Prototype

Recommended Videos

Suikun

New member
Mar 25, 2009
159
0
0
Forenote: I'll start off by saying thus; I never actually completed the game because... well, it got so tedious and boring to do anything more that I simply lost interest, and I'd seen my friend play through the game the day before, so I knew the entire story already. Truth be told, all that awaits me are precious achievement points, and we all know just how useless those truly are when the day's done, but I suppose I'll continue my gaming masochism after I play a few day's worth of Rock Band 2 to flush my palette.

Prototype
Platform: XBox 360
Made by: Activison
Rating: M (Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language)


So I'll begin things with a small explanation as to how exactly I got this game. Truth be told: I hate the idea of open-world stories. To me it seems that it gives you too much freedom and you feel like dicking around in the environment more than you do actually completing the game. Some people enjoy this, I suppose, and it's not my cuppa tea, but for my friend and cousin, he would pay $300 dollars for it as though it were a cheap hooker. You see, my friend lacks a 360, because he recently sold it in a short-sighted attempt to further his PC gaming abilities. When he realized he prefers console to PC, he immediately tried every possible way he could to wrack up cash to re-buy his old system. When that plan fell through, he returned to me and we struck an agreement that if he bought the game, he was free to use my Xbox to play it, so long as I, too, was able to try my hand at the madness. Thus our symbiotic relationship grows still today, and part of me wishes he never gets another damned system for the rest of his life because of this.

So Prototype, a hack-and-slash, open-world, mystery game of sorts that I personally think of as "Resident Evil meets Assassin's Creed, with God of War style combat". And essentially that's exactly what Prototype amounts to: you kill things in disturbingly bloody ways with large, overpowered weaponry, but you're supposed to be inclined to be at least somewhat stealthy in the process of your murder spree. More on that later.

To merit the game where it deserves it, Prototype is exactly what it markets itself to be; bloody, gory madness the likes of which are rivaled only by the Gears of War franchise. No big tricks are pulled out of the bag, and if you're looking for a good senseless murder spree game (much like Grand Theft Auto), then this is definitely worth at least a rent of.

But before I spoil too much of what I'm going to say, let's actually get to what I'm saying, shall we?

STORY

The story of Prototype is unique within itself. The entirety of it is told in flashback, and even flashback within flashback, from the end of the game itself. I can't quite say I enjoy this idea, seeing as the flashback chain sometimes bothers me and getting to know details about the story is about as fun as a competition of who can bite their tongue the most, but at least it's a new way of presenting it... well, sort of. If you don't quite follow what I'm saying, go rent Hero, a kung-fu action movie that pulls about the same gimmick, except it does so with a more defined manner.

The setup of the story is that Alex woke up in a morgue with absolutely no idea of who, what, when, where, why, nor how about... anything. So what ends up happening is he goes a little nuts, kills a few people and finds out that he's infected with something and swears vengeance on the person (or persons) who have done this to him.

I'm going to go spoiler free, this time around, and just say that the way the whole story is presented is so fragmented and awkward, you might as well try reading Charles Dickens via scavenger hunt clues, because it gives you about the same feeling. However, the twist is that each and every one of these vital details that expand your "Web of Intrigue" only show up as visible targets once you're within about fifty feet of them, making finding each and every one of these special people among the throngs of New Yorkers, near impossible. Furthermore, for each one you do happen to stumble upon and consume (more like absorb, but people like to use fancy pseudo-synonyms I guess) all you get is about a five-to-ten second clip of a memory of theirs that's supposed to help you understand your current situation. Problem is, most of these clips just tell you things you already know.

The characters all seem relatively human, including Alex's sister being genuinely freaked out when Alex mentions he's been killing people, but this presents an interesting problem. For waking up in a morgue with no recollection of anything, Alex sure seems to catch onto things very quickly, including developing a deep connection with his sister very quickly. And isn't Alex supposed to be a murderous psychopath bent on revenge? Then why does he seem to show so much emotion and needless depth to character, especially when it contradicts who you're telling us he's supposed to be! Most cutscenes actually make our protagonist out to be actually caring that he's murdering hundreds, thousands, millions of civilians, military, and infected zombies alike, and eating them for his own health profit. Again, this doesn't fit his laid out character and completely contradicts what his actions are within the game, making it all very confusing and odd to figure out whether or not Alex is really doing it for the greater good of things, or if he's just being a vengeful jackass. I suppose that could be part of what the designers were going for, but I'm pretty sure that last I checked, having to debate whether or not a character is truly evil should be left to B-movies and particularly stimulating books, not video games. Personally I'd be much happier if they just had Mercer spouting random lines like "I'm going to destroy you all!" rather than something along the thought of "Man, this seems like an amoral choice"

The story seems strained and, while inventive, badly presented. Perhaps if the game was more Indigo Prophecy like, and each of the tidbits of information you collected actually added up to something meaningful I'd care, but each and every one is recapped in a much broader sense in an upcoming cutscene, so it feels like a gigantic waste of time!


GAMEPLAY

As I mentioned before, the gameplay tends to revolve around the senseless wanton destruction and wholesale slaughter of people, whether they're shooting at you or not. Considering there's at least three hidden soldiers within each pack of civilians, it's tempting to not really care about setting off any alarms and just go apeshit on anybody who is unlucky enough to be in the nearby vicinity. This is all well, and good, but like every other game before it; there's consequence to your actions. Get too hemophilic and you quickly get swamped by hordes of helicopters and tanks, with which you can't do much except run away during the beginning of the game. In later parts where you can hijack such vehicles, the ability for wanton destruction just increases that much more, because a significant threat is no longer there. Albeit it is worth mentioning that the tanks and helicopters have such dismal health that you'll have to hijack at least three to do much of anything constructive (or destructive I should say).

Senseless bloodshed aside, the story itself and the missions are... hit and miss. Sometimes you'll be doing something fun, such as commandeering a vehicle to go blow up an infected "hive" or military base, and others you'll be stuck playing bodyguard as you escort a particularly vulnerable something to a location that always seems to be gruelingly far away. Others completely will just be go here, eat this guy, run away before the military comes and ruins your party. Truth be told, none of the missions are particularly inventive in any way, shape or form, and you've probably played some sort of version of them in another game. Each mission you complete gives you an overarching view of what happened, and if you're really desperate for each and every tiny detail you have the opportunity to hunt down every last Web of Intrigue target, but you'll still get the story in full.

Side missions are something that is always the bane of sandbox games. Sometimes they can be good, but this is about as rare as finding a pair of real breasts on a young female celebrity. I'm looking at you, Miley Cyrus... it's only a matter of time. Prototype's side missions are essentially more "go here, kill this/eat this guy/destroy this" than anything else. There are short reprieves of free-running (Parkur) races, and gliding target-practice, but both of these tend to be rare and unfulfilling at best. I'll admit that my personal favorite set of side missions is the ones unlocked for each new power you acquaint yourself with, as a way of saying, "Here, try using this new power on all these civilians/infected/military personnel we'll throw at you, and you don't even have to worry about cleanup." And that's just what the game does; as soon as you've contented yourself with slaughtering as many bastards who happened to be in the area (meaning you repeat the event until you're satisfied, not that you have unlimited time), the game simply makes all leftovers are swept beneath the carpet neatly for you to continue what you were seeking before.

The gameplay itself, I suppose I should get to, is just as unlikable and testy as the rest of the game. At times, you'll be gleefully sprinting up the side of a building and suddenly something will go wrong and you'll end up falling the entire way back to the street just to have to climb again. As I did this for the fourth time in a row, I started singing to myself "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" before falling again and simply going around the seemingly unscalable monument to bad programming. Flying around the city with use of the Glide power is a nice and easy way to get around, and I timed that it takes about three and a half minutes to get from one side to the other with everything upgraded. That being said, getting around isn't hard, but the fact that you have to constantly be under disguise or else a meandering helicopter might spot and reign five layers of hell on you before you know just what the hell is going on. More often than not I found myself having to hide and redisguise myself about once every thirty seconds because apparently you can't look innocent enough while running on the streets. To the games merit, however, while you're gliding around all masked up, enemies don't tend to bother you, so long as you don't come down and try to kick them in the shin and run away. Getting from point to point isn't bad, normally, but I still can't help but find it funny just how oblivious some of the guards can be.

Vehicles are terrible within this game. There is no other way to put it when the tank you just hijacked gets taken down to half-health a few seconds after your entry, and then promptly blown to bits by a strategically placed missile-wielding foe, or some bewilderingly over powered Hunters.

The upgrade system works fantastically in this game, giving you your needed powers at a reasonable pace, and giving upgrades to these wonderful tools of Armageddon isn't too far away. You get plenty of EP (evolution points) from normal missions, and if you do the side missions you're rewarded quite generously. Hell, even if you just go on a murder spree you'll find you get quite a bit of genetic whatsit just from that. A twist is that to upgrade vehicle/gun abilities, you have to consume special targets within military bases and gain their memories of their training and the like, increasing your skill as a result. Not too shabby, and hey, it gives you an excuse to kill and eat more people.

All this looks wonderful and great, but the glaring problem comes in with controls, which are constantly unresponsive and don't do what I want them to do when I tell them to do it. As a result I get Alex standing around getting pummeled on when I wanted him to unleash a super-attack, and consequently a game-over. Also, as I mentioned before, running up walls becomes a challenge when Alex is suddenly overcome with acrophobia and neatly backflips to the streets below despite my cursing and best attempts to get him recovering and running. Some attacks, even with so called "fast" weaponry take a few seconds to register that Alex has to swing his damned blade to kill something, and my plight comes in even greater when dealing with the targeting system. It seems that a harmless car is just as much of a threat to Alex as the armored tank about to blow him into tiny, bloody chunks. Guns are relatively useless unless you're inside a base, in which you can quickly grab the nearest assault rifle and spray randomly to kill just about any human.

The only other big problem I had was the fact that every consume target I was able to find was just as susceptible to death as every other target. I literally had a WoI target get hit by a minivan veering off the road to avoid me, and he was killed for it despite being in head-to-toe armor, and thus making his memory seemingly inaccessible. A cursing fit later, I found out, also to my dismay, that he didn't seem to respawn, and I failed the event. Oh, side quests are called Events, by the way, forgive me for not mentioning that earlier. So naturally you'd expect that a side quest will reset should you fail it, correct? Not in Prototype, it instead takes the side of people who like to make complete dick moves by saying that you have one chance, and only one chance to complete this mission. Should something go awry, as in a military unit shooting his ally whom you were supposed to consume, you're shit out of luck.


AUDIO/GRAPHICS

Since there's not much to say about audio, other than the creators should know better than to keep a VERY annoying, high-pitched alarm that alerts you when your helicopter is low on health, and doesn't shut up until the damned thing is destroyed, I'll hop on over to the graphics train to take a ride.

Now, normally, I don't judge much on graphics because I believe that a game's story is why games are created, with gameplay to enhance it, and graphics just make things prettier. Hell, I'll play something in 8-bit if it has a decent story behind it and gameplay that doesn't make me want to gnaw my fingers off so I never have to go near it again. Prototype frames this very well, I think, the story and gameplay aren't the best, but the graphics are absolutely stellar. I'm tempted to call this a repeat of the new Prince of Persia title, which I still degree as an art game, not worthy of the Prince of Persia brand, but since there is a definite focus on doing things within the game aside from just running around looking at pretty scenery and collecting shiny objects, I suppose I can't say that with a straight face. Prototype gives you a view of it's pristine gloom that I'm sure would be a particularly depressed emo/goth kid's version of heaven, by showing you a shot of Alex cleaving some poor bastard in two, and you get a nice little view of all his guts and bones inside him thanks to the (un)fortunate camera angle. Each and every cutscene is like this, featuring at least one high-quality CG shot of something that looks pretty. And by "pretty" I mean disgustingly horrific or grotesque. When you "consume" someone, you're treated to a minor bloodbath and eerie gargled screams from your victim. Upon killing people with powers, you can see their severed limbs, or whole halves of body, fly in different directions, once again giving you a grim spectacle. If there's something Prototype does right in every way it's that every part of every thing looks good, even down to the small blood pools you leave behind when you consume someone.

WRAP UP!

All in all, perhaps Prototype just isn't my type of game, and that's why I'm so harsh on it. If you're up for something of a gore-tastic Assassin's Creed, with more of an emphasis on combat, and Resident Evil-esque zombies that are ready to tear your limbs from your body; then yes, this is the game for you. If you like to cause large acts of mass murder and destruction just for shits and giggles; this game is for you. If you want a compelling story that makes you think and feel for the characters involved, I suggest you stay far away. For what the game is, I suppose it accomplishes what it sets out to do (making a mysterious case and a bloodbath to the answer), but perhaps it was just something that I was better off leaving with my friend to return for his next purchase. God knows that I didn't need to play a game with a main character psychopath who looks frighteningly like one of my fellow graduates. (Go, Go Class of '09)

I swear I'm going to have nightmares about him with Mercer's powers going nuts at our school Columbine style... He always was kinda creepy...


Feeling rather prepared for a zombie apocalypse,

~Sui

P.S. Has anyone else noticed that every zombie game as of late has stopped calling the enemies "zombies" and instead dubbing them "infected"? Just something to think about.
 

Zeromaxx

Walrus King
Jul 2, 2008
301
0
0
Suikun said:
P.S. Has anyone else noticed that every zombie game as of late has stopped calling the enemies "zombies" and instead dubbing them "infected"? Just something to think about.
I think it's supposed to be a small note that says the developers think humanity is going to kill itself with it's incessant need to screw around where we shouldn't.
 

Lyri

New member
Dec 8, 2008
2,660
0
0
Really good review, very nicely written and well presented.
I felt pretty similar about Prototype at the end of it all and most of what I played I had very little time for all together.
I wouldn't go so far with the graphics praise though, they where ok but I thought that suited the game.
Ok, if you like that sort of thing.
 

Destal

New member
Jul 8, 2009
522
0
0
Good review, I've never played the game personally, just talked to people who have and it sounds like you nailed the game pretty well in your review. It was a good idea that you mentioned that you inheriently dislike sandbox games before you did the actual review. If that wasn't the case you may have turned a few people away who are into the genre.

I think infected is coming about because it sounds scarier than zombie. Infection implies that anyone at anytime can drop dead and become a zombie. Wheras a zombie is usually someone who's already dead but comes back to life.
 

jthm

New member
Jun 28, 2008
825
0
0
As someone with a sadly limited amount of time, I hate to resort to tl;dr. But it is sadly the case. Just a few points from what I read on the first chunk of review (I'll read more later).

Memento is a much better movie to compare it to than Hero. A hero with Amnesia and no short term memory who is determined to find and kill his wife's killer and has to rely on clues and notes he's written himself to do it.

No game will ever be improved by "making it more like Indigo Prophecy". Ever. The game was a collection of quicktime events and a story that started out good and then turned into the matrix. For anyone who doesn't see a problem with that, kill yourself. You're beyond help, and are in fact the cancer killing original story telling in any artistic medium today. It would not be a stretch to say that I'd rather play Prototype for a straight month than play Indigo prophecy for an hour. That isn't to say Prototype's story is good. Far from it. But Indigo prophecy is a failure of a game on every level.
 

Suikun

New member
Mar 25, 2009
159
0
0
jthm said:
No game will ever be improved by "making it more like Indigo Prophecy". Ever. The game was a collection of quicktime events and a story that started out good and then turned into the matrix. For anyone who doesn't see a problem with that, kill yourself. You're beyond help, and are in fact the cancer killing original story telling in any artistic medium today. It would not be a stretch to say that I'd rather play Prototype for a straight month than play Indigo prophecy for an hour. That isn't to say Prototype's story is good. Far from it. But Indigo prophecy is a failure of a game on every level.
Perhaps you should go read and comment on the review I did on it a few days ago :p When ya have the time of course.

MaxTheReaper said:
Human beings are complex and retarded and a whole host of other things.
While I can't say "They were going for depth" (as I have no idea what they were going for,) it does make sense that some characters can be very contradictory - after all, art imitates life.
This is true, but for the feel of the game and the fact that it seems like Alex fits much more the stereotype of "psychotic madman out for revenge" rather than "normal human being in the wrong place at the wrong time", it goes against the grain for me to hear that he's actually feeling sorry for the millions of possibly innocent people he's killed. The rest of the characters, it's fine, it fits, even if the Black Ops are a little... cold blooded.
 

The Random One

New member
May 29, 2008
3,310
0
0
I haven't played this game, (though I certainly will), but the thing that boogles me the most is how every review mentions how Alex goes on and on about whether or not what he's doing is right. Of course, every GTA main character is a honourable man thrust into a life of crime by a cold and uncaring society during a cutscene and an indestructible omnipath the second it ends, but that's par for the course for the series. Prototype said it would embrace this evil side of the sandbox character rather than bury it with pointless empty philosophy, so that makes me feel disapointed.

Then again, one game that does embrace this is Saints' Row 2, and the guy/gal is a complete bastard. Seriously.
 

vultureX21

New member
Feb 26, 2009
300
0
0
MaxTheReaper said:
Human beings are complex and retarded
This could be the quote of the year thus far.

I personally loved Alex Mercer in Prototype and his sadistic, sociopath behavior. If you were a disease infested killing machine with missing memories wouldn't you go on a rampage of indiscriminate murder to get answers? And when you realized that you could become the God-like master of that virus wouldn't you do anything to make that happen?

I could be the only one who would have done precisely what the game asked Mercer to do, but I doubt it.
 

jonmcnamara

New member
Apr 4, 2008
29
0
0
I cant believe anyone likes Prototype, it's one of the worst games I have ever experienced.

I'll just list things I dont like about it.

1. The combat is frustrating and buggy, leading you to get hit for 3/4 of your hp if you dont pay attention.

2. The missions are all pretty stupid and generally boring. The side missions dont really give you anything worthwhile and are usually stupidly hard.

3. Nothing you do ever seems to affect the world. Sure you could go destroy every hive in the city, but it doesnt fix the zones and just gives you more xp that you cant spend until you unlock more options by playing the storyline. You can blow up every military base in town, and it just gives you a slight break from the military which doesnt matter anyway.

4. The city starts running out of people for you to kill by having infected zones spread, leading from the fun slaughter of innocents to being annoyed that everything is red and everyone attacks you.

5. Most of the moves are funny at first, but quickly get extremely old. If you have stolen one gunship you have stolen them all.

6. Finally THE STORYLINE IS UNBEARABLE AWFUL. I serously couldn't keep playing it, it just got stupider and stupider and stupider. Several moments made me literally cring at how bad the dialogue is.
"This is where he'll be.What are you going to do when you find him?." Alex's sister says to your back. Dramatic zoom on Alex's face. "I'm going to make sure he never does this to anyone again...".

Hey look an absorb target...(I brutally murder some journalist). Cue the 5 second video about a guy complaining that the military has locked down the bridges. No shit? They already said that... I literally just killed a guy becuase he made a phone call about his rights being abused.

It was just a stupid game that is fun for maybe 1 hour with 0 replayablity. Pass on it all over.
 

Zealous Kringle

New member
Nov 20, 2008
29
0
0
I pre-ordered Prototype under the assumption that introducing it to my console would provide me with the most fun I'd had in yonks.
And it did.
Considering I found Spiderman 2 to be one of the more enjoyable games of the last console generation Prototype struck me as more a sequal to that then any of the other laughable attempts on the franchise. I can see why people wouldn't like it, possibly for similar reasons to disliking Ninja Gaiden or Painkiller or any other game that requires full 360 degree telepathy to spot every incoming missile.
It's the first open-world game that's actually engaged me through to the end in a while, considering most of the others just wound up as GTA knockoffs with a mouthful of gimmicks.
Possibly the main degree of attraction for me was that a majority of the gameplay missions generally just required the kind of thing you'd do for laughs in any other world.
Since I tend to spend all my time knocking over sandcastles anyway it only seems fair to receive some tangible reward for it.
I liked Prototypes storytelling method but about 90% of it was predictable tripe that had cropped up in about a billion other franchises anyway.
Not to say I can't enjoy a game with an engaging narrative > gameplay, but some things don't really need it.

Oh, and I think that infected and parasitic zombies are more the flavor right now since radiation and magic undead stopped being 'cool.'
 

joe182

New member
Feb 18, 2005
395
0
0
Good review, only things I would chage next time would be A) Don't section the review, it breaks up the flow, and B) Add some pictures to re-enforce your points.

Other than that, great review.
 

Standby

New member
Jul 24, 2008
531
0
0
Destal said:
I think infected is coming about because it sounds scarier than zombie. Infection implies that anyone at anytime can drop dead and become a zombie. Wheras a zombie is usually someone who's already dead but comes back to life.
Must...resist...fanboy...reply.