A heavily story driven action game within a New York City based sandbox world.
What do you get when you take a city like in Grand Theft Auto, replace the armies of cops with real armies outfitted with helicopters and tanks, and give yourself some ridiculously over the top super powers? The answer is Prototype, an action game made by Radical Entertainment. While there may be quite a few similarities to the GTA series such as the sandbox city structure and story driven missions, it isn't long into your first mission that you realize that Prototype offers a very different experience.
You play the game as a man named Alex Mercer and you can safely assume that you are no longer of the human species given your unnatural abilities. An event occurred of which you no longer have memories of that has radically altered your body. Bullets are no longer a life ending threat, obstacles are something you can now easily leap over, gravity becomes a minor inconvenience as you can run straight up the side of buildings, you posses a ridiculous amount of strength and agility, and your physical appearance can be altered by simply consuming the body of your victims. The end result is a being that can scale buildings like Spiderman, change appearance like Mystique, smash tanks like Hulk and tear through bad guys like Wolverine.
Your immediate problem is that due to whatever has happened to you, your memories have been wiped out in the process. Combined with the fact that lots of people with military equipment, the Blackwatch, are out to kill you and you have some serious problems to contend with. Prototype is a very story driven game with cutscenes coming at you frequently to move things along. It's not just the volume of cutscenes that stands out but their quality, which is clearly exceptional. The story telling is just phenomenal and paints Prototype as more than just a generic action romp.
The city you are in, effectively modeled on New York City, is an impressive accomplishment. The streets are littered with traffic moving in believable patterns, large volumes of pedestrians going about their business, and appropriate surrounding details and decor. With your ability to scale buildings at will, players will often take to the rooftops to avoid unnecessary attention. Here the architecture is often far more generic which is understandable given the fact that there is usually no action to be had 30 floors off the ground. With the games day and night cycle, combined with a very long draw distance, standing on top of some of the more notable NYC skyscrapers will give you a wonderful view of the skyline. Looking straight down is also a treat, especially if there is action taking place below. As the games story progresses the landscape gets changed into an ever increasing warzone, further improving the visuals. The amount of work and effort that went in to modeling the city is just very impressive.
As you traverse the city completing objectives for missions you will run into plenty of opponents tasked with killing you. The means of defending yourself are twofold. You can either use physical combat such as kicking and punching along with using mutated hands into claws and other self generated weapons, or you can pick up the dropped weapons of your vanquished foes like machine guns and rocket launchers to gain long range capabilities. While ripping your enemies apart with your hands is satisfying and often appropriate, we found that using the games weapons was usually preferable. Machine guns dispatch most soldiers with just a single bullet and while the game does let you manually lock on to your opponents, shooting without a target is just fine due to the auto targeting of whatever is within your immediate field of view. This allows you to quickly pick up a gun, face towards your foes and squeeze off a few rounds to take care of business with ease.
Soldiers aren't your only concern however as they have friends in the form of helicopters, assault tanks and personnel carriers, all armed with more than just machine guns. Getting hit by explosive shells is definitely going to make things much worse for your health. These armored vehicles are certainly more difficult to destroy and will often require the use of heavier weaponry, such as rocket launchers or your hammerfist power. Alternatively you can use your super strength to pick up and throw large objects. While this can be a good way of dishing out big damage it is also a rather slow mechanic. As you progress through the game you will eventually be given the ability to hijack these armored vehicles and use their assorted weapons yourself. Crushing cars and firing rockets as you cruise down city streets just never gets old. When your vehicle gets destroyed you automatically hop out and resume the battle unscathed which makes using such vehicles a good way to stay alive.
Beyond the army there are also mutants to contend with. Apparently the same method that gave you your powers has gone wrong in others and turned them into zombies and super mutants. The bigger versions take explosions in stride and you will have to exert far more effort to bring them down. When your health gets low, and it most certainly will when you have a whole army shooting at you, you can consume the bodies of others to heal up. This rather disturbing mechanic is also used to allow you to change your appearance as you will immediately take the form of whomever you just consumed. Furthermore the game places key people throughout the city whom you can consume to unlock some of your forgotten memories. This side task is used to give you something to do as you move around the city and is not the only non-mission related activity.
Placed throughout the city are events you can trigger by going to the appropriate map marker. These give you tasks such as reaching a specific number of waypoints in a certain amount of time, jumping off a building and landing on a bullseye or seeing how many bad guys you can kill before the timer runs out. All of these events, along with completing missions and other objectives, give you EP or Evolution Points. You spend EP like currency at the games upgrade screen. Here you can purchase all sorts of abilities to improve your character such as new offensive and defensive abilities, movement improvements and other skills. Some of these are passive and take effect immediately. Others need to be triggered with specific key combinations. These key combinations can take some practice to master and are necessary to unlock your characters full potential.
Our biggest gripe with the key layout is that you need to hold down a button to continue sprinting or while climbing up a building. Since traversing the city requires you to cover a lot of ground, continually pressing down a button can become a real nuisance, not to mention a physical pain. Another area of notable disappointment is the games checkpoint save system. While roaming the city you can save at any time, during missions you have to rely on the checkpoints to mark your progress. This normally isn't a problem until you reach a difficult mission and have to replay tough scenes multiple times because you fail half way through them. This is a common practice for console games but on the PC a quick save/load system would be preferred.
One area where the game could have easily blundered but managed to do absolutely right is by not including any form of falling damage. If you leap, or fall, off the top of a building, regardless of height you will hit the ground without a scratch, albeit leave a nice crater where you landed. This gives you the freedom to scale all the games buildings and experiment at will with your invincibility. Combined with abilities such as gliding and a rather fun landmark collectible task and you have a nice exploratory personality to the game. The side effect of all that exploration and rooftop travel, which often is required, can be vertigo and a headache for some due to all the rapid movements.
However all the complaints we have mentioned in this review pale in comparison to the utter ridiculousness that some of the missions throw at you. It isn't frequent, but every now and then you will be presented with a task that makes you wonder why the developers enjoy torturing their fans. The core of the problem are the games helicopters which can defy physics in ways that can only be explained as a clear intent to aggravate the player. While everything else seems to behave normally and believably, these flying demons from hell will follow you around buildings and through alleyways like a bad smell from the bottom of your shoe. Maybe if this was a Terminator game and they were piloted by Skynet would one be able to explain how they can find you hiding inside a garbage can and disintegrate you with rockets while hovering a few feet from the ground.
Overall Prototype is a rather impressive action game with some notable frustrations. It does a lot of things right and offers something both GTA and superhero fans will appreciate. We experienced zero stability problems and the games performance was perfect even during the largest battles. The sandbox structure to the game allows you to freely approach mission objectives from any angle you chose and often complete them in more than one way. Such an approach to game design is very welcome and should appeal to most, just be aware that some frustrations will be involved as well as crazy button mashing and plenty of blood and gore.
GameSNAFU Rating: 4 out of 5 (Good)
Sylvester "Annex" Rozylo
Executive Editor
