Prototype PS3 Review

My inital impression was that Prototype was terrible. After deciding to just ignore the story and run around having fun it has been upgraded to average.

To let those of you who can skip the rest of this, the game is almost exactly like Spiderman 2 but with slightly better graphics and the fact you are forced to be a complete jerk at all times.

Anyway…

You play Alex Mercer, a man who’s been missing for five years and who comes back having all these powers of genetic transformartion that do not surprise him one single bingle bit. Me, I would be a little taken aback were tendrils of LIVING FLESH to sprout out of my belly and absorb some guy whose head I just punched until it exploded. I could afford a gasp. But that’s me. You, gentle reader, are maybe made of sterner stuff.

But no, Alex does not care that he sprouts 6 foot blades on his forearms and can run up 200 story buildings without breaking a sweat. All he cares about is getting revenge on the man what gave him all these great super powers that let him do anything. That big jerk! Alex is just another uber-macho dork designed to make 12 year olds and people who are mentally 12 years old think they’re hot stuff. Hunched walk, check, stands on tall things, check, gravelly emotionless voice, check…. The man is just pathetic.

So, basically, this is a game where you run around and kill things. Mostly innocent civilians since, if anyone walking the street even comes close to Alex, he back hands them so hard they fall over or spin across the street. Spiderman pushed through, that dude in Assassin’s Creed gently moves through crowds; SUCH a gentleman. Alex is a big jerk. More importantly, Alex HAS TO BE a big jerk unless you take to the rooftops; the game does not give you the option to not be an immature loser.

The main mission is pretty par for the course. It starts 18 days into the infection of the city by the same virus that gave Alex his terrible terrible wonderful powers. You have every power available to you in the game and you basically fight off a big old military/infected monster fight. It’s pretty dumb, needlessly confusing and a terrible way to start any story much less a game. Plus the whole “I tell the story as you do it” thing just never works as a narrative; it totally removes you from the story every time they cut back to Alex. And, really, the writing never gets any better. Then the game switches back to Day 1 and you wake up in the morgue yadda yadda yadda.

There are a number of wacky side missions to go on and you unlock them as you continue on in the main mission. None of them are very interesting; they’ve pretty much all been done before in Spiderman 2 and most of them are frustrating because of the sloppy targetting system, camera and poor graphics. A lot of reviewers are making much over the stealth missions into army bases to consume certain people that raise your skill levels but even these are lame, all you do is walk slowly behind the target and hammer the Stealth Consume button. Stealth Consume won’t activate unless you’re completely safe so it’s basically a really boring game of follow the leader.

And yeah, the graphics are bad. I’m not a graphics snob by any means, give me 2-d, low-res sprites any day of the week but this actually affects gameplay. There’s tiny red printing on black backgrounds which is pretty much impossible to read without an HD TV and even with one it’s gonna be tricky and the character models are blocky and weird looking, like early Resident Evil games. Everything is grey, black or red; the city is incredibly washed out and lifeless. There’s about 7 different people you’ll see walking the streets and about 4 different cars. It’s almost impossible to tell the infected zombies apart from the normal citizens which also affects several missions, but this may actually be a choice on the part of the developers since you can unlock a power that lets you see enemies clearer, however. But since you have a HUD that tells you when enemies are near, it hardly matters.

Powers are another mixed bag. Most of them are just upgrades to what you have already and the controls to get most of the later ones off are impossible to read and unneccesary anyway, the game is crazy easy as it is just with hammering the default combat buttons. Or, just ignore the combat completely and spend the entire game in a tank. By the time the game unlocks the next set of powers to buy, you have so many Evolution Points they may as well have just given you all of them at once instead.

That’s the really big problem with the game, none of it is neccesary. Yeah, I can buy power upgrades but why? I can go on side missions to get Evolution Points but I already have a ton of them. I can absorb certain people to keep the military from noticing where I am but they don’t anyway; the Awareness meter that fills up as you do unnatural things just doesn’t. I regularly run down the middle of the street doing 30+ foot jumps and nobody bats an eyelash.

It IS fun to tear around the city tho, and unlocking the Glide power makes things even more fun. But I don’t just want a game where I run to the end of a boring city and then run back.

All in all the game is a Spiderman 2 clone that tries to break out more but everything it does pretty much falls flat. It’s not a terrible game but there’s better.