Matthew "MJP"
Critique, Review Monday, June 29th 2009

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Prototype is an open world action game, there seems to be a lot of that going around lately. You play as generic white American male, Alex Mercer, who gets infected with a virus that gives him all kinds of awesome powers (which is just how viruses work in real life). Mercer is essentially a best-of compilation of various Marvel superheroes; Spider-Man, Hulk, Wolverine, Mystique and probably a few others that someone with more comic book knowledge would recognise.

As Mercer, you want revenge against whoever gave you all these powers, because for some reason you aren’t happy about it. Vengeance means killing things and killing things means progressing through a bunch of linear story missions and side activities that are sprinkled over your map of open world Manhattan.

If you’ve played any other open world action games, especially those with superheroes, then you know what to expect. It’s standard open world design. You run around the city, do story missions, upgrade your abilities, kill people, and participate in side activities for extra experience points. The only somewhat unique aspect comes from controlling Mercer himself but everything else plays out just like any other open world game. It’s uninspiring to say the least.

You’re a badass…sort of.

Mercer has a lot of moves at his disposal. He can jump over buildings, sprint up walls and glide through the air. His arms can mutate giving him various weapons such as the whip fist, claw, blade, hammer fist and muscle mass powers which are exactly what they sound like. On the defensive side there’s a shield as well as full body armour.

Mercer can even disguise himself as other characters, which adds a stealth element to the gameplay. Last, and certainly least, there are the sensory powers that provide you with two thermal vision type abilities that you will never use because, well, they’re useless.

The game actually does a good job of rewarding you with new abilities but many of them are just variants of each other that serve the same purpose and despite this extensive arsenal, you’re still a bit of a weakling. Sure, ordinary humans are no problem. You can pull a helicopter out of the sky with your whip, you can throw cars at it, you can even kick it in mid-air or pull yourself aboard and hi-jack it. Tanks? Again, you just smash them to bits or hi-jack them for personal use.

However, one of the main issues with the game is this ability to control military vehicles. They become a crutch that you will lean on far too often, as despite all your amazing powers, everything is much easier from the seat of a helicopter or tank, which is rather telling of how contradictory the design is.

Most of the time you’ll feel all-powerful…and then you’ll fight some of the larger enemies. You see you’re not the only one affected by the virus. There are all kinds of monsters running around the city too. At first there aren’t many but as the story progresses, the city becomes more and more infested.

The problem here is the boss battles. For a game that supposedly makes you the ultimate badass you’ll do an awful lot of running away. Just about all of the bosses require you to run away from them, attack them a little bit and then run away again. Attempting to stand toe-to-toe with any of them is futile, as they’ll punish you for it every time.

Instead of actually using a combination of your abilities, you’ll just throw things at them from afar or charge at them and pop off the occasional “devastator attack” before fleeing like a little girl again. It’s rather contradictory to be so powerful yet so weak. During one of the last boss battles I essentially spent a good half hour running away, regenerating my health and then coming back to attack again before repeating the cycle over.

These boss battles are tedious and frustrating but not necessarily difficult. Prototype is a fairly easy game. I managed to finish my first play through without dying which awarded me with a rather ironic achievement. You won’t find a good challenge here, just frustration at how the game forces you to play when it tries to amp up the difficulty.

It’s Hulk without Hulk.

Anyone that has played Radical Entertainment’s previous title, Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, will immediately notice the cues taken from that game. Ultimate Destruction was Radical’s one shining success last generation; it was, at the time, the best superhero title out. It therefore makes sense that the developer would choose to mine their biggest success when designing Prototype, but Ultimate Destruction is a four-year-old game, and the four-year-old game design isn’t as interesting as it once was.

Make no mistake; Prototype is the definition of a “spiritual successor”. It takes Ultimate Destruction’s entire gameplay design and just adds to it enough to make it a little more varied. The giant leaps that many would associate with Crackdown are in fact from Ultimate Destruction, as is the sprinting, as well as the majority of your attacks and many other aspects of the game; such as the upgrade system and the strike teams, among other things.

If Activision still held the license to Hulk then I doubt that the intellectual property of Prototype would exist at all. It is quite obvious that Radical wanted to make Ultimate Destruction again but couldn’t. Because of this they have created the story and characters of Prototype out of the need to justify re-using their only successful game design and it shows.

Story time!

Games of this genre have had a rather varied approach to story of late. Crackdown didn’t really have one and from what little I’ve played of Red Faction, there doesn’t seem to be much of an attempt there either. However, Prototype does actually try to have a story, though it fails miserably.

It begins with the city in ruins and Mercer having a discussion with an unidentified person on a rooftop. We then go back in time to a few weeks earlier in order to witness the events leading up to this point. Mercer wakes up having lost his memory, infected with the virus, and now capable of superhuman feats. He must consume people with knowledge of the virus, absorbing their memories, in order to find out what happened to him.

Both story and characters are woefully bad here. Mercer has as much character as I do (not much) and there aren’t many other characters that don’t exist solely for you to kill them. There’s some business with your sister and a few other side characters but it’s completely forgettable. The story itself involves some shady military stuff regarding the viral weapon that has infected the city and all that you would expect from that sort of storyline.

The city is infected, you’re on the loose with your new superpowers and the military is trying to control it all; do the math and it adds up to exactly what you would expect and nothing more. I’d probably prefer the Crackdown approach instead of having to sit through the awfulling boring and predictable story that is on offer here. In short, Prototype’s story and characters aren’t memorable or entertaining but that doesn’t stop the game from continually pretending that they are.

Upon finishing the story you can continue running around the game world, finishing any left over activities, or you can start the game over again, keeping all of your unlocked abilities. There’s also a hard difficulty setting that unlocks upon completion. However, this is the only replay value on offer. There are no online or multiplayer modes of any sort and the idea of playing through the abysmal story again isn’t exactly appealing. The main story did at least last me around 14 hours on my first play through which is a fairly acceptable length.

A few other points worth mentioning:

• The graphics are terrible. It looks bad and there is also noticeable pop-in. Mercer does animate rather nicely though and the frame rate is always steady.
• The tank’s turning and acceleration are controlled using only one stick, which is as frustrating as it sounds.
• Furthermore, the right stick controls camera movement as well as target switching, which often results in you doing one thing when you wanted to do the other.
• The game will repeatedly target inconsequential cannon fodder enemies instead of the boss that is on your tail, which results in you running for your dear life until you get the right target selected.
• The stealth-consume ability allows you to consume people in front of an entire base full of soldiers without anyone noticing. It looks absolutely ridiculous when it happens and it happens often.
• At times, Mercer sounds like a normal human being, and at others seems to be attempting an impression of Christian Bale as Batman.
• Consuming specific individuals rewards you with a cut scene of your victim’s memory. These are mostly repetitive, consisting of “virus that, military this, blah blah blah”. The bad writing prevents the mechanic from ever being interesting.
• Infiltrating an enemy base plays out exactly the same way every time and it isn’t even fun to do before you notice the repetition.

Prototype can be fun. The game gives you all sorts of crazy abilities that allow for the kind of variety in combat that you don’t see in other games of the genre. However, the graphics, story, characters and overall game design are fairly poor. It’s a typical open world game that you’ve seen a hundred times before. Playing as Mercer is enjoyable but it’s not as innovative as it was when the developer first did it with Hulk four years ago. It’s the equivalent of a Hollywood action film, shit but still exciting on some levels and if you don’t mind forgiving the many negative aspects then you will at least get some enjoyment out of the action.

You should play this game if…

…you like open world superhero games and want something that is better than those Spider-Man titles.

Final Score

Poor graphics, story and characters as well as derivative open world design that is only partially redeemed by the many superhero abilities available to you.

(What does this score mean?)

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