REVIEWED – Prototype

Title:  Prototype
Platform:  PC
Developer:  Radical Entertainment
Publisher:  Activision
Reviewed By:  emerald_hammer
SCORE:  B

Look for more reviews of Prototype at TestFreaks.com

Prototype is a sandbox game from Radical Entertainment, set in a very near-future version of Manhattan that’s under attack from a mysterious virus that works similarly to that in Left 4 Dead, turning some into effective zombies and others into larger mutants capable of putting up a considerable fight. Your character, Alex Mercer, has been afflicted with the virus in such a way that he’s able to control the structure of his biomass to give him superhuman abilities and the ability to turn his limbs into weapons such as claws, blades or massive fists. Your fight is against both the infection and the military, as you race to recover your true identity from the mists of plot-convenient amnesia, a vocation apparently so important that murdering thousands upon thousands of people is but a small price to pay for the truth.

STORY/MISSIONS
The story is carried out in an extremely similar way to one of Radical’s previous open-world efforts, The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction (we’ll see more about the similarities later). You go to various points on the map to start missions, with free roam interspersing them, and the story progresses utterly linearly. You fulfill objectives such as ‘destroy x’, ‘protect x’ and even the outlandish ‘destroy x while protecting y’. There’s little variety besides four boss fights, but what there is is tried and tested, with the escort missions never being that annoying due to frequent checkpoints. There are 31 missions in all, with none being inordinately frustrating with the possible exception of one boss fight against a giant worm-tentacle-monster-thing, which plays annoyingly like a Zelda boss fight (destroy certain parts of thing, hack at core, regeneration, repeat) while enormous waves of tough enemies attack you as you desperately try to heal from its huge attacks. Extremely annoying.

Each mission starts and ends with exposition-laden cutscenes, which are well-written and rendered nicely but feel too detached from gameplay. There’s also a very nice feature that tells you how many soldiers, infected and civilians died (usually in the thousands due to extreme collateral damage stemming from tanks crushing everyone before them) and how many millions, often billions of dollars you cost the military. Alex Mercer: mass-murderer. Drain on taxpayers’ money. Hero.

The plot is highly complex and is based around a complex conspiracy stretching back years, which is where the consume mechanic enters. There’s a ‘Web of Intrigue’ in the game, which explains the conspiracy and is added to by either completing missions or consuming (more on that in the gameplay section) certain marked people who were important to the conspiracy to gain their memories. However, complexity alone isn’t sufficient for a good story; the characters are important, and this is where Prototype falls on its face. Mercer’s motivations are unconvincing and his methods inhuman, which I suppose fits with his role as mysterious anti-hero but leaves a lot to be desired in our ability to empathise with him. The other characters fare no better, having either one-dimensional or no-dimensional personalities and little importance besides their status as quest-givers or MacGuffins. This is hardly a character piece, but they could have at least tried.

Overall, it’s not a brilliant plot but fits well enough, with the mission structure simple but also effective. It takes a back seat to the free-roam anyway, so it’s not of paramount importance. I blasted through in around eight hours, skipping cutscenes, and then played through again on New Game + (where you keep your old powers) to work out what was actually going on, and encountered a few interesting twists.

GRAPHICS
Prototype is odd in its ugliness for a current-gen game. They’re by no means bad, but I’ve seen better graphics from 2006. The characters are slightly blocky and unrealistic (did I mention that I’m playing this on near-full graphics?), the draw distance disappointing for a game spent largely on rooftops and the general texture quality disappointing. Nothing looks outstanding, and the animations for buildings being destroyed look positively last-gen. However, there are some redeeming features: there are truly vast amounts of people on the streets (even in the middle of a massive city-wide plague and a military that appears not to care about collateral damage), and this makes it the closest thing yet to a living, breathing Manhattan. Perhaps this necessitated the lack of detail and variety on random pedestrians. The movement in the game tends to mask these flaws; Alex moves incredibly fluidly as he works his way across the city, his animations for vaulting and climbing being particularly impressive. Overall, the graphics are passable; we’ll leave it at that. Watch some gameplay videos to decide for yourself how good they are.

SOUNDTRACK
Simple. No licensed music, just dramatic drum-laden techno during the more frenetic missions and cutscenes. I think. to be honest, I never noticed the music at all, which is good because that means it blended well with the gameplay without becoming annoying. I don’t even think there is any music in free roam mode unless you trigger a military alert.

Voice acting is somewhere between ‘OK’ and ‘not bad’. Alex sounds like the standard bitter anti-hero of the contemporary gaming mores, and the few other plot-central characters are competently played. The background noise is typical New York; horns, shouting and general bustle, and when you hit the streets you often hear people horrified at your shapeshifting, which is quite entertaining. You also get to hear military transmissions, which adds to the feel of the game as they become increasingly panicked during the fights. Helicopter pilots scream like little girls when you shoot them down, which is frequently hilarious. However, my absolute favourite aspect of this is the minute chance that a pedestrian you run into will shout a certain word that should make you crack up. I won’t tell you what it is because that would spoil the surprise.

GAMEPLAY
The meat of the game, and it is one mixed bag. Overall, I have to say that it’s very good, but certain bowel-clenchingly annoying mechanics and controls drop the score a little. Let’s divvy this up into a few sections.

-MOVEMENT
Movement is by far the strongest part of the game. While your main skills such as jumping and sprinting are poor at the start, they can be rapidly upgraded to turn you into a cross between Spiderman and the Hulk. Your main method of movement will be jumping and gliding, which works excellently. You can scale buildings simply by sprinting at them, leap over cars, ledges or rooftop clutter with no effort whatsoever and push through crowds with no trouble. Jumping is only really fun once you upgrade it fully, at which point it can send you bounding hundreds of meters when combined with gliding, a secondary mechanic that allows you to prolong your airtime and make it to other buildings when running on rooftops. Movement is by far the strongest part of the game; it just feels so fluid and fun, similar to the awesomeness that was Spiderman 2. My one complaint here is that jumping and gliding aren’t quite powerful enough at the highest level, slightly diminishing the feeling of godliness that should be the ultimate goal of a proper sandbox game.

-COMBAT
Oh, boy. The order of the day is the combo, and you are going to need a lot of them. The combat system is ludicrously complex, with dozens of different special attacks added to the basic attacks from the vast array of powers. In fact, let’s give that its own section before coming back to combat.

-POWERS
Armour, which is… armor that protects you but slows you as well. Shield, a giant shield held in front of you that lets you soak up damage and smash thorough things. Things like people. Claws, which turn you into Wolverine and let you slash people in half, which is kind of neat. Musclemass, which just makes you stronger. Whipfist, equivalent to a giant, deadly yo-yo that you swing around to hit enemies from long range. Think of the wrecking ball of Ultimate Destruction. Hammerfist gives you mighty big fists, which are slow but brutally powerful. Blade, the most powerful, gives you a big damn sword with which you can kill anyone fairly easily. Alex can absorb people, either up front or stealthily, which restores health and allows you to disguise yourself as them, giving you an option of stealth instead of raw superpowers. This ability can be used to hide from pursuit, quickly restore health, accuse other enemies of being hostile and gain new skills from military bases such as the ability to call in artillery strikes. He can use several powers of perception to see enemies or infected clearly in crowds and even use guns, although I have no idea why you’d want to. No fun whatsoever.

COMBAT PART II: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO
Right. Combat can be viciously annoying at times, especially when sheer numbers begin to overwhelm you and you’re forced to retreat. Hunters, a big, mean type of infected, will beat seven shades of red out of you at first, and can keep up with you to stop you from charging attacks. They’re extremely irritating, as are the distant roof-mounted bazooka troops. I’d advise against fighting on the streets, as the combined forces of the military and infected will hurt a lot. Naturally, there are many ways to fight, be it with weapons, powers or vehicles, which is where the combat excels; if you find the complexity of melee baffling, there are simpler (but less effective) methods as well. All in all, it’s very customizable, never forcing you into using one style over others to complete a mission or survive in free roam. There are vast amounts of moves with various modifiers, probably deeper than most straight fighting games especially when combined with use of the environment such as throwing cars or taking cover on rooftops. Its main flaw is the way that the combat system is quite frequently deeply irritating and very slightly broken, such as the way in which hunters can push you into an inescapable corner and kill you to death. Also, why does a single punch from a weakened common infected cause Alex to recoil and drop whatever he’s charging? This is a man who takes direct missile impacts with nary a flinch.

CONTROLS
This is where the gameplay starts to creak a little. This game is simply not designed for any form of controller known to man due its sheer complexity. Playing with keyboard and mouse allows far faster selection of powers and greater direct control, but also makes doing certain moves much harder due to key combos like V & E. Looking at both styles, I’d probably recommend using a gamepad, but either way you’re going to encounter difficulty. The controls do tend to let you down in the midst of combat, but luckily most of the best moves are accessible from just [key] + mouse, so you don’t really need to vary your attacks and hand positions much.

VEHICLES
Alex can absorb military officers with skills like tank driving and helicopter piloting. Tanks are a useful vehicle and are damn fun to drive, crushing waves of screaming citizenry (and their cars) before you, but their slow speed renders them vulnerable to easy destruction from sufficient numbers of military and they have an irritating tendency to get stuck on things. Helicopters are different; they’re extremely easy and fun to fly, and far harder for enemies to destroy. In fact, one later mission has you destroy all helicopters in the are, ostensibly to cut off escape routes but really to prevent you from having one in the next mission, as the gunships really are overpowered. Use them whenever you can; they’re but a quicktime event away.

YOUR VERDICT, YOUR HONOUR?
Buy, says I. It’s deeply flawed but in the end its intense fun gets it enough points for a recommendation. It’s frustrating and difficult, but it overcomes that with its sheer strength of awesomeness. If you think it sounds a little too frustrating, I heartily recommend Ultimate Destruction, which is most assuredly a prequel to this due to their enormous similarity in gameplay. My personal theory is that Radical wanted to make a sequel but didn’t get the licence, so they adjusted it into this instead. Whichever way you go, you’re sure to find a heap of Radical fun that manages to bury its sizeable flaws admirably.