Borrowing from open world trailblazers, is this the new gold standard, or still a work in progress?
Format: PS3 (version played), Xbox 360, PC Dev: Radical Entertainment Pub: Activision Out: 12/06/09 Players: 1
You are Alex Mercer in a city overrun with disgusting mutants and angry military types, all out to get you. But it’s OK, because Alex Mercer is “a walking slaughterhouse”, in the words of the developers at Radical, the team behind the new open world, superhero game, Prototype. Well, I say ‘superhero’, but it’s more like: pissed off bloke with recently acquired powers that allow him to kill everything in sight.
The story of Prototype kicks off with Alex Mercer walking up in a morgue with no memory of how he got there, or how he gained the ability to shape shift his body in a variety of different ways. Alex can mimic any character he consumes, enabling him to avoid detection from angry strike teams – sent out to kill him – and infiltrate certain buildings. He can also run up the sides of buildings, throw cars halfway across New York city, and form deadly claws, blades and other instruments of nastiness to get the job done.
All of these abilities can be upgraded by using experience points gained from completing story missions or side-quests. The amount of upgrades available is quite staggering. Multiple powers are unlocked as you progress through the game. Each one has its own list of upgrades added to your Movement, Weapon and Vehicle upgrades, so you’re looking at a pretty long list. Needless to say, once you’ve completed the game you’ll feel a whole lot more powerful than you did at the start. The feeling of progression is quite satisfying and gives you an incentive to actually play through the story and not just muck about – which is very tempting.
Unlike most super-powered hard-nuts, who foolishly rely on freakish abilities to fight their enemies, Alex takes advantage of everything he can. You can wield machine guns, grenade launchers, tanks and pilot helicopters. All of which adds to the gameplay variety and gives you various options when undertaking a mission. You can take a more stealthy approach – consume a few guards, use disguises – or (perhaps more likely) go in all guns blazing and just unleash hell upon whoever stands in your way.
Being Alex Mercer really gives you a sense of power, and crucial to this is the free running mechanic. Once Alex starts to sprint he can flip over walls, jump from building to building, and even glide to the ground. And it works brilliantly. Just roaming around New York can take up hours and, naturally, there are plenty of collectable tokens hidden about to keep you occupied. The combat mechanics are equally as satisfying, too. L2 locks on to the nearest enemy and you can switch targets with a flick of the analogue stick. The variety of powers keeps it from getting stale and there are numerous combos and special attacks to sink your teeth into. Prototype is also stupidly gory. People are sliced in half, skulls are crushed, copious amounts of blood are shed – not one for the kids by a long shot. Should you grow tired of dismembering civilians there are a number of side-quests scatted throughout the city – mostly involving killing yet more civilians, or racing across rooftops. These add to the amount of fun you can squeeze out of Prototype once you’ve finished the story missions.
On visuals side the game isn’t exactly mind blowing. Textures are pretty bland, buildings all look relatively similar and there is noticeable pop-in. However, the game runs exceptionally smoothly and the frame rate never drops, even during intense action – of which there is plenty. The shape shifting animations are good, but there is very little variety among the NPCs. Voice acting is passable, although the story never really grabs you in, anyway. Despite these points it doesn’t take anything away from the pure fun that Prototype offers, which is some of the best open world action this generation. If you enjoy open world adventure games, like blowing sh*t up and killing lots of people, then give Prototype a rent.
Stuart Kent
[Originally published on Saturday, 25 July 2009]
Tags: action, activision, prototype
