Review: Prototype

This is a very confused game. This is a very horrible game. This is a game that is so inherently mind-blowingly stupid that I actually did not finish it. It is utterly disappointing in light of the hype that the developers perpetuated that this would be a triple-A blockbuster. But it turned out to be nothing more than a horrible C-rate game.

Firstly, why is it a confused game? It wants to be Assassin's Creed, Wolverine, Spiderman, Grand Theft Auto and a whole bunch of other more exciting ones jam-packed in one title. There's the running and jumping over rooftops and flying, scaling tall buildings, targeting individual victims, and hacking and slashing civilians and enemies alike with nary a care in the world.

From the get-go, you are thrown into the fray with little understanding of why on earth the world is getting tentacle-raped by some mutation, and you have all these awesome kickass powers. Then you realize, "oh, it's a tutorial" when it tells you to WASD your way through the destruction in the city, and then kill whatever it wants you to kill.


That's all good and fine but it's not fun when you suddenly remove all this godlike power from the player and say it's flashback time! Assassin's Creed did the exact same thing and it was quite irritating, especially when the point of the game is to make you do all those fancy moves and look good. But at least with Assassin's Creed, each new level slowly gives you back all your fancy abilities until you are finally a full-fledged killing machine again.

But with Prototype, they expect you to buy back all your powers with points that are rewarded through senseless violence. They should at least give you back all your powers as easily as they take them away! But no, you have to stop the action every so often and trawl through a complicated list of moves and abilities to buy the ones you want, as if giving the player a very weak, almost false sense of control over character.

No doubt, when you do have the powers, they are an absolute joy to use. Tanks get dented with a single punch, cars and bits of buildings effortlessly lifted over head to throw at helicopters, and the countless number of people you can eat and slice in half. If there's any game that makes you feel uber, this game does it best. That bit in the movie where Wolverine jumps up at the helicopter to destroy it? You can do it here, and even roundhouse kick it into the next dimension. Chuck Norris eat your heart out. Running up walls is so effortlessly taken care of with a hold of the Shift button to sprint. So Altair can eat his heart out too for that matter.

But I can't help but feel that after a few minutes of psychopathic violence, you too will grow tired of this shallow game. There's nothing else to it. Hack and slash through everything and anything over and over with little motivation. Kill 10 weird unexplained machines, or race across the city and eat this designated target. And then kill 10 more weird unexplained monsters. There's so much repetitive button-mashing, with so little skill involved. And the developers expect players to be motivated to continue playing with its horribly thin plotline.


Alex Mercer evidently is a "prototype" of an experiment-gone-wrong. We've been down that cliched road before but apparently the developers thought it was alright to do it again. So now awoken with all these powers and very angry, he seeks to take revenge on the man who has made him that way. Honestly? I'd be pretty happy that I can fly and shapeshift to be anyone at will. But if the Left 4 Dead Hunter look-a-like wants to tear up the city with his irritable bowel, so be it.

There's a fancy novelty implemented in this game called the Web of Intrigue. More like the Web of Boredom. Everytime you come across a special enemy, the game encourages you to eat his face out so as to "learn a little more" about the amnesic Alex Mercer, through these flashy snippets of "memory". Sometimes they'll be useful in explaining why things are the way they are, whilst others are deliberate red herrings because developers think gamers will just love that. Thankfully, you have the ability to skip those pointless scenes of drivel.

On top of which, at the start of every mission there's a cutscene where a wooden, gravelly voice-acted Alex Mercer with no personality whatsoever drone on to the few allies he's got, namely a sister and a pathologist, about what he needs to do next, which is basically... kill more stuff or look for a specific dude and then kill more stuff. There is also some mystery surrounding another test subject, a little girl who claims to be the hero's mother (gross) but honestly, no one really gives a damn about Alex Mercer or his problems. He's so utterly unlikeable.

The graphics are a strange thing. Sometimes they can be very shiny and next-gen, and at other times, they are so last century with very poor detailing and large over-sized pixels. The character models look flat and under-detailed, not like something you'd expect for a 2009 release. The first warning I had already that this game was going to be graphical hell was when I couldn't raise the resolution of the game beyond 1280x760 when my computer can handle 1366 max.


Sure, my framerates were pretty smooth as a result but everything looked so horrible. The city is bland, you might as well put cardboard boxes in place of the skyscrapers and buildings and no one would know the difference. The under-detailed cityscape is nothing in comparison to the liveliness and character of Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto 4, but in Prototype's defense, you spend most of your time virtually sprinting and climbing on rooftops in a blur to really see anything. But it still would've been nice to see them put a little more effort into making the game more immersive.

The civilians are just soulless shells that amble about their empty existences just waiting for the next explosion or destruction by Alex Mercer to set them running around like headless chickens. GTA 4 at least made you consider your violence against innocent people, but you really don't give a damn in Prototype. You're not even saving them from the mutation. You're saving yourself. So go ahead and kill as many of the little people as you like. It also makes little sense to me when the protagonist is supposed to be a good guy, that he is killing all these people.

Here's a funny strip I found on my favorite webcomic Chainsawsuit that so succintly sums up the idiotic nature of violence in the game:

Without a doubt, the action looks good though, from the fountains of gore spewing, to the explosions of helicopters as you kick it or punch it mid-air. The way Alex Mercer's body bends forward like an athlete in full sprint to the twists and turns when climbing up buildings, there is a definite sense of breathtaking locomotion.

But in conclusion, no matter how much style this game has got, with the amount of money thrown at it, it still doesn't hide the ugly truth beneath the surface that this game is as brain-dead as a piece of dog poo. Pointless, uninspiring missions, a truly horrid main character with a story that you could wipe your ass with, and button mashing that you needn't waste your time with.

Avoid at all costs.