Prototype

There comes a time in every game reviewer’s “career” where they are truly stunned. You see, after playing more games than the average person would care to – including all of those titles that the average person would avoid like the plague – we think we’ve seen it all. That’s not the best attitude in the world to have, but it really is kind of unavoidable. Every now and again though – albeit on increasingly rare occasions – we pop that disc into the console to try out yet another blockbuster new franchise that is bound to promise more than it delivers, and the cobwebs start to clear. We remember exactly why we do what we do.

Prototype is one of those titles. From the outset, the game delivers exactly what it promises, and provides a full-on action-packed experience that takes its influences from several titles, improving on each one seemingly as a matter of course. I’m aware that’s a bold claim to make, but when you’ve just completed the first boss battle – which sees you trying desperately to avoid being cornered by a gang of huge zombie swines whilst seeking out elusive rocket launchers in order to stage some sort of attack against them – and you realise that it’s taken you a full twenty minutes and that in that time, you’ve not moved an inch in your seat or taken your eyes off the screen, well, that pretty much says it all.

Forgetting the superlatives and getting down to the traditional description, Prototype puts you in the shoes of Alex Mercer, a standard-looking fellow who has the handy ability to become an carbon copy of anyone who gets in his way. This stretches so far as to allowing him to access limited amounts of their thoughts, and also enables him to use their overall look as a disguise. With only a basic knowledge of his past, Mercer is on a quest to find out not only how his powers were gained, but to take revenge on those that are responsible. Sure, it isn’t massively original, but the twists and turns of the plot do make up for it – along with some excellent presentation.

To begin with, the game leads you by the hand for a fair amount of time, teaching you the skills that will see you through the rest of the game. Straight away, you realise that you’re playing something a little bit special – and that realisation comes as soon as you depress the shoulder button and sprint through the chaotic New York streets for the first time. Rather than asking you to jump every time you come to an obstacle, the developers have made Mercer somewhat more understanding to his surroundings than the main protagonists in other titles have been. If you’re running toward an upturned yellow taxi for example, Alex will automatically leap over it, causing you only a very limited loss of momentum. This adds to Prototype’s pace and makes the action as smooth as butter. Mercer can also run along any surface, with no limit to how far he can go – meaning that you can run all the way to the top of the tallest building in the city if you wish, and then leap off into the unknown, hitting your glide button to get our main man to spread his arms and glide gracefully to your next target. Prototype is relatively simple to control too, and this helps the game to become the new benchmark when it comes to free-roaming titles. The area on offer may not be akin to the size of the likes of the Grand Theft Auto titles, but it’s a heck of a lot easier to navigate – and lots more fun to do so.

As far as offense goes, Mercer has his basic hand-to-hand style attacks in his arsenal, and these can be used to devastating effect when combined with an awesome leap. The ability to pick up guns and other weaponry from downed enemies is also on hand and whilst the choice of using the “X” button to fire was a bit of a strange one, it still works well enough. On top of this, a lot of items can be transformed into a ranged weapon since the character is devastatingly strong, and able to throw a taxi at a helicopter without breaking a sweat.

Graphically, the game doesn’t give you a second to stop and stare at the textures – which are of acceptable quality – or to look at how convincingly the pedestrians scatter in fear as an explosion occurs nearby. At times, the game suffers from ferocious pop-up, although it isn’t something you’ll necessarily notice when you’re sprinting towards your next port of call. Slowdown is non-existent, and that’s probably due to the quite limited draw distance that can be found when you scale a tall building. However, I’m more than happy to sacrifice the ability to see for a hundred miles, if the close-range gameplay runs smoothly – which it does. There are limits on the ground which can be a tad frustrating, such as the inability to damage anything bigger than a car and a limited number of pedestrian styles, which causes a feeling of repetition. It most certainly is not a game-breaker.

The reason I haven’t gone into more finite detail about the actions that your avatar can perform is simply that a lot of the fun I had with the game came from realising that the new ability that I’d just earnt was just another superb addition. At more than one juncture, I headed back into the game to try out my new-found power and just boomed “Oh YES! That’s what we want!” – and I wouldn’t want to take the joy of the surprise away from any potential purchasers. You see, Prototype is unlike many games of the current generation. They all start with blockbuster trailers and deep, emotional introductory movies and some even get so far as to providing a level’s worth of compelling gameplay, before petering out into bland repetitiveness. That doesn’t happen here. You will have played something like each of the missions in the past though, and there could have been a little bit more thought into providing more varied mission types. The two player online co-op mode helps with that somewhat – and that works as well as if you were sat in the room next to your ally.

I think it’s fair to say that the storyline isn’t going to win any prizes, and that it may not be an entirely original concept, but those – along with my previous comments about the limitations of the game engine- are truly is all I’ve got in terms of downsides. Some have complained that the game is unfair and unrealistic in terms of the way the army and police come after you for seemingly everything. My rebuttal to that is that if you were in the army, watching for a superhuman freak that could leap tall buildings and you saw, well, a superhuman freak that was leaping a tall building, would you not react? My case is rested.

The sheer pace and intuitiveness of the game shows that an awful lot of thought has gone into what would make me shout “Take THAT, you bastard!” at the screen as I played, rather than shouting expletives at the game’s engine for killing me unfairly one more time. I can’t do anything but applaud that. It has its faults, but somehow it overcomes them to provide an incredibly solid playing experience. In fact, I’m quite prepared to say that Prototype is one of the finest Western-developed games that I’ve played in the last ten years. This is simply stunning, and definitely not a title that you should overlook.