I encountered something in a game the other day that has never really been an issue for me before. The game was Prototype, and as my fairly cryptic title may or may not convey, its player character animations were often a problem when choosing my tactics. They all shared one common problem.
They were too damn long.
All the crucial animations such as absorbing someone to regain health wrench control from the player for a few seconds, but leave them vulnerable to attack during that time. Often times I would lose more health during the act of consuming someone than I gained from doing so. Even worse, sometimes I would be hit so hard that the animation wouldn't complete and I would be left with significantly less health than when I started.
I didn't really notice this as a problem early on, but the farther I got into Prototype, the more crap the game threw at me. By the end of the game I was often fighting off multiple helicopters, tanks, infantry, infantry with rocket launchers, and super soldiers or giant infected monsters called hunters. Most of these guys direct attacks will knock the player back and when enough are firing at once Alex (the player character) can quickly become what feels like a ping pong ball. This means stopping for even a split second can have pretty devastating results, yet several moves require three to five seconds of extremely vulnerable stationary actions. To make matters worse, all the best moves, the Devastator attacks, require a certain amount of health and then a charge period of a few seconds. If you are lucky enough to consume enough people to get your health up past the midway point, often times you'll take enough damage during the charge up to fail the attack completely.
This resulted in several missions devolving into me reusing the same move over and over again. For example, one of the very last missions had me chasing one tank, and destroying all his friend tanks whenever he stopped with to try to thwart me. Earlier in the game I would have just jacked one of the tanks, used it to blow the other three up and then moved on. Or maybe I would have used my Hammerfist power and pounded them into the ground. I could have jacked a helicopter and blown the three up that way as well. Devastator attacks also would probably end the entire confrontation and the rest of the city block in one foul swoop. Yet none of these were possible. The tank jacking animation takes so long that my character can only try it once before having to go hide and regenerate health. Everytime I tried ended with a rocket to the face knocking me clear off the tank and ending the jacking sequence. Helicopter jackings are a bit faster, but often times ended with the helicopter propeller first in a building with every enemy targetting it, meaning I'd have about three seconds before the damn thing explodes. Landing near the tanks to punch them with the Hammerfist power lends itself nicely to that whole ping pong effect I was talking about earlier and I've already explained why the Devastator attack was a no go.
I found one feasible option. Basically Alex dive bombs from a glide headfirst into the ground, damaging anything in a fairly small radius. It looks awesome and is really fun to do, but aiming it is quite difficult. Also, the novelty of the move wore off after the fifth attempt to blow up the twelfth tank of the mission. By the end I was able to run up a skyscraper and nosedive perfectly on top of a tank from a hundred stories above, destroying it and everything nearby, but doing the same pattern over and over again for ten minutes is just not fun.
It's obvious why Radical chose this route for Prototype. By allowing the protagonist access to as many awesome powers as he has, they almost made him invincible. Of course that may lead to some boring game design, running around as an unstoppable God is fun, but gets old fairly fast. To counter this they just threw more and more enemies into the mix until it was just unfair. If they had just made the animations for all the moves mentioned above twice as fast, or made the player invulnerable during them I think all my gripes would be solved. This would allow all the fun and useful moves to be actually usable during the times they were most needed, while still having the fear and danger of an entire army trying to stop you.
I never thought something as simple as animation length could have some a huge impact on gameplay, but Prototype proves it does.
P.S. Despite it's irrelevance to everything, I feel obligated to mention I think I liked Prototype better than inFAMOUS, but Red Faction: Guerrilla was better than both. ;)
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