Thoughts About Prototype

I was supposed to like Prototype. It’s been getting great reviews, hard-core gamers all over the web have been raving about the combat system, and even the Official Xbox Magazine had a review predicting that game developers would be copying its dynamic for years to come. I guess I was disappointed when the only two feelings emotions the game drew out of me were boredom and frustration.

Prototype cast you as Alex Mercer, a ex-black forces marine who is supposedly killed by a deadly mutagen. When he wakes up in the morgue a few days later, he finds himself infected with the virus and imbued with its powers. Super speed, wall scaling, appendage blades and bionic armor all play a part in Alex’s arsenal. As the game progresses experience points can be spent to upgrade, or “evolve”, these abilities turning him into one scary symbiotic mother. So what is a meta-human to do with all these newfound powers? Sadly not much. The games missions consistently rotate between “go there”, “kill him”, and “reach this point before the time runs out”.

Unfortunately, he also wakes up to find that he wasn’t the only infected. The city is at work between military soldiers, who want Alex dead, and a mutated zombie like population, who also want to see Alex dead. Throughout much of the game, I was deciding which side to let live longer to help me kill the other side.

In repetitious game play would have been more forgivable if it wasn’t for the unbalanced difficulty. The mission would swing the pendulum on the difficulty setting. One mission being ridiculously easy, and the next being so insanely hard it borer-lined on ‘cheap’.

All the meta-human powers in the world wouldn’t don’t really mean a thing when you’re being chased down by an endless barrage of helicopter rockets.

Normally, a game this repetitive and frustrating can get a few extra points from me if the story line is solid enough, but sadly this is not the case here either. What starts out as a tale of revenge, turns into dark tragedy. As it turns out, Alex died because of that initial infection, and your avatar is merely the virus whose consumed his memories.

I’m normally a fan of less-than-happy endings, but it was so anticlimactic it almost didn’t make the seven hours I spent playing the game through worth it.

It wasn’t all bad. Once all the missions were completed and you’re given “free roam” over the city, I did enjoy running rouge around Times Square looking for any surviving zombies to hunt. And I do appreciate the developers thinking outside of the box the avatar. The abilities that were possible have never been attempted in a video game before, so they really broke some ground. Outside of this, I could have passed on Prototype. My final score is a weak 4/10.

Does this look infected to you?