Prototype (Xbox 360)
Genre: Third-Person Action Publisher: Activision Developer: Radical Entertainment Players: 1
That’s the other thing: where inFamous gave you powers that you could, with some effort, imagine being in a Marvel or DC character, Prototype is decidedly bloody. Incredibly so, in fact.
Mercer is some form of a shape shifter, allowing him to contort his body into a variety of weapons from hammers to blades, but more interestingly it allows him to assume the shapes of people he’s consumed, which he does to regain health. The application of this ability is handled well, allowing Mercer to infiltrate military bases, learn the skills of the people he’s absorbed, and evade capture by changing shape when nobody’s looking.
Beyond movement and concealment, the mutating abilities allow for a simply staggering array of weapons and abilities to be unlocked, but there is a chance that you’ll find it just too much. A hundred potential skills doesn’t make for a hundred useful unlocks. Once we were comfortable with a select few that’s what we stuck with, and it’s somewhat telling that we didn’t use a Devastator attack (consume enough living things to push your health bar over 100 per cent and you can unleash a mega attack) until the final boss battle? Why? Because we’d lost interest in trying to learn all the combinations with the controller after we had about 15 skills.
Assuming the skills and appearance of the military also lets you commandeer military vehicles, which leads to some of the most brutal and rewarding combat seen in a sandbox game. Armoured vehicles can be driven through Times Square and over hundreds of people, all the while blasting choppers out of the sky, which is an impressive feat.
Where inFamous adopted a Spiderman-like approach to getting the titular character around, Prototype adopts a less intricate method. Mercer can run straight up walls, meaning there’s little thought needed in navigating the city, and when you’ve got six helicopters and 10 tanks hot on your heels, then that’s a good thing. He can also glide (allowing brief bursts of flying across the rooftops) and, once you start hammering points into upgrading his movement, it becomes a marvel at how well you can get him to traverse the city.
Visually, Prototype does a lot of good things. The city isn’t fog-laden and has an impressive draw distance, and once an area becomes infected, and has a hive centre, it takes on a distinctly dark aura. Thousands of crows circle the buildings, a reddish tint seeps into everything, and infected roam the streets. The number of people in the streets is also remarkable and really whets the appetite for Dead Rising 2 which promises 7,000 AI at once. Traffic does more than simply go in a straight line around the city, and having a taxi skid and slide into the side of your tank as you crunch pedestrian infected like peanuts brings forth some guilty giggles.
But all of this doesn’t help push Prototype into the realms of the amazing. Instead, in its own way, it makes it too convoluted, and it becomes a victim of how far it tried to reach.
The brilliant storyline is hamstrung by the need to find and consume characters in the city to unlock further clues to Mercer’s past. There are 131 of them, and although plenty of work has gone into the image montages and the voice work over the top once you do absorb a story-related person, there comes a point where trying to gather them becomes a chore. When the end credits rolled, we had 44.
Gathering things goes beyond the story. In a distinctly Crackdown-like effort, there are 250 orbs you can collect around the city, 200 of which are normal orbs that give an XP bonus, and the remaining 50 are hints. The problem is that as you collect the hints they interrupt play to tell you something you already knew, such as ‘Use combinations of X and Y for different attacks’ which you certainly don’t need to hear after eight hours of play; and all 250 of them fall victim to the actual control scheme of the game. Running to the top of a building, only to have to jump back and forth across its apex to get an orb (because Alex doesn’t climb, and his jumps can take him 50 feet into the air) is an exercise in tedium.
As you would expect, there are plenty of side missions too and again, these have had serious thought put into them. Each has its own unique name and objective, unlike the Mayhem ones in the GTA world. While interesting to break up the monotony, there are some that just can’t be completed once you start, because you need to have upgraded your movement skills to be able to do so. By the time you’ve hit the credits, there’s not much chance you’ll go back to do them all, unless you’ve lots of time on your hands.
Prototype could have been amazing, and in some ways it is, but it just doesn’t come together in the way we’d hoped. It’s scattered, confusing, and finicky, and lacks a depth of detail to go with its ambitious reach. Yes it is fun for a while, but lacks the sort of replay value we’d hoped for, and that’s a shame. Had the co-op that was promised way back in the early stages of development been implemented, it could have solved a lot of the replay issues.
By Keith B (16th Jun 2009)
The last review of the big three sandbox titles to land in the past fortnight is worth the entry price, but whether you’ll stick with it after completion is another matter.
Prototype has been touted as perhaps the best of the three recent open-world game releases – the other two being Red Faction: Guerrilla and the PS3 exclusive inFamous – but we beg to differ. Oh, it has some absolutely brilliant elements, but by the time the end credits rolled, there isn’t much to entice you back.
But let’s get stuck into the good things. The story follows the tale of Alex Mercer, who has lost most of his memory but been gifted with awesome – and bloody - powers, and starts a trail of destruction to work out what’s happened. As a backdrop to this, Manhattan Island is slowly decaying from the inside, following the release of a virus that is consuming the city’s inhabitants at a staggering rate. Mercer engages the military and the infected as he traverses the city from on high.
The story is riddled with holes, and it’s up to you to plug said holes by discovering people throughout the city, and consuming them.
That’s the other thing: where inFamous gave you powers that you could, with some effort, imagine being in a Marvel or DC character, Prototype is decidedly bloody. Incredibly so, in fact.
Mercer is some form of a shape shifter, allowing him to contort his body into a variety of weapons from hammers to blades, but more interestingly it allows him to assume the shapes of people he’s consumed, which he does to regain health. The application of this ability is handled well, allowing Mercer to infiltrate military bases, learn the skills of the people he’s absorbed, and evade capture by changing shape when nobody’s looking.
Beyond movement and concealment, the mutating abilities allow for a simply staggering array of weapons and abilities to be unlocked, but there is a chance that you’ll find it just too much. A hundred potential skills doesn’t make for a hundred useful unlocks. Once we were comfortable with a select few that’s what we stuck with, and it’s somewhat telling that we didn’t use a Devastator attack (consume enough living things to push your health bar over 100 per cent and you can unleash a mega attack) until the final boss battle? Why? Because we’d lost interest in trying to learn all the combinations with the controller after we had about 15 skills.
Assuming the skills and appearance of the military also lets you commandeer military vehicles, which leads to some of the most brutal and rewarding combat seen in a sandbox game. Armoured vehicles can be driven through Times Square and over hundreds of people, all the while blasting choppers out of the sky, which is an impressive feat.
Where inFamous adopted a Spiderman-like approach to getting the titular character around, Prototype adopts a less intricate method. Mercer can run straight up walls, meaning there’s little thought needed in navigating the city, and when you’ve got six helicopters and 10 tanks hot on your heels, then that’s a good thing. He can also glide (allowing brief bursts of flying across the rooftops) and, once you start hammering points into upgrading his movement, it becomes a marvel at how well you can get him to traverse the city.
Visually, Prototype does a lot of good things. The city isn’t fog-laden and has an impressive draw distance, and once an area becomes infected, and has a hive centre, it takes on a distinctly dark aura. Thousands of crows circle the buildings, a reddish tint seeps into everything, and infected roam the streets. The number of people in the streets is also remarkable and really whets the appetite for Dead Rising 2 which promises 7,000 AI at once. Traffic does more than simply go in a straight line around the city, and having a taxi skid and slide into the side of your tank as you crunch pedestrian infected like peanuts brings forth some guilty giggles.
But all of this doesn’t help push Prototype into the realms of the amazing. Instead, in its own way, it makes it too convoluted, and it becomes a victim of how far it tried to reach.
The brilliant storyline is hamstrung by the need to find and consume characters in the city to unlock further clues to Mercer’s past. There are 131 of them, and although plenty of work has gone into the image montages and the voice work over the top once you do absorb a story-related person, there comes a point where trying to gather them becomes a chore. When the end credits rolled, we had 44.
Gathering things goes beyond the story. In a distinctly Crackdown-like effort, there are 250 orbs you can collect around the city, 200 of which are normal orbs that give an XP bonus, and the remaining 50 are hints. The problem is that as you collect the hints they interrupt play to tell you something you already knew, such as ‘Use combinations of X and Y for different attacks’ which you certainly don’t need to hear after eight hours of play; and all 250 of them fall victim to the actual control scheme of the game. Running to the top of a building, only to have to jump back and forth across its apex to get an orb (because Alex doesn’t climb, and his jumps can take him 50 feet into the air) is an exercise in tedium.
As you would expect, there are plenty of side missions too and again, these have had serious thought put into them. Each has its own unique name and objective, unlike the Mayhem ones in the GTA world. While interesting to break up the monotony, there are some that just can’t be completed once you start, because you need to have upgraded your movement skills to be able to do so. By the time you’ve hit the credits, there’s not much chance you’ll go back to do them all, unless you’ve lots of time on your hands.
Prototype could have been amazing, and in some ways it is, but it just doesn’t come together in the way we’d hoped. It’s scattered, confusing, and finicky, and lacks a depth of detail to go with its ambitious reach. Yes it is fun for a while, but lacks the sort of replay value we’d hoped for, and that’s a shame. Had the co-op that was promised way back in the early stages of development been implemented, it could have solved a lot of the replay issues.
6.9
Single Play
7.4
Friend Play
0.0
Multi Play
0.0
Graphics
8.2
Sound
7.5
Challenge
6.8
Entertainment
6.9
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Prototype
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Prototype (X360)
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we say:
6.9 - you say: 5
- scores: 1 your score: 0/10
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Terrible review. I recommend going to another site (Gamespot.com) if you want to get a good impression of what to expect from prototype. I doubt the guy who wrote this is an actual gamer, he obviously rushed through it at 8
Hours. Pass on Hellbored.
Seems to be getting mixed reviews all over the place. How come every sandbox game has that one thing that ruins everything?