Prototype

We’ve just consumed a terrified screaming woman, our tentacles ripping through her stricken body as we absorb her whimpering remains. Having replenished our health, we turn our attention to the horrified quad of soldiers frantically firing at us, morphing an arm into a huge organic blade. Plunging into them, we send arms, legs and torsos spiralling to the pavement in a spray of blood, before leaping away and running up the sheer side of a building, blood covered, remorseless and unstoppable. We don’t know who we are or what’s been done to us, but we’re coming, and our enemies had better run.

If nothing else, you sometimes feel extremely powerful playing Prototype, Radical Entertainment’s violent open-world game. The tale of Alex Mercer, a man who wakes up in a morgue with little memory of who he is but possessing great bio-organic powers, is less a case of ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ and more a case of ‘with great power do whatever the hell you like’. The whole sandbox New York City, which you quickly discover is infected by a horrific mutating viral outbreak, is your playground as you leap blocks, run up buildings, pick up cars and even use the weapons and vehicles of your enemies. As you quest to discover who diddled with your DNA, you’ll cut a bloody destructive swathe through the city. Given how powerful you are we were quite surprised at the stealth elements of the game, with Alex able to morph into anyone he absorbs and hide, but it’s totally necessary; later in the game you get everything including the kitchen sink thrown at you, pushing your abilities beyond their limit.

Our introduction to the game is Alex at his fully powered height, and it’s a cacophonous, blood-filled riot. We barely had any idea what we were doing, lashing out at the troops and hordes of monsters with claws, subterranean tentacles and fists. In true game tradition, you lose them all after that intro, regaining them in a flashback story by earning EP (evolution points). You’ll play through 31 quite varied missions, ranging from sheer brawl-fests to infiltration. The trouble with Prototype is that by the time you build yourself back up to your initial god-like level, repetitive grind and an ever increasing number of enemies have sucked much of the initial joy out of proceedings.

Radical Entertainment is the team that developed Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, and as we played Prototype we wondered why it hadn’t just renewed the licence. Certainly the scope of the bio-powers you gain is much wider, but the basic concepts of running up walls, picking up and throwing cars while battling the army is pure Hulk. But then Prototype is one of the bloodiest games we’ve seen in a while and claret is splashed very liberally around as you unleash your powers on the army and the general populace of New York. Ever seen a man grab someone, body slam them repeatedly into the ground in a spray of blood, or thrust an arm into the floor and send a tower of spikes out of the ground that impale everyone around them? Just a few of the imaginative ways you deal mass death in Prototype and it’s hard to feel much sympathy for Alex as any kind of tragic hero, especially given his penchant for eating innocent civilians to heal himself. If the idea that ‘having the power of a superman alienates you from your fellow man’ had a poster child, it would be Alex. His motivations are entirely selfish and patently amoral, and to find out who’s done this terrible thing to him, he’ll happily wade knee-deep in innocent blood.

It didn’t ultimately matter as we got into the totally destructive spirit of the game, but perhaps this would make a better super villain game without all the angst. We did enjoy one clever narrative device used, the ‘Web of Intrigue’, which had us hunting for particular characters on the map, who once devoured gave us memories detailing the plot that led to Alex’s transformation.

We also got a feeling of detachment from Prototype’s large open world, and while your abilities are cool, beyond fighting and killing the game can feel slightly empty. You can commandeer some army vehicles, but everything else in the city is out of bounds. It’s very linear as you go from mission to mission, with the handful of extra events not providing enough variety.

Sadly, there’s very little character to New York City, it’s filed with lifeless generic buildings. Far more disappointing is the lack of any proper destruction effects on any buildings. You can’t damage solid structures, beyond knocking down scaffolding and fire escapes. Even if you chuck cars and tanks at buildings, they bounce off with no effect – something severely at odds with the destructive spirit of the game. The best way to play Prototype is a 360 pad, and while that isn’t a problem in itself, the camera and lock-on system often leave something to be desired. The camera isn’t awful, though it sometimes can’t quite keep up, but the lock-on system is a real problem, tied into the triggers and sticks of the pad. Because you choose targets with the right stick, we often found ourselves changing targets without meaning to in the chaos.

All of theses things would be niggles really, but it’s the difficulty spikes that spoil the experience. Like everything else in Prototype, the enemy count goes over the top. Later on the game just throws so much at you, including some pretty unfair monsters that just seem to be able to attack continuously, that your defensive abilities are overwhelmed by the sheer numbers. In theory, it should be easy to just disengage, run off and gulp down an enemy or civilian to recover health, but it’s often difficult to do so. You find yourself in a grind of attack, escape, and attack cycle that soon becomes quite boring.

There are times when you just want the kind of game that lets you jump in and go wild, cutting a swathe of destruction through the world, and for a while Prototype provides that. It’s just a shame that technical limitations, a flat sandbox world and random difficulty spikes offer little beyond short-term thrills.