Prototype

"Prototype gives you many hilarious ways to cause chaos."

Jason's Score:

9.0

The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, Crackdown, Grand Theft Auto IV, InFamous, and now Prototype. I feel like I'm reviewing an arms race, with each new product upping the ante in some insane and very fun way. Let me say, my fantasies of being a super-powered being that can rampage from one end to the city to the other are being well served these days.

Prototype casts you in the role of Alex Mercer, a former soldier who has the power to absorb other people, mimic them and turn his body into a variety of fleshly, bladed and tentacled weapons, sort of like Scramble from the Marvel Comic Alpha Flight (NERRRRRRD!). Mercer is trapped in New York City, where a mysterious infection is turning people into mutants and a private military company has locked the city down. Mercer has little memory of how he ended up the way his is, so is goal is to discover what made him, and confront the source of the mysterious plague. Think the two might be related?

Prototype shares certain similarities to Crackdown and InFamous. Mainly, they're all open world games in which you play a character that gets ridiculous powers with which to tear up the city and anyone in it. Prototype scores right away by being the easiest open world game to get around in I have ever seen. The game permits you to run up and along the side of buildings, leap crazy heights and you can even fly for pretty long stretches. I can't think of an open world game that lets you cover more ground as quickly, as Prototype does. Not only is it easy, it's fun, seamlessly allowing you to switch from one activity to the other. Once you've powered up your character a little, you can launch yourself off a skyscraper, whip out an arm and grab a helicopter, hijack it, or just leap or fly across the city yourself.

Prototype isn't just about destruction, though there is a lot of it. You'll be trashing the usual things: cars, lamp posts, mailboxes, trash cans and even the occasional building. I think Prototype should be awarded the Electric Playground Meritorious Service medal for allowing you to destroy trees, though. Yes, thankfully this isn't one of those games where a tank can punch through cars, fences and walls, only to be stopped cold by a Trembling Aspen. In fact, very few things can stop you or get in your way once you get rollin'.

Or, you can try a sneakier approach. In an effect that is somehow both satisfying and disturbing at the same time, Prototype allows you to consume virtually any character in the game, from soldiers to Jane and John Does walking the streets. This permits you to take on their appearance, which can be useful for infiltrating military installations and getting you close to targets. Occasionally, you'll absorb someone who has a role to play in the story's events, so you'll inherit their memories and more of what's going on will unfold.

As with other open world games, there's a main story campaign to follow, and plenty of side activities to discover. The story missions are pretty cool for the most part, though they do have an unfortunate stretch where many of your powers are suspended over the course of several missions. Since you spend experience points to unlock those very cool abilities, you may not be very happy with that move (and the one where you have limited powers AND have to protect an NPC? Who thought that was a good idea?!). With the exception of the absorb missions, the sidequests are a bit of a disappointment. Sure, they're challenging and most of them are fun, but most of them are also done without any kind of story context. Why, for example, am I trying to kill 50 guys in less than two minutes? In makes them less engaging, in my opinion.

The story in general doesn't flow as well as it should, and leads to one thing that sticks in my craw about Prototype; and it's something that struck me about The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction as well. In both games, civilians get hurt. In Hulk, you can smash up police cars and civilian cars. In Prototype, flesh and blood citizens get mowed down left, right and centre.

Now, don't interpret this as me whining "Won't someone think of the children," but it just seems that the wholesale destruction of civilians ought to matter more in the game. Prototype has no formal alignment system, so whether you try to keep civilian casualties to a minimum or treat them as food really makes no difference, story wise. But the cutscenes present a character that is sort of heroic. He seems to want to stop people perceived as having an evil agenda, as opposed to personally killing every last person in the city. It's hard to reconcile this with the guy who rips open the guts of three passers-by while trying to punch one Hunter. It doesn't help that civilian AI is pretty dim, and they're just as likely to throw themselves into harm's way as out of it.

However, I won't deny there is a great deal of fun to be had be indiscriminately using god-like powers in a public space and damn the consequences, 'cause you won't be paying them. And Prototype gives you tons of powers to play with. They span a good variety; there are abilities that give you slow but very powerful short range attacks, or quicker, weaker attacks that you can rain on someone from a distance. Virtually everything you do from the monsters you kill to the windows you break give you experience, which you can spend on defense, offense or movement.

Prototype is a good game for tricks, and crazy powers lead to crazy stunts. You can do things like snatch someone, run up a building and hide so you can absorb them in safety. I'm addicted to infiltrating military bases and stealthily consuming the personnel one by one. Also, I could hijack helicopters all day. These tricks are badass when you pull them off. There's one power that gives you permission to accuse someone of being you, basically, and then watch as his buddies descend on him while you sneak off. Just that and the trees thing give Prototype major pluses in my book.

The best open world games give you great powers and very few roadblocks, and they're aren't many of those in Prototype. If you've enjoyed the mayhem of games like InFamous and Saints Row, I think you'll be very happy to see this game in your collection.

Pros

Cons

Bottom Line

Jason's Score:

9.0