Prototype Review
OVERVIEW
Alex Mercer seeks to regain his memory, and exact vengeance on those that infected him.
REVIEW
The hero is a man with limitless power, a victim of an experiment gone awry, and oh yes, he has amnesia. Sounds a little familiar, doesn’t it?
One thing about video games is that certain ideas get used to death. But in a capitalistic world, a company is always going to go with what sells, isn’t it? And what seems to sell in games is this character type in a world where you can do just about anything you want. The concept familiarity doesn’t stop with the lead character – even the sprawling Manhattan sandbox suffers from the all-too-familiar muted color palate that seems to pervade action games these days. Seriously – no one in the entire city has a flowerpot anywhere? This game could do with a little color.
But then, I am getting ahead of myself.
The game begins in a morgue, where you as the protagonist Alex Mercer awaken on a slab, much to the surprise of the morticians examining you. You find that you have incredible power, and quickly are thrust into a brief combat scenario where you are taught to use a variety of Alex’s incredibly powerful abilities… which you quickly lose as the game rewinds into a standard flashback. Again – extremely familiar.
As the game progresses, you slowly gain access to more and more of his powers. Eventually your strength, agility, and jumping increase several fold, your melee repertoire diversifies and becomes more powerful, you learn to use different weapons and vehicles and your proficiency in using them increases, and you can shapeshift your body into an array of different offensive forms with varied natural weapon and armor types. In true sandbox form, your ability to traverse the city soon grows to the point where you are literally scaling skyscrapers in seconds and gliding across the city, well above the civilians and enemies below.
A standard ability which sticks with you throughout the game is Alex’s ability to absorb anyone in the game and shapeshift into their form. Disguise becomes an integral part of your strategy as there are several occasions where you are expected to move undetected – and disguising yourself as a civilian or a base commander will allow you to access areas unmolested that you would otherwise have to fight to enter.
I mentioned before that Alex has lost his memory – specifically those memories relating to what happened to him and who is responsible. The game actually has a fairly clever way of revealing this information to you – the Web of Intrigue. Throughout the game, there are specific NPCs that you can absorb in order to relive a fragment of their memory. This helps you piece together one of several lines of investigation in which you learn a bit more about the virus that has hit the city, and the players involved. These targets are scattered throughout the game – some you will encounter and absorb automatically as you encounter them in missions, but some you need to find by breaking into secure military bases, and others you stumble upon by exploring the city. After absorbing each, a short movie plays, allowing you to relive that fragment of their memory that deals with the information Alex is searching for. I enjoyed the Web of Intrigue mechanic – it was fairly innovative way of weaving the backstory logically into the game.
There are still more targets that you go after for knowledge – specifically the skills needed to use the variety of weapons and vehicles in the game. Most of the soldiers have a weapon of some kind – a rocket launcher or machine gun usually, that they will drop when they are defeated or absorbed. Alex can pick these weapons up and use them against any target in the game – military, civilian, vehicle – and even some buildings. Absorbing certain targets in military bases will increase Alex’s skill with these weapons, making them more effective. Other targets in these bases allow Alex to use the variety of vehicles – and soon you are able to hijack tanks and helicopters and use them in your fight.
This game has the potential to be wall-to-wall action, but mercifully it has an incredible amount of balance which allows you to approach almost any objective in a variety of different manners. Like GTA, there is a system in place where when you are spotted by the military, they go into full alert and begin to target you. These conflicts can escalate to the point where a Strike Team is called in to take you out. Combat can get quite bloody and chaotic, especially in civilian areas. There are literally tons of civilians so many in fact that in the middle of a brawl, it can be difficult to know who is a bystander and who is trying to kill you. Not that it really matters, since civilians are fair game – your character doesn’t have any problems smashing, slicing, blowing up, or eating civilians – or even grabbing one, running up a tall building with them flailing in your arm, and hurling it as hard as you can at a helicopter trying to kill you. You can also absorb civilians to take their form and to gain a little boost in health. You find yourself frequently dropping into a crowd of civilians just to slaughter them to max out your health meter. Alex sometimes seems sympathetic in the cut scenes, but in reality he is anything but. But I digress.
When you are taking a lot of damage, sometimes it is a good idea to take out the things trying to kill you. In the chaos of some of the brawls, it can be tough to spot exactly who is shooting at you and who is just running around in a panic. There is an ability that allows you to track hostiles that kind of looks like a thermal vision which helps in that regard, but more often than not you will find yourself not using it. When things get too hot, it is often easier to run up a building, take out the helicopters targeting you by throwing air conditioner units at them (or hijacking one, and using it to destroy the others), and hide out until they have lost your trail. Then you can slip back into the mob in your new form, and the military is none-the-wiser. This doesn’t work on infected enemies – these usually take the form of mutated civilians, but sometimes you encounter beefed up hunters which are usually very difficult to kill – they have the ability to sense the virus within you, and will find you whatever form you take. Getting distance from these groups is the key when things get too hot.
The balance here really is the beauty of the game. You can approach just about any fight a variety of different ways – from a complete stealth approach to a full-frontal assault. The side-quests can be monotonous, but the different ways you can approach them keeps things interesting. One thing you will find yourself doing frequently is breaking into military bases (which requires you to assume the form of the base commander, who is usually walking around the entrance, and get to the entrance without setting off an alarm). You find many Web of Intrigue targets and skill bonuses in these, so you usually find yourself cleaning each of these out in between missions. Upon entering the base you are in disguise – and outside the targets I listed above (which you need alive so you can absorb them), you generally want to clear out the base.
After a while, I started getting bored with this, and did what I could to clear out most of the base without actually attacking anyone. You can absorb someone using a stealth technique when none of the soldiers can see you that will avoid setting off an alarm. You can also frame someone, accusing a soldier of being you and causing the surrounding military to open fire on your patsy. This is a source of some entertainment, let me tell you.
The different tactics you can employ to clear out these bases keeps this repetitive side-mission from becoming too mundane. As with many games, you gain powers by spending XP, in the form of Evolution Points, which you gain by random killing or completing side quests. The upgrades become expensive, so doing the side quests is almost essential. Thankfully the skills at your disposal keep things varied, and prevents the game from getting too monotonous.
Combat takes a little practice, but becomes very intuitive as the game goes on. One thing I have to give this game credit for is the consistent and varied power levels of your opponents. You have your fodder, which take the form of infected civilians which usually can’t do much damage on their own and die quickly, but can sometimes swarm you like something out of a zombie flick. The soldiers are also soft and easy to kill, but their weapons do a bit more damage. Hunters can be brutal – so much so that you can’t even go head-to-head with them at the beginning of the game, and vehicles are nearly impossible to kill throughout most of the game without some kind of weaponry – be it a car or some other debris being thrown at them, hijacking, or a missile launcher. Instead of facing increasingly more powerful enemies, everything remains at about the same power level – you just gain more varied ways of tackling each foe. While you eventually become a virtually unstoppable killing machine, you still can take damage – a lot of it, from certain opponents. It does become challenging when you are fighting the military to find yourself near an infected hive. No matter how powerful you are, to suddenly find yourself in the middle of an intense crossfire with small arms fire on every side, the occasional rocket explosion sending you flying, with infected civilians swarming you, one or two hunters chasing you down, a tank lobbing shells at you, and a gunship unleashing on you from above for good measure isn’t a walk in the park.
There is no multiplayer – and while I have seen this game get criticized for the lack of the multiplayer aspect, I have to say that it really isn’t needed. I can’t think of how multiplayer would enrich this game – and an online versus system would just become boring after a while. Some games just don’t need multiplayer to be good, and this is one of them. I am actually glad that they didn’t try to cram that in there just for the check-mark in the game listings. It isn’t needed or wanted here.
Overall, I have to say this game is a lot of fun. It seems made for the console though – not only does the game have very high resource requirements for the PC (check your system before you buy), but the combat is much more natural with a handheld controller. If you are planning on picking this game up, I recommend the Playstation or Xbox versions.
Prototype suffers from some generic themes, a boring color palate, and some fairly monotonous side-quests, but the story is decent and the gameplay is frankly exciting. The variety of tactics at your disposal and the consistent and varied power levels of your different opponents makes each battle you enter into an exciting war. I have to say it is well worth playing.
Overall Rating:
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