Genre : Action
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Radical Entertainment
Players: 1
Retail Price: $60 ($50 PC)
Availability: Xbox 360, PS3, PC
There are certain games that appeal to my inner 14 year old. Ones where I play, or see someone else play, and say ‘That is so cool!’ You see, as much as I’d like to think I’m a well educated, reasonable, adult member of society, I also tend to have an uncontrollable urge to say ‘awesome!’ when I see explosions and graphic, unrealistically over the top violence. It should be obvious, then, why I was looking forward to Prototype so much: you get to elbow drop a tank. And then it explodes. If you don’t get giddy at that thought, reread the last two sentences and then, if you’re still unmoved, you can skip the rest of the review because this game is not for you (and also, you are dead inside).
The story of the game is set up in an interesting way, because you’re finding everything out at the same time as Alex Mercer, who wakes up in the morgue and seems to have developed an uncanny ability to not be dead, have superhuman strength and run up walls. He’s got no memory of anything, so the majority of the game is spent trying to piece together who he is, how he wound up dead and why he’s tied to the virus that’s rapidly taking over New York City. You do the majority of your fact finding by ‘consuming’ various important people, which means punching your fist through their chest and absorbing their appearance and memories. These are tied together by the ‘web of intrigue,’ which is a visual representation of what you’ve uncovered, and there is a lot to know: even after finishing the game and consuming about half of the web’s targets, I still don’t really know what’s going on.
Storywise, let’s establish at the beginning that this is not Shakespearean. It’s a good government conspiracy story: you’re fighting both the infected and Blackwatch, a military-supported private contractor that’s so close to Blackwater it’s a miracle there hasn’t been any litigation. Both groups suck, since one is trying to kill humanity and the other is trying to kill you (and may have been responsible for your creation), so at various points you’re fighting for one side or the other, or just generally killing everything you can and blowing stuff up. The story, while interesting, is really just an excuse to wreck stuff and at times treads dangerously close to cheesy (you can take on any form, but you wear a hoodie that never falls down, even when you’ve been shot by a tank?). It also doesn’t always clearly establish what’s going on: I’m still unclear about a few main plot points, but didn’t really dwell too much on the fact since I quickly moved on to throwing more cars at helicopters and cutting fools with my arm, which coincidentally had recently turned into a giant sword.
The benefit of being somehow related to the infection is that you can now gain new powers and abilities: your heath regenerates (more quickly if you consume others), you can turn your arms into things like giant hammers or claws and you can learn to do things like glide between rooftops. You purchase upgrades by spending XP, which is accumulated by finishing story missions but also by doing practically anything: infiltrating military bases, blowing up infected hives and even just killing people. After a bout of havoc has stopped you’ll get an operational report telling you how many military personnel, infected and civilians you killed; at first I was worried about taking innocent lives, but they give you XP just as easily, and there’s no penalty for killing them. Besides, as the game progresses, most of them get infected anyway, so soon you’re just dealing with a mass of pseudozombies.
What surprised me the most about Prototype was when, after the short abilitease tutorial, it abruptly becomes an open world game. There’s always a sole objective to head to to progress the story, but you can also take a break from that and spend some time playing minigames like races and ‘kill as many people with this weapon in a time limit,’ or sneak into military bases and consume knowledgeable people to upgrade your skills (these can also be purchased as upgrades, but it’s much more fun — and XP-thrifty — to consume them yourself). There are also blue landmark and purple hint orbs to collect, though the hints are generally useless, basic facts (’Run away from danger and let your health recharge’), so they function more as a second set of collectible instead of legitimate gameplay advice. I initially skipped most of the side missions because I didn’t have sufficient upgrades to do them well, and after that I was more interested in progressing than I was in the endless mass of extra activities.
Maybe Playstation 3 and PC owners have missed something, so I’ll aggregate it for you: this is an open world game where you play as a man with super strength and agility, optionally collecting glowing orbs as you leap across rooftops. I’m confused by the recent announcement of Crackdown 2, because I just played it. That’s not a bad thing, by any means, because this was a very fun game and playing as a nigh-omnipotent badass is, as previously mentioned, incredibly satisfying.
The problem with nigh-omnipotent badassery, though, is that to do really cool things generally some control has to be taken away from you. Running up buildings is effortless and fun, but there were times when I’d catch a ledge or outcropping and Alex would behave oddly; this was especially the case when I’d reach an overhang, as instead of grabbing on to the new ledge and continuing you do a backflip and fall, which wouldn’t matter so much if there weren’t, oh, say, a tank shooting at me. Targeting was also occasionally difficult, though the game slows down briefly to allow you to select the proper recipient for the car you just picked up.
There are many, many ways to approach a situation, both with stealth vs violence and with the individual weapons you use. In addition to the powers you unlock, you can also pick up weapons from fallen (or consumed) soldiers or hijack tanks or helicopters (the helicopters, incidentally, being the best controlling ones I’ve played with in a long time). Sometimes it pays to assume the identify of a soldier and walk into a base — you can get into a tank without ruffling any feathers, which comes in handy — and other times you should use your claws, or the sword, or the hammers, etc. You can equip armor or a shield eventually too, though this extra defense comes at the cost of some of your movement.
While this myriad of options makes for diverse gameplay, some missions seem to almost demand a single approach, and if you can’t figure out what that is then it’s easy to get frustrated. I was known to yell ‘___ this game!’ often, except I didn’t say fudge. Then I’d stop for the night, and the next day I would either inexplicably beat it on my first try (which I think I’ll call Chinatown Wars syndrome) or try consuming a rocket launcher-wielding Blackwatch officer to use his weapon to, say, shoot down those escaping helicopters that I just can’t seem to keep up with. All I can say on that front is that, while the controls are sometimes frustratingly impossible to wrangle to your will, you should try another option and see if that works better.
Sometimes stealth can be your friend, but other times the jig is, as they say, up and you should just worry about causing damage. I readily admit that I could have been using the wrong techniques, but one of the game’s biggest bosses (in Times Square, to not give away plot) took me over an hour to beat and quickly went beyond ‘epic’ into ‘tedious.’ I’m not sure what would have happened if I had died, as I came close to often: I didn’t see a checkpoint, so I probably would have exploded in a ball of fury, which my wife would have been left to clean off of our couch.
The checkpoints occasionally were a bit too far apart, but much more often they were logically spaced, In fact, sometimes they were far too generous: I’d have died in the middle of a military base because I was causing a ruckus, but I’d spawn with no warning level at all, and — if I had one — a fully loaded tank or weapon. So, something that had been extremely difficult suddenly became overly easy, and I felt almost like I had cheated. This also happened after I completed missions: sometimes you’d have to escape to successfully finish, but other times I’d go from being in a tank in the middle of a firefight into a video that would place me on a rooftop the next day.
The game had a good sense of pacing: just as I had purchased most of the upgrades I was interested in I’d be given more to choose from, and soon after I realized that I was beginning to tire of the game I was at the end. You’re able to run around the city after the story is done, completing the web of intrigue (there’s still much more to learn) and stirring up trouble, or you can start a New Game+ and have access to all of your upgrades (and unlocked web nodes), though inexplicably not on the Hard difficulty. I understand that Radical wanted Hard to be, well, hard, but I could either play through the frustratingly difficult missions on a more punishing difficulty or I could mess dudes up with my superpowered ability set, so if given the choice I’d take the fun one.
Given the diversity of the gameplay and the otherwise awareness of how much is too much, it was slightly disappointing that some of the animations and dialogue was so repetitive. Every military base is laid out the same way, with people standing in the same positions, though your entrance and subjects of interest changed places. Each hive looked the same, and when destroyed blew up in one of only a few different ways. Your weapons have different consuming animations, though not many each, so if you tend to stick with one then you’ll see the same things frequently.
There are control and gameplay frustrations in Prototype, yes, and the story has a tendency to be convoluted, vague and silly, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a hell of a lot of fun to play. It’s very adolescent in its thrills, in the sense that the fun comes from blowing stuff up and violently killing quite a lot of people, but there’s a big market for that sort of game, and that market includes yours truly. Characters use a lot of what are colloquially referred to as ‘the swears,’ and you have a tendency to punch through people’s chests, crush their heads or slice them in half, so don’t let a child anywhere near this game. At the end of the day, though, Prototype should be filed under T, for ‘Tanks, elbow dropping.’ So, I mean, come on.
