Prototype Serves Up A Large Slice of Fun (Prototype (PC))

Member Name: dissident505

Product:	Prototype (PC)
Date:	12/07/09 (28 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Open world, different ways to play

Disadvantages: See main review

Prototype is a third person open world action game. You play as Alex Mercer, a man with a past he can't remember. Alex isn't a normal guy. The first thing he remembers is awaking in a morgue and quickly learns the military is intent on capturing him. From the outset he has incredible abilities. He can sprint faster, jump higher and punch harder than any man should be able to. He can run up vertical walls, pick up cars and throw them at helicopters and he can consume people in the city to gain health and take their appearance. Alex is infected with a secret virus which gives him these abilities and he's out to find out who did this to him.

The game unfolds in a GTA style open world city, populated with pedestrians, cars, many buildings, police, military personnel, tanks and helicopters. The game takes place in a version of New York which you can roam in freely from the very start. Alex has may abilities and can upgrade existing ones and purchase new ones with evolution points. EPs are basically the money in this game. When you complete missions, destroy military or infected you get points. By going into the game's menu, you can upgrade yourself at any point. This was a nice feature as I was expecting to only be able to do this at the end or start of missions. The EPs are easy to get and I ended up with much more than I needed. This allowed me to purchase all the skills in the game and I think the creators intended this. Protoype is a lot of fun from the get go and it seems purposefully designed this way. When you start off you have a few basic abilities, a fraction of what you'll end up with, but this is more than enough to start having fun with. You can free run across the city, running up vertical building walls, hooping along the tops of skyscrapers, pick up cars and people and chuck them into other cars or people. As you evolve, you gain access to some really useful and devastating skills. The combat is mostly close range but you can use machine guns, hijack tanks and military helicopters and order artillary strikes. Even the "hand to hand" combat is incredibly varied. You start with your bare fists which is more than capable of dispatching the early game enemies. As the game goes on you can get claw hands which slice people clean in two with a single swipe. Giant Hulk hands which can punch tanks to pieces and create shockwaves. You get super powered muscles which allow you to punch people into a mist of blood and gore. A blade arm which can again cut through people and tanks, like the claws but much more powerful. Lastly there was the whipfist which basically turns your arm into a long destructive whip used for mid range combat and also grabbing things from a distance. Each of these styles has many moves to purchase so as you can see, there's a lot of ways to cause havoc. Definately worth mentioning is the devastator moves. These are as the name suggests, incredibly powerful and flashy moves which use part of you life bar. You can only use these when your life bar is near the top so you never feel too bad about sacrificing a small portion of health for large scale destruction. One example of a devastator move is where Alex shoots out black spike tendrils from all over his body which impale anything and anyone is view. As you may have gathered by now, Prototype isn't shy when it comes to showing the effects of Alex's attacks. Bodies are bisected, limbs fly and most of the time you're the cause. I found it not to be distracting, instead it added to the feeling of super powered carnage. It only makes sense that a man out for revenge with a giant blade in place of his arm would cut someone in two when he attacked them.

I've heard some people grumbling about the game's graphics saying they look last gen. I don't agree with this. It may not have the most detailed textures or highest polygon count for the characters or objects it still looks good. It have goog lighting and visual effects, the city have a lot of NPCs and traffic at all times and it manages to keep a solid frame rate all the way through. I ran it at 1920 x 1200 on highest settings using an overclocked GT8800 512MB and even with explosions going off all over the frame rate didn't drop any noticable amount.

Time for the bad points of the game, of which there aren't many. Some of the abilities become quickly redundant so you'll likely find yourself using only one or two most of the time and the different vision types seemed a bit pointless, save for one mission which required a vision type which could see infected carriers. The main evasive move in the game, the dodge roll, was disappointing. You could roll left, right or back to avoid attacks but the distant Alex rolled and the time it took for him to get back up meant you would often come out of a roll straight into another attack.

There's a technical issue with the PC version of this game worth mentioning incase anyone is having the problem themselves. Some people have found that when they go into a military base or top of a high building, Alex will hardly turn. I had this problem and it case me a few unnecessary deaths and a lot of wasted time. If you're having this problem then you need to enable V-Sync in the options menu. This cured the problem for me and except for that, I haven't had any other problems.

Summary: 4 out of 5 for Prototype on the PC. Not perfect, but too much fun not to try.