Prototype - The Review

I would like to begin this by saying that this game is so disappointing I could cry, but at the same time, it's an immense amount of fun.

The premise of Prototype, story-wise, is kind of cool. You are Alex Mercer, a guy who wakes up in a morgue in the middle of a viral outbreak on Manhattan. You have no memory of anything prior to waking up, but you discover you have these... powers. You can get shot and not die, you can kick people's asses, You can run fast and jump great distances. In all, you probably feel a little like Jason Bourne.

Over the course of the game, Mercer will grow to have a whole slew of powers. Perhaps the most important of these is the ability to consume others. Mercer can consume anybody, and doing so yields him different benefits. First and foremost, consuming people gives him more health. Given that civilians are plentiful, you are never short of "medikits." Second, Mercer can shape shift into the last person you consumed. This helps you blend into the crowd if the military is chasing you, and it allows you access to otherwise restricted areas, like military bases.

Having discovered these powers, you set out to kill the person who left you to die in the morgue.

Thus you are launched into an open world, sandboxy game where you can run around and do pretty much whatever you want. Go do storyline missions, do some side events scattered throughout the city, blow up a virus hive building or a military installation, the choices seem boundless. Each mission or event that you complete, each person you kill (let's face it, you have zero moral compass in this game - you kill everything) earns you evolution points, which allows you to purchase new abilities or upgrade existing ones.

There are 31 storyline missions in the game to partake in, but they only tell a small portion of the story. The rest is told through the Web of Intrigue. As you venture throughout the city, you will find people (designated with a red icon) who you can consume, and upon doing so, you will see a slick cut scene. See, when you consume people, you absorb their memories. The folks who contribute to the Web of Intrigue have memories that tell bits and pieces of the past and the events leading up to the viral outbreak. Get all 131 nodes on the web, and you have the complete story.

I really, really like this mechanic as a storytelling device in a sandbox game such as this. It gives you reason to explore the city beyond the standard hidden orbs and such. It ensures that you don't get the entire picture until you've invested some time into the game.

And time is something you may very well want to invest here. The use and abuse of Mercer's powers provides grin-inducing entertainment throughout the entire game. Without these powers, the game would have been a complete waste of time. But thanks to the developer's understanding that all we're really going to want to do is kill shit in awesome ways, it's almost possible to overlook all the shortcomings.

Ah, the shortcomings, there are many of them. First and foremost is the story. There are loopholes you could pilot a space shuttle through, there are loose ends galore, and it's really not very well written. Cheesy lines are found throughout, and I'm not talking campy-cool-cheesy like you find in RE games.

I'm going to share an example here of one of the bigger loopholes in the story. This is a major spoiler (though not the biggest), so if you haven't yet played the game and would rather experience this twist for yourself, skip down to the next paragraph. For those of you who have beaten it already or don't care, highlight away. Alex Mercer, the real Alex Mercer, dies in Penn Station right before the game picks up. We discover near the end that Mercer is actually the virus manifested in human form. Hence all his cool abilities. But, if he's a manifestation of the virus, why does the virus attack him, and where does his flimsy idea of being a good person come from? They never really bother to explain that, and given my love for all things character development, it bothers me to no end.

Aside from the story, the graphics are bad. They're bland, drab, and they look like they belong on the original Xbox. Mercer is literally the only thing in the world that looks detailed enough to be on the 360. There's a lot of sameness everywhere. New York, according to this game, is made up of thousands of people who share maybe 10 different skins. All marines are white, all commanding officers have buzz cuts and sunglasses. Every military base in New York looks exactly the same, and if you blow up 100 hive buildings, they will all look alike. One of the great things about this generation of consoles is that you can really implement variety in games. If you'd like a great example of crowd variety, go take a peek at Assassin's Creed. There's no reason everything/body has to look the same at this point in the evolution of video games.

Speaking of Assassin's Creed, this game reminded me of Assassin's Creed at many points. Our hooded protagonist looks like a less-cool Altaire, with his hooded garb and all. He also controls much like Altaire. Simply hold the right trigger and move. The game handles all the complexities for you like jumping over cars, scaling buildings, avoiding obstacles, etc. This is utterly necessary, as the entire rest of the controller is used to control your powers. There are a lot of them, and it can be aggravating trying to select the correct attack power, for example, in the middle of a hectic firefight.

The learning curve in this game feels more spikey than curvey. This can be attributed to the difficulty that swings wildly between very easy and throwing the controller through the TV hard. For example, the superior hunters (such an awesome name!!!) are difficult literally to the point of ruining the experience. You fight 2 in the game, and I really couldn't stand those fights. You spend more time running away than actually fighting, because your attacks (even the fully upgraded ones) do a pitiful amount of damage compared to their 2 hit kill shenanigans. Spoiler note: For crying out loud, I am the virus! How can I not kill them? They are a product of ME!

As long as we're on the topic of enemies, it should be noted that there are approximately 5 kinds in the entire game. Soldiers, infected, stronger infected, hunters, lead hunters. Then there are boss battles. 5 is a very small number, so the enemies get old particularly fast (especially since they all look the same).

On top of all that, there are frame rate issues. I'd need both hands and feet plus some to count all the times my frame rate dropped well below the standard 30fps. In this game, there is always a ton of action going on onscreen. Most of the time, the game does well with all the gore-tastic moments, but there are numerous times when it just slows to a crawl, particularly during the final boss fight.

The side events exist much like they do in Spider-man games. No, you aren't going to chase any balloons for little girls, but many of the events were ripped right out of those games. You've got your race style events where you have to hit a certain number of checkpoints in a certain amount of time. There's the kill things events where you kill as many baddies as possible within a certain time limit. These are rather derivative, I've done them a million times in other games, and they're boring. There are a couple of interesting mission types, though. One, called War, aligns you with a side (military or infected) and you must kill all members of the opposing side before everybody on your side dies. Being on the military's side is just awful, because they fall so quickly to infected hunters, it's just silly. Then there's the glide event, in which you use Mercer's gliding ability (think like a squirrel) to get as close to a target as possible.

There are two vision modes that you can activate, both of which are utterly useless and probably could have been cut from the game. The first vision mode allows you to tell an enemy from a civilian. Considering the game doesn't care if you're killing civilians while trying to kill enemies, and hell, even if you're trying not to you will anyway, there's no point to ever activating this. The other vision mode shows you who is carrying the infection. This is useful for exactly one mission in the game in which you are tracking certain infected people to consume, but beyond that it is worthless. True, you can see that the military is slowly getting infected as the game goes on, and I was hoping they'd make something of that in the story, but no.

So, what is it that makes the game so fun exactly? Well, like I said before, powers! The purpose of this game is to make you feel like a badass (the most recent example being The Force Unleashed), and it succeeds there admirably (most of the time, anyway). Even at the beginning when I lacked the really awesome powers, I still felt awesome. So far, I've spent more time in the game wandering around and finding fun ways to exploit my badassness than I spent actually following the story. I'm sure eventually killing people would get old, but it hasn't happened yet.

Powers aside, my favorite thing about the game is watching New York evolve as the game progresses. At first, when the outbreak is just beginning, the city is all as normal. But as the game progresses, the virus starts gaining footholds across the city, and the military starts setting up posts in the city as well (these are marked on your map with red and blue circles respectively). At first you see people on the sidewalk start coughing up blood and clutching themselves in pain. As you move out of areas protected by the military and into infected zones, the sky turns red, buildings are on fire, you can see organic matter on the streets and on buildings, cars are no longer driving on the roads but instead litter the streets as their owners shamble around trying to kill you. As the infection spreads, taking control of more and more of the city, the soldiers start coming out with their tanks and helicopters to kill the infected, and there is literally war in the streets. This game-long evolution is exciting to watch.

Helicopters are a blast. I love hijacking helicopters (talk about feeling cool, but you can eventually fly a helicopter, jump out as it explodes after being hit with a missile, latch onto another helicopter as you're falling, kill the pilots, and carry on blowing things up), and I love air-to-air combat. Especially near the end of the game when the military helicopters just don't stop coming. It's a blast, in more ways than one.

Infiltrating military bases and trying to consume the necessary folks (certain soldiers in each base will give you skills if you consume them) all stealth-like is quite challenging and entertaining.

I also like finding people on the Web of Intrigue. Few things in the game are more exciting than stumbling on one of those red icons that just scream EAT ME!

Overall, this game has so much potential, it's hard to just write it off as a bad game. No, it doesn't live up to expectations, yes, it feels like it was rushed through development. The graphics could have used some polish, the city and enemies need more variety, as do the side events, and the story needed a good deal more time to flesh things out. But all that is almost negligible in the face of how much fun it is just to run around in that world, go to town with Mercer's powers, and watch the city evolve through the epidemic. This is not a game I should enjoy playing, all things considered, but I do anyway.

Score: 5.5/10.0