until now, the Typhon were THE big threat on the station. It was humanity vs. the aliens, and humanity was getting its shit collectively wrecked<\/b> by these space bugs. This drove home the point that we hadn’t been taking these things as seriously as we should have. We saw their lack of language, rank, and leadership hierarchy and assumed we were dealing with a great big ant colony.<\/p>\n When the Typhon broke containment, it suggested these things were a lot smarter and a lot more patient than we ever gave them credit for. But now Baby Dahl and his droid sidekick Kaspar show up and suddenly the Typhon are on the ropes? Get the fuck out of here.<\/i><\/p>\n There are these kiosks spread around the station that can 3D print fresh operator robots. These robots come in several flavors that can heal you, repair your suit, and that sort of thing. But now Kaspar has taken control of these kiosks and he’s spamming the entire station with waves of military laser drones.<\/p>\n Previously, you had to fight a phantom or a couple of mimics every so often as you moved through the station. But now the only time you see Typhon is when they’re getting lasered into charcoal by swarms of killbots. If your secondary villain makes your primary villain look toothless, then you have messed up.<\/p>\n As the player, you’ll enter a scrappy fight to put down three robots so you can walk the next ten meters closer to your goal. Before you’ve even healed your wounds or looted your enemies, another killbot pops out of the nearby printer. You’re in a war of attrition against a foe with limitless resources.Not quite<\/strong> limitless. If you deliberately hang around a printer, it will eventually<\/strong> stop.<\/span><\/p>\n Which makes it seem like keeping the Typhon in check is no biggie. If we’d just had enough guns around, none of this would have happened. Previously it looked like humanity was simply outmatched, but now it looks like we can totally get these aliens back in their cage. We just need to print more gunbots. It’s not like Dahl brought thousands of robots with him in his space shuttle. He’s using the resources we already had on hand, and the printers have been here the whole time.<\/p>\n The fact that this never occurred to any of the hundreds of scientists and engineers on the station just makes everyone look stupid. Heck, if we’d designed the robots in-house then we could have programmed them to only<\/b> attack the Typhon, instead of lasering anything that moves, which is what Dahl’s bots are doing.<\/p>\n Walther is voiced by Steven Blum. Blum is doing an accent, which is a little hammy. But his performance<\/b> of that accent is a 20lb. glazed Christmas ham. He’s chewing so much scenery that pretty soon he’s going to shit out the 200 or so habitation pods we were missing earlier<\/a>.<\/p>\n Now, I’m a fan of Blum<\/a>, so I want to be very careful to lay this blame at the feet of the director and not the actor. Prey isn’t some outrageous over-the-top campfest. This isn’t DOOM, it’s not Saints Row, and it’s certainly not Rage<\/a>. Prey is more or less science fiction for grownups, and Blum’s performance sticks out like Ronin the Accuser<\/a> showing up in Moon<\/a>. If he gave this performance for a character in a Transformers movie, Director Michael Bay would say, “Dude! Come on now. Take this seriously.”<\/p>\n I just don’t understand how the game’s director heard Blum’s performance and said, “Perfect! This fits right in with the rest of the game and I wouldn’t change anything!”<\/p>\n The Typhon are a diverse bunch. From the jumpscare mimic to the peek-a-boo antics of a poltergeist to the brute-force bullying of a Technopath to the hulking and tenacious Nightmare, this game has a lot of different kinds of foes to throw at you.<\/p>\n Or it did<\/i>.<\/p>\n But lame-ass Walther only thought to bring one robot blueprint with him, so now you need to spend the next hour or so of the game fighting the same enemy over and over. Since all of his killbots drop the same ammo, this in turn funnels you towards using one particular weapon. I mean, you can mix it up if you’re willing to go out of your way to do so, but given the sheer number of fights you’ll be taking and the resource limits you’ll be up against, you’ll probably find a single way of dealing with them and use that over and over.<\/p>\n Also, there’s the uncomfortable fact that his robots drop, essentially, zero “XP”.<\/p>\n Obviously this game doesn’t give literal XP for leveling up. I didn’t get into this earlier, but to print a neuromod, you need a little bit of several different ingredients. A bit of plastic, a bit of metal, and a bit of “exotic material”. The exotic material is just a euphemism for Typhon cells. When you kill a Typhon, you can loot its corpse for a bit of this exotic goo.<\/p>\n When it comes to printing neuromods, you’ll have lots of the other ingredients. Plastic and metal are easily obtained by shoving your armloads of trash loot into the recycler. So the real limiting factor stopping you from printing out a hundred neuromodsBesides your own patience. The printer is actually annoyingly slow if you’re trying to print in bulk.<\/span> and filling in the entire skill tree is that you need exotic matter. Every Typhon you kill brings you another step closer to printing your next neuromod.<\/p>\n But now that Walther has filled the volume of the station with endless robots, you’re doomed to fight countless foes who will drain your resources but who won’t yield any exotic material. These are the most boring and repetitive foe in the game, and to put salt in the wound the designer made it so you’ll never “level up” from fighting them.<\/p>\n Boo.<\/p>\n2. Walther Supplants the Typhon as the Big Bad<\/h3>\n
<\/div>3. Walther is Tonally Wrong for this World<\/h3>\n
4. Walther Makes the Gameplay Boring<\/h3>\n
<\/div>5. Walther is Working for a Cartoon Villain<\/h3>\n
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