Prototype

by zeb k Thu Jun 14, 2012 12:10 am

Today I'm reviewing Prototype, a sandbox game developed by Activision.

Story **MAY CONTAIN MINOR SPOILERS**
Prototype losing several millions points right out of the box with this being the standard "guy who has no memory and goes to try to recover it" deal, and the plot can get so confusing sometimes that they had to put in a whole gameplay mechanic for eating the brains of people who might know what the hell's going on. So the game is set in New York City, where you wake up in a morgue after being shot and killed. After soldiers arive and try to kill you again, maybe to make you extra dead, and then you escape using superhuman powers you didn't know you had. So then you decide to go and hunt down the doctor guy that did this to you, and it turns out that the thing that kept you alive and gives you superhuman powers was some virus which procedes to infect New York. The virus makes people into zombie things, and then it turns into your standard New York zombie game, with the military trying to stop the virus and kill the zombies, and the zombies running around being zombies. Then you discover some big plot or something, and go to stop it. At least I think so. I mean your character may have just been on his way to get some frosty chocolate milkshakes and gotten mad when some marines in a tank cut him off, seeing as how the game wasn't exactly the most story based game.

Gameplay & combat
So the game is a 3rd person sandbox game, in which you run around killing people in various ways. Well, once you get the tentacle power, pretty much just that way, and it can make 20 enemy soldiers top halves say a dramatic goodbye to there bottom halves in about .087 seconds. I guess I better explain the powers in case you(yes you!) have the mental capasity of a brain dead dung beetle, and don't know that the word "powers" mean "kill, blood, slice, big sword, kill, huge fists for squashing" and so on. So the powers are powers. The virus lets you change your body into whatever you want, or at least whatever you've unlocked. So you gain XP by doing stuff and killing enemies, and then you can buy powers and upgrades to powers if you want, and the whole process turns into a obsessive D&D player filling out the character sheet for a half orc mage warrior accountant stripper with a tail. Now while I mentioned that the story is less than stellar, Prototype is the master of screwing around. I mean, you can run up the empire state building, slice 30 soldiers in half with a single tentacle swipe, and then eat them. Or you can steal a tank and go marauding around the streets like the worlds worse driving student, and you could go for a gunship and spend hours buzzing military bases and getting them angry at you, and then flying off when they start shooting, leaving them in the dust. So all in all for messing around killing time it's great. I personally found the combat quite annoying sometimes, such as when you are running away from a boss with no health and you are trying to grab some soldiers to eat to get your health back, and instead you go lunging right into the boss and get killed. So all in all, and I do with quite a few 3rd person games where the character is not bound to the mouse *cough*Assassin'sCreed*cough* I found the combat annoying and sometimes frustrating.

The main character
So you play as Alex Mercer, who (as I mentioned) lost his memory after getting infected with the virus and getting killed lost his memory and gets back a few pieces now and then. There isn't any of the moral choice stuff that infests some games, and Alex Mercer is rather comical in this respect. In some of the cutscenes it seems like the game is trying to get him across as a nice wronged guy who is only out for justice and to find out what happened to him, but this is a bit hard to swallow when he's chopping hoards of people in half with tentacles and plowing through massive crowds of civilians in a tank. So being a heartless bastard crossed with having the destructive capacity of a T Rex driving a semi truck is usually not a good combo for the people in the general area of 40 miles around you, and it shows in Prototype so if you object to killing civilians, I dunno if you want this game, as I think it's impossible to avoid killing any. I mean, they jump right in front of a charging tank and freeze. Talk about stupid....

So yeah, all in all this game is a great time killer and excells in the screwing around department, and I had a good time playing it, but it's no great work of art of anything. I found it for ten bucks on Amazon( http://www.amazon.com/PROTOTYPE-Pc/dp/B0012LGHZI/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1339653544&sr=8-7&keywords=prototype ), so if you want a game to pass the time, you like sandbox games, and don't mind eating peoples brains and slicing them in half, I'm say this game is right for you.