Prototype Game Review for PC

Prototype is one of those titles that promised a lot before its release and only half delivered once it hit the streets.  On the upside, the complete freedom and utter chaos you can create playing as Alex Mercer is definitely liberating.  There’s no moral code you have to follow (which is quite a shock when you try to play without killing innocent bystanders only to realize you can’t) and there’s no sliding good vs. evil scale you have to manage.  However, the graphics are a bit weak, the AI is a bit dumb, and the whole environment feels a bit “small” even though the map encompasses all of Manhattan.  So when you do the math, is Activision’s badass sandbox title worth the cash?

The storyline of Prototype is rather simplistic though the cut scenes and flashbacks tend to make it unnecessarily difficult to follow.  You’re dropped into the shoes of Alex Mercer just as he’s about to get sliced and dice on the autopsy table.  You wake up, scare the pants off the shady biohazard-suited monkeys about to fillet you, and discover that you been given some seriously cool powers:  absorbing bullets, running up the sides of buildings, and leaping 30 feet in the air without breaking a sweat.   Unfortunately, you’ve lost your memory (how convenient) and don’t know who you are or how you got there.  As the story unfolds you learn Mercer was infected with a new virus that is turning the rest of the city into mutant freaks and there’s a shady Blackwater-style organization trying to crush you under its boot with the help of the U.S. Marines.


Gameplay & Graphics

As you play, you earn points with which you can choose to use in order to evolve Alex into a more efficient killing machine.  Want to grow sword blades out of your arms?  How about turning your fists into giant tank-slaying hammers?  Or maybe you want to coat your entire body in bulletproof armor Spawn-style.  You can do all of that and much more.  You’ll also develop the ability to heal yourself by consuming others, an ability you eventually use to acquire new skills and access to previously inaccessible areas.  Also, once you’ve consumed someone, you can use their likeness as a disguise which is great when you’re being perused by half an armored battalion.  Just slip around a corner and morph into an overweight policeman or a suited Wall Street type and the heat is off, instantly.

All of those abilities come in handy as you discover new and more gruesome ways to turn your enemies into paste.  Not only will you have military units to deal with (which grow progressively more difficult to defeat as the commanders order out the big guns – tanks, attack helicopters, and super-soldiers — but you’ll also have to wade through hordes of infected which hide their own monstrosities – huge hunters and super-hunters determined to turn you into lunch.  Slice and dice, pound and smash, or grab and toss all of your foes around like rag dolls and you’ll find yourself chuckling even as you feel bad about it.  It’s great fun.  You’ll also earn the ability to control those tanks and helicopters yourself but doing so feels boring compared to using your own super human mutant powers.

Some of those powers can be upgraded to near god-like levels including Mercer’s critical mass attacks.  These attacks require you to consume enough people to overfill your health bar.  Mercer can then convert that excess life energy into amazingly devastating area attacks including a tentacle spike attack and tentacle swarm attacks that destroy most everything within a large radius around him.  These work great when you find yourself in a tight spot, unfortunately, to launch the attacks you need a small amount of “preparation” time and during this you’re vulnerable.
Chances are, for the first few hours of gameplay you’ll be so engrossed in gaining new abilities and discovering just how many pieces you can chop that grenade launcher toting spec-ops soldier into to see the flaws in Prototype.  That’s a good thing because once you notice them the game gets old quick.

Chief among my complaints about the game are the graphics.  Granted, you would need a serious machine running some heavy duty hardware to render the vast amounts of NPCs, vehicles, and buildings in Prototype’s version of New York City but the character models are all bland with almost no variation among them, and even the cut scenes are sort of last-gen.  In that respect, the game very much reminds me of Crackdown but in this case the vanilla visuals feel less like a stylistic choice and more like a product of undisclosed limitations.

The other huge issue is the inconsistent AI.  Sometimes you can pluck an enemy soldier out of a crowd and consume him with only one or two people noticing.  At other times, if you merely bump into a soldier while walking past him, he’ll raise an alarm and call for backup.  This is also reflected on a large scale in the city itself.  As the infectious outbreak rages on, parts of Manhattan become festering pits of decay and disease clouded by thousands of zombie-like walking corpses yet just down the street a ways life goes on as if nothing at all is out of place. 

Also, as the game progresses Alex must combat more and more types of enemies, each more deadly than the last, but none of them ever get any smarter (in fact, the military super soldiers are really some of the dumbest of the bunch.)  To compensate, in the latter missions of the single player story, Prototype throws increasing numbers of enemies at you leaving you overwhelmed.  It’s a cheap way to increase the level of difficulty and can really get to be annoying as four tanks, six helicopters, two dozen soldiers, and a handful of hunters are all coming at you at once and you don’t even have to pull yourself off the ground before getting slammed by the next rocket or pummeled by a super-hunter’s lightning fast attack.


Sound

The soundtrack and voice work mimic the graphics and are quite poor and really don’t add much of anything to the game.  Alex’s voice in particular sounds cheesy and over-the-top in his cut scenes and the bad guys are so cartoony it’s not even funny.


Value

Taking a cue from (and stealing the map system of) Spiderman, the playable area is huge.  In that area you find a ton of collectibles (200 “geography” nodes plus 50 tutorial nodes) as well as a host of mini-game type challenges.  Some of these challenges are fun, requiring you glide through the air and land at the center of a bull’s-eye.  Some are frustratingly difficult (many of the checkpoint races require precision navigation that Alex’s parkour system just can’t manage.)  However, there is no multiplayer version of the game.  In this instance, it actually makes sense not to include multiplayer.  Competing against similarly powerful mutants wouldn’t be as much fun as cutting paths through weaker enemies.


Final Verdict

In the end, Prototype feels like two separate games smashed into one.  You have the excellent freedom and killer destructive abilities of a first-class sandbox title combined with the mediocre graphics and poor scripting and abysmal dialog of a third-rate action title.  However, the fun you’ll have totally destroying New York City as a big, brutish jerk with a bad attitude makes Prototype at least worth a play through.


Pros:  Incredibly fun superpowers, freedom to create tons of chaos, massive playable area.

Cons:  Poor graphics, Annoying AI, clunky storyline and script.


Overall Score: 7/10


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