Prototype

Available on: Xbox 360, PS3, and PC
Played it on: PC
Played it for: 20 hours

RATING: 3.5/10

Want a game that's just an amalgam of all the action game cliches from 2005, mushed into a badly designed, horribly executed mess of a game? Then Prototype is for you!

Yes, that's a very strongly opinionated opening, but this game is a 3.5/10 for a reason. In all my gaming career, I've rarely come across a triple A cesspool of this magnitude. Sure, it happens. Brink and RAGE do exist, and despite by best interests, I continue to play some games with very minimal research into their actual function, so sometimes I end up with garbage like this. So, to begin in earnest.

I picked up Prototype because it was one of those games that I would see in stores, but would always pass up. Back when it first released in 2009, I wasn't old enough to purchase M rated games by myself, and I wasn't interested enough to try convincing my parents to come to GameStop with me to get it. And I hadn't heard too much about it, either, since YouTubers didn't really do a whole ton of Let's Plays back then, and those who did simply passed the game up as well. So I was left with a very well-designed box art and an intriguing premise, and that was about it. Alex Mercer is infected with a virus that gives him the power to mutate his body into weapons, and the whole city is becoming infected with the same thing. And Alex can somehow control his version, when the rest of the citizens become mindless zombies. Dark and gritty, but interesting nonetheless. Boy, was I let down.

To start, the game's color palette is brown. Sometimes there's some red if you look hard enough, but even when you visit the brighter parts of the city, everything seems... washed out. Even Alex's design is boring, he wears a black leather jacket with a grey hood and light blue jeans. And this minimal color is completely overtaken by browns as the city falls more and more to the rapidly spreading infection. I get that its trying to broadcast this forced gritty-ness, but even Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 had its brighter moments. Heck, even Gears of War had more color than this. And unfortunately, it only gets worse.

I'm going to bring up Modern Warfare 2 once again, but it's because I want something to be very clear to you lovely readers out there. 2009 was the same year that MW2 released. It was also the same year in which we saw the releases of Mirror's Edge, Killzone 2, and, very notably as we move forward, the first inFamous. That's the level of graphical fidelity and animation quality we're talking about. Prototype plays like none of these things. In fact, the animation quality isn't even something that we'd see out of a game released in 2005, and often looks equivalent to or worse than Halo: Combat Evolved, which released nearly a decade earlier. The explosions are barely better than animated 2D gif's, of which you'll be seeing plenty, and the rush to release becomes very apparent when nest buildings fall apart. They just sort of collapse in on themselves while the pieces clearly fade out. And it doesn't help that they're badly textured in obvious 2D.

Now, you may be saying that because Prototype is an open world sandbox game, it needs to load more things at once, and therefore must have less to load in general. I'd be inclined to agree with you, but I already brought up something very important: inFamous. inFamous is eerily similar to Prototype in a number of ways. They're both open-world games, both feature a protagonist with strange powers who can freely move around the environment and climb buildings set in a heavy urban map, and both have a fluid combat system that requires fast thinking and good use of existing powers. But one of these games does things properly, and the other botches them horribly. Can you guess which is which? You're correct! In inFamous, the world has volume. Windows and doors are set into buildings, cars are modeled with decent care, and Cole even stands out decently well with his bright yellow jacket and shining electric powers. In Prototype, everything looks like a dirty png was just slapped on some rectangles. Nice.

Well what about all the stuff you can do within the world? Sadly, its more of the same. Alex is just a person, so I get that big monsters could realistically knock him around, but it becomes insanely aggravating when every single enemy in the game can do it, even when Alex is coated in late-game, heavily dense armor. Soldiers have rocket launcher squads, tanks and helicopters have missiles, and all the mutated infected can knock Alex around like a pinball. This seems to encourage a highly mobile hit-and-run playstyle, except anything thrown or fired can track you, so distance means next to nothing as well. And despite the fact that the game has built-in combos, you'll never get any of them off because they make Alex stand still for too long, and he'll just get the crap kicked out of him. And the only ranged abilities Alex has are to throw large objects, which don't track and rarely hit their mark because the automatic target selector is awful. Instead of aiming where the camera is aiming, Alex shoots or throws at whatever his character model is facing, which means that if you want to actually hit anything, you have to turn Alex around and aim first, breaking what little fluidity the moving combat has.

On top of it all, the story is... well, to be honest, I don't even really remember. The main problem is that while I came to care about Cole McGrath's story in inFamous, I don't care even remotely about Alex Mercer. The story strives to make him so edgy that he becomes lost in a sea of generic tropes and black leather. And unlike Cole, you can't choose Alex's path. Even if Cole only had the good and bad karma options, the fact that they existed at all made a huge difference because they affected his powers, the story, and the whole game in general. Alex is instead forced down a single, boring path that becomes obscured by all the terrible boss fights and vague mission parameters. What remains is a skeletal premise about Alex saving his sister or something, and and then fighting some infected and murdering a bunch of people. Alex himself is the product of a scientific experiment with a bunch of horribly cheesy codenames like Project Blacklight that seem ripped straight from the corniest Resident Evil storylines. And in the end, I just don't care. And that's a shame.

I could keep going about a lot of things here. The AI is horrendous, I had to restart one mission four times because three of those tries ended when my allied helicopter crashed into me and killed me. Not to mention the parts when the military will exclusively target Alex, even when a berserk boss mob is ripping them to shreds and Alex is obviously helping to kill it. The map is badly laid out, the side missions are generic and tiring, and the story missions themselves offer little to no explanation as to how anything is connected or what Alex's motivations even are. The disguise power is absolutely worthless outside of specific missions, and the game actually looks and plays considerably worse on PC than on console, seeing as the resolutions are heavily limited and the controls are pretty terrible. Ultimately, I'd suggest that you avoid this one. I realize that die hard fans of this game exist, and I apologize for my rather visceral reaction to it, but I cannot in good conscience recommend this game to any sane gamer. Play inFamous, or, even better, just play something newer and with more polish like inFamous: Second Son. This game nearly gave me any aneurysm, and I'm glad it's now off my hard drive.