It’s summer time, that means the slew of annual block buster titles with high production values and even higher advertisement budgets are upon us. This year in particular has seen the return of the Open-World game play genre in full force, with the popular GTA IV expansion "Lost and Damned" earlier this year, and PS3 exclusive inFAMOUS just before it, Prototype is now upon us. Prototype is a game with a very convoluted development history, announced as one of the earliest titles in development for the then "Next-Gen platforms", Prototype has seen it’s share of revisions before finally being presentable in a playable form. Fortunately the results seemed to have paid off for the most part as the extra development time shows itself. The game has been developed by Radical Entertainment, best known for their "Hulk : Ultimate Destruction" title, which featured similar carnage, and is available for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.
The game stars Alex Mercer, a genetically enhanced super soldier who conveniently has amnesia and must uncover the events that led up to his current superhuman condition. It’s basically a revenge tale where your task is to find and punish the people responsible for your state, with a heavy dose of conspiracy theory thrown in for good measure. The most important character of the game however is the living, breathing Manhattan Island. The game takes place on Manhattan Island portrayed to a somewhat realistic scale, and as the events of the game unfold the city transforms in front of you. It’s an impressive sight to behold as you witness the entire population slowly descend into chaos as the game progresses.
The city starts off peacefully enough. Too bad this won’t last for long.
The plot line involves the sudden emergence of an unknown virus that transforms humans into zombified creatures. Alex’s genetic powers are directly linked to the virus, so you will also uncover the mystery behind the viral outbreak while you try to find out your own past. As Alex, you will have to navigate through the Manhattan landscape, complete various tasks and rescue key personnel from the monsters, so you can kill them yourself and absorb them to inherit their genetic memories. Alex can, for the lack of a better term, "eat" people to unlock new pieces in the "Web of Intrigue". The web is a jumble of various story elements broken up into several small cut scenes that you can view by consuming specific people, the images are always out of order so it can be difficult to make sense of the entire plot if you don’t unlock every piece of the puzzle.
Prototype is a sand-box game in it’s truest form. The entire island of Manhattan is at your disposal from the get go and you have full freedom to travel anywhere as you please. Alex’s genetic powers allow him to run at great speeds, glide large distances quickly and run up vertical surfaces without any problems, making no obstacle impassable and no rooftop unreachable. GTA style story missions are present to advance the plot line, but besides that a slew of side missions, which range from typical assassinations to timed challenges to destroying military headquarters. The number of things to do on Manhattan is in no short supply. However, even though the amount of missions is staggering, the actual mission types are very limited, and you will often find yourself doing the same kinds of missions over and over again, just with the difficulty amped up a notch.
Jacking cars is for pansies. Alex is hip with the times.
The combat of the game is surprisingly it’s strongest suite. Alex is a one man wrecking crew, well capable of taking out entire battalions single handedly, and elbow drop tanks from roof tops to blow them to smithereens. Your opposition comes in the form of your average military grunts in the early going to tougher special forces ops and eventually genetically mutated monsters as more and more of the population starts getting infected. The level of activity in the game is mind blowing, as at any given point in the later parts of the game you can come across dozens of soldiers and monsters battling each other around every corner, and hundreds of panicked civilians running for dear life. There are no factions here, so you will be equally targeted by both sides at all times.
Fortunately the game provides you with a wide variety of methods to deal with the opposition. Alex himself is the best weapon imaginable as his body can morph into various things ranging from club like hands, to giant swords as arms and even an extendo tentacle that has a very generous reach. Besides that you can pick up any weapon the soldiers drop, or even hijack tanks and military choppers to aid your cause. Jumping off a sky scraper and latching onto a helicopter in mid air with your tentacle arm, then prying it open and subduing the soldier inside to hijack it never gets old. The game’s not all mayhem though, as one of Alex’s primary abilities is to absorb and take the form of any human. You can use this to your advantage and masquerade as military generals to covertly infiltrate enemy strongholds and sabotage them without raising much alert.
Alex graduated with honors from the "Kratos’s School of Brutality".
The biggest highlight about Prototype is that it truly understands the concept of a sandbox game. It lets you loose with a large box to play around in and what you do in it is completely up to the player. There is a flip side to this however, as there are no consequences to your actions. No matter how sneaky or how destructive you are, the end result is always the same, and consuming innocent bystanders to restore your health has no moral consequences either. This takes away from the replayability of the game. Besides that the only real problem Prototype has is minor low-rez artifacting as the game runs in sub-HD resolutions (on the consoles) to maintain the high fidelity action. Other than that it’s a simple game that anyone can pick up and enjoy without any complicated game-mechanics to worry about.
Before everything is said and done, you WILL transform into the ultimate badass.
