Guess What Saigon's Been Doing Instead Of Making His Map!

PLAYAN VIDYA GAEMS.

More specifically, Prototype.

AND THEN WRITAN A LONG-ASS REVIEW.

So, Prototype is a pretty awesome game.

But seriously folks.

First of all, a few things:

I haven't played InFamous.
I do not own a PS3.
I do not work for Activision or any other game company.
I don't work for IGN or any review site.
I enjoy long walks on the beach.

With that out of the way, let's get down to basics: in Prototype, players take on the role of one Alex Mercer, a man who wakes up in the corporate morgue of a company called GenTek, seconds away from being autopsied. He escapes and, in the process, learns that he can withstand bullets (for the most part), can punch cars to death, has Spiderman-like jumping abilities, and can shapeshift into anyone he kills, absorbing their memories in the process. Oh, and BLACKWATCH, GenTek's corporate military force, is after his ass. All in all, it's a bad day that turns into a bad month for New York: a viral infection is quickly spreading throughout the city, driving people mad OR transforming them into mutant monsters hell-bent on destruction. The story itself is told mostly in flashbacks as Alex, on Day 18, explains to an unseen figure what all has happened, starting from Day 1 and finally concluding on the present day. Alex physically evolves from just a guy who can jump high and hit hard to a living weapon in the process, allowing him some pretty insane moves, including the 'musclemass drop' (better known as the 'HOLY FUCK I JUST PULLED A PILEDRIVER ON A FUCKING TANK' move), as well as the now infamous 'body surf.' Some powers, such as the Claws, are learned naturally, whereas other abilities like the Hammerfists are purchased using Evolution Points, which are rewards from doing badass things like completing missions, annihilating (or evading, if you're a wuss) strike teams, and killing enemies. Powers aren't the only things purchaseable, however: various moves for the different weapons, as well as upgrades for Alex's health, his speed, jumping height, etc. Here Devastators can be purchased as well, massive AoE attacks can that can only be used when Alex is in 'Critical Mass,' when he's absorbed enough biomass that his life meter is overflowing (the Prototype version of Overhealing). The game world is a scaled-down New York, giving the player free reign in deciding where to go and when, as the game possesses a day/night cycle as well. However, while this is technically 'sandbox' gaming, don't confuse it with games like Morrowind, the Grand Theft Auto series, Oblivion, Fallout 3 or the Saints' Row series: Prototype has much more in common with games such as Assassin's Creed, with various diversions scattered about the city as well as the main storyline missions, though, unlike Assassin's Creed, none of these missions really have any effect on the game world. Alex goes through the game trying to figure out what happened to him, why, and who's responsible so he can KICK THEIR FUCKING ASS. Now that you have the basics, we'll go to the pros and the cons, the latter of which I'll tackle first:

Cons:

The writing is probably the most noticeably bad thing about the game, but even then it's not really 'bad' in the traditional sense. The audience isn't treated to third-rate attempts at sounding dramatic that would make a Sonic-fanfiction writer laugh out loud, but rather there's almost a total lack of interesting dialogue. Exchanges between characters aren't even cliched, they're just wooden and awkward. If anything, the already-sparse dialogue is just out-and-out boring, with the only bright spot being the semi-compelling conversations between Alex and his sister Dana. Unfortunately, for the most part, they simply play out as mission briefings delivered in different voices. It's not necessarily a detriment to the game, it just could've been done much better.

The storyline itself (yes this is a different thing from writing) is actually pretty interesting, especially in the way it's delivered to the audience, but there are some major issues. For one thing, at the end of the game, there's quite a few loose ends simply left hanging:

SPOILER WARNING

One example is this: about 2/3rds or so through the game, Alex's sister gets kidnapped by a Hunter (one of the serious badass mutants) and Alex goes on a mad chase. After much ado, the Hunter gets taken down and Dana is retrieved in semi-stable condition - Alex then drops her off with a mortician he'd been working with for quite some time, telling him to 'do what he can for her.' Then Alex nevers goes back to check on his sister OR his mortician buddy. So WTF happened to them? A similar thing is Alex's ex-girlfriend, who sells him out to BLACKWATCH, but not before simply disappearing without a trace. One would think that someone as obsessed with revenge as Alex is would at least attempt to hunt her down as he does so many other characters in the game. But nope.

SPOILERS OVER

Another part of the storyline's problem is with Alex himself: while he certainly changes physically, he never grows or matures or changes as a protagonist; he remains just as single-mindedly set on revenge AFTER a significant plot twist (which I won't state here, even with spoiler tags) as he was before. His sister's fear of what he's turning into seems more an annoyance to him than a real concern even after [WHAT I JUST WROTE IN THE SPOILER PARAGRAPH]. At the end, right before the credits roll, personal growth is hinted at, but just barely, and in a vague, not-sure-if-serious way. Similarly to the dialogue problem, this isn't an issue that will probably detract from most peoples' experience with the game, but it could've been more. This could've easily been an exploration of what it means to be human, if it's your genetic makeup or if it's your choices in life, but Activision seemed content to just have it be a story about a guy with crazy powers beating shit up...which is perfectly fine. I guess.

There's also a real lack of replayability in Prototype: once you've beaten it, there's really no reason to play through it again unless you want to go through the missions again or try a different difficulty. There's sort of compensation for this by allowing free-roam after the final boss goes down so you can still cavort about the city, doing challenges and playing a never-ending game of King of the Hill with your enemies, but really it would've been nice to have RPG-style choices that would directly affect the ending of the game. I can even see it working, as well: as the game goes on, Alex does find himself in a position of neutrality in the mutant/army conflict, so why not be able to side with one or the other (or decide to fight both and take over New York yourself )? Hell, even unlockable costumes for Alex would've been nice, his default rags being rather boring (not counting his badass Armored form). There's a suspicious-looking 'codes' input in the Extras menu, but I have no clue what it does and neither does anyone else on the internet, evidently.

In addition to the lack of replayability, there's a lack of interactivity with the city: you can't go inside buildings, you can only talk to people in cutscenes, you can only drive tanks and helicopters, etc. Note that all the things I listed are things that are not necessary to the plotline and the game itself, but they'd really be fun. Keeping up with the 'unlockable costumes' idea, imagine walking into a clothing store and buying some new threads for Alex...or, if you're evil, imagine hiding behind a Starbucks, consuming some poor teenage barista on her smoke break, shapeshifting into her, then walking back inside only to decapitate the entire restaurant when the fat fuck at the end of the line says 'My business meeting started two minutes ago!' That would be fucking awesome. Also: having opportunities to save the harrowed populace, superhero-style, would be sweet -- Alex is painted by the media as a bio-terrorist responsible for the infection of New York; how cool would it have been to see some group of teenagers skipping school only to be attacked by a bunch of mutants and have you there to beat'em down; slowly, as you save people from these monsters, the city's opinion of you turns from everyone running scared of you to people cheering you on every time you smack down a six-mouthed monster harassing some old lady. BUT NO ACTIVISION YOU JUST LET ME DOWN AGAIN.

Really the rest of the cons are just small things:
- strike team waves tend to come incredibly close together, making it damn near impossible to actually catch a break.
- you have to stand still while consuming enemies, which puts you at a big disadvantage since most of the enemies like to sort of plow through you constantly.
- a few of the missions have an incredibly high level of difficulty, even relative to the rest of the missions, seemingly with no reason other than just bad planning.
- not a whole lot of visual variety as far as enemies are concerned.
- the final boss is the most anti-climactic final fight since Bioshock.
- no Lo Pang

Pros:

I don't think I have ever played a game this where you, the main character, gets to do things as part of normal gameplay that the majority of game characters don't even do in fucking CUTSCENES. You want to spear through a helicopter and whip it out of the fucking sky?! You can do that! You want to pick up a tank and bowl over fifty poor fucks with it?! Go ahead! DO YOU WANT TO 'ATOMIC ELBOW' A FUCKING APC FROM THE TOP OF THE EMPIRE FUCKING STATE BUILDING?! DO YOU WANT TO RIDE YOUR ENEMIES LIKE A BLOODY, GORE-SPEWING SURFBOARD?! Well you can do that in Prototype. The developers took a practically loving approach to mass destruction, and it shows. There's a glee in every inhuman show of decimation that carries from the first time to the fifteen-thousandth. The only game that comes close would be the oft-overlooked Gungrave OverDose, but even that can't hold a candle to this game's endless ways to take apart anything that stands in your way or even looks at you wrong.

The storyline itself, wooden dialogue and plot misgivings aside, is actually quite interesting and even a little novel in concept. What's even better is the way in which the plot is revealed, mostly through the act of Consuming, when Alex literally absorbs his foes. While most of the time this is done to gain health and build up Devastator attacks, Alex can also do this to take on the exact form of his foes, as well as absorb their memories, learning what they know and moving the plot along as Alex becomes more and more aware of the situation he's in. Also, scattered throughout the city, are various people who fit into the 'Web of Intrigue' (as it's called). While they don't show up on the city map, Alex can see if one is near him in-game, and by chasing them down and absorbing them, he learns more about the game world, the history of Blackwatch, and even his own history before the game's events. Those little snippets of information, while not vital to the main storyline, really flesh out the game world, the same way that the recordings in Bioshock and the logs in Dead Space do.

The city is one of the most 'alive' and reactive environments in a game I've ever seen, and it changes like a living, breathing character of its own. People go about their day-to-day business, run from the trigger-happy BLACKWATCH forces and viral mutants, sit out on rooftops having a smoke, camp in front of the Golden Gate bridge and try to get across. While the infected zones tend to be filled with nothing but mindless mutants, there's a thrill in getting in to a fight with a Leader, being thrown ten city blocks into a 'safe' zone intersection, and watching the world around you react: some people will get out of their cars and run, some people will try to make it through the intersection around you. As you throw down with this roadkill-faced abomination, some people will run, some people will stand and watch, some people will run off, get their friends, and come back to watch. Even though Prototype is far from a traditional 'superhero' game, as a player, I get the idea of what Spiderman must feel like on his rough days.

The various abilities that Alex eventually gets access to are absolutely incredible, and allow for a variety of playstyles. This is one game where YOU, the player, are actually stronger than most anything you come up against, so it becomes less of 'oh lord do I have the right weapon to beat this guy' and more 'HEAVEN OR HELL! LET'S ROCK!' Of course, certain weapons are suited more to some situations than others (the Whipfist is made with helicopters in mind, the Hammerfist is more useful against vehicles, Muscle Mass is better for hand-to-hand), but ultimately it's up to the player how to dispose of his opponents.

There's a boss fight about 2/3-3/4 of the way through the game that is absolutely rocking, where you tussle in Times Square with a giant worm-thing called Mother. This is probably going on my top 10 list of favorite boss fights ever. You have to run up buildings, dodge boulders and energy spheres, dive from the tops of skyscrapers, throw tanks, eat army people, juggle chainsaws...you want it, this fight's got it. It's really more of a 'final boss' than the REAL final boss is, though, which is a disappointment.

While there's not a whole lot of mission variety (most of it is either 'kill X creatures' or 'follow this guy'), the missions themselves are quite entertaining to do, providing unique challenges from fighting super-powered soldiers than can see through your disguises to infiltrating enemy bases without raising alarms. They're varied enough in execution to be interesting consistently, which brings me to my next point:

The length of the game is...actually just about right. It's not 'beat it in an afternoon' like Bioshock was, and it won't keep you busy for weeks on end like an RPG. If you play through just the story missions and DON'T play it all day like I did, you can probably finish it in 3-4 days, with probably 2-3 days more to beat the challenges. The gameplay was just starting to get a little tired at around the point I hit final boss (and I lose interest quickly as a normal thing), so it just felt right to me. The free play after the credits means you can pretty much play to your heart's content, and the medium-length story missions will probably keep even people with a short attention span happy. Saying the length of a game is 'about right' is actually pretty rare for me, as I almost always feel like a game is too short (Bioshock) or a game is too long (Halo 1), so if I feel it's JUUUUUST RIIIIGHT, then someone did something correctly.

Final verdict: B-
Prototype is dumb, semi-mindless fun on a massive scale, with refreshing gameplay, and somewhat wooden dialogue. Unfortunately, due to low interactivity and a somewhat limited scope of the gameworld, it also has a short 'hard drive life.' I'll most likely uninstall it in a week or so, but will keep the install files and my save games just in case. Would I pay fifty bucks for it? Probably not. Would I pay any money at all for it? Probably so. If Prototype had come out at around the $20-$30 price range, I would've been much more likely to buy it than to get it off of releaselog (which I think is the case with most pirates anyway), but I'm glad I got it anyway. If the price drops, would I buy it? Well no silly, I have it already.

good review seems to sum up what i thought of it.
Prototype

Ya I was thinkin about it but the 50$ turned me off, so i got deadspace instead

Ya I was thinkin about it but the 50$ turned me off, so i got deadspace instead

good choice clooney

meh, good story and whatnot but the combat gets a bit repeditive and kinda stops trying to scare you twards the end

George Clooney wrote:meh, good story and whatnot but the combat gets a bit repeditive and kinda stops trying to scare you twards the end

'twards the end' here having the meaning of 'from chapter four until whichever chapter the Kellion crashes in, then the game gets fucking horrifying again.'

SaigonTimeMD wrote:

George Clooney wrote:meh, good story and whatnot but the combat gets a bit repeditive and kinda stops trying to scare you twards the end

'twards the end' here having the meaning of 'from chapter four until whichever chapter the Kellion crashes in, then the game gets fucking horrifying again.'

ehhh, I just got a bit tired of enemys coming out of the vents, and the last chapter was realy dull to me, cept the final boss.(was realy easy but still fun)

also I dont realy get scared in games, just may be an ocasional jump if its well put together.