Great freedom, great fun

by Lazare Gvimradze

Fun factor: Fun

Worth to: Buy

An unprecedented, but balanced sense of freedom and power make this game perfect for having sheer fun, but it might unfortunately displease the more hardcore audience.

The ridiculously ambitious project, known as Prototype, has been in works from Radical Entertainment for many years now, and, fueled by unparalleled hype and some delays, built up an enormous fanbase who had hopes for one of the would-be greatest sandbox experiences ever. The sheer amount of possibilities the developers offered amazed: one of the most powerful anti-heroes of all time, running and jumping around Manhattan Island, possessing extraordinary shape-shifting powers which allowed him to transform his body into an array of melee weapons, or another human’s body altogether. The gameplay offered a crazy mix of adrenaline-filled action and infiltrating stealth. There seemed to be no way this would not work.

Alex Mercer – an absorbing fellow

The story, or the Web of Intrigue, centers around a person named Alex Mercer. One beautiful day, he wakes up in a morgue with amnesia, and while trying to escape, a secretive military organization named Blackwatch start to chase him. While Mercer tries to shake them off and cope with his newfound shapeshifting abilities, New York starts to alter in the face of a mysterious viral infection known as Blacklight, which turns citizens into mindless zombies and covers streets in red slime. So now all Mercer can do is use the little help he can get from his sister, Dana, and find every single person who knows just about anything regarding the infection, absorb their memories, and destroy the one responsible.



The intrigue itself gets more or less cleared out at the end, but you can choose to acquire every memory and delve into the details. The amount of work done on the visualization of the memories impresses, and, if anything, makes the story even more interesting.

The flaw here are the characters. Alex seems fine; regarding his amnesia and newfound powers all he cares about is vengeance, showing little interest to his own personality. The secondary characters seem raw, underdeveloped, and sometimes you think that seeing more of the baddie generals will up the tension. Not that they aren’t underdeveloped, either.

If only Altaïr could do that stuff…

But everything is forgotten when the gameplay erupts. The controls are, unexpectedly, Assassin’s Creed-like: apart from basic movements and light/heavy attacks/grabs, you get a special trigger to enter parkour mode (as opposed to AC’s “High Profile”), after which Alex gains sprinting speed and starts to vault over every obstacle he meets any way he sees comfortable. He jumps over cars, or on them, bending the metal as he does it, runs up walls without noticeable reduction of speed, slices through crowds and generally acts as a mini-hulk from hell. There are no cops whatsoever in the game, but there are military patrols, tanks, helicopters and all the goodness needed to notice and pursue you. And that’s when you start utilizing the powers at your disposal.



Another trigger opens up the Power Wheel, slows down time for a few seconds and politely lets you choose how to alter your body next. You can turn yourself into an armored monster, a hoodie-version of Wolverine, acquire Venom’s kilometer-long tentacle and many more. You also can, of course, absorb any human in a dark alleyway, become him/her, and shake off the military, but where’s the fun in that? It’s better to do the same to a soldier or a general, infiltrate the base, order an artillery strike and blow everything to bits, finishing what’s left with a deadly Devastator attack. And yes, all of this happens in freeroam mode.

In fact, the game has an impressive ecosystem found in few products of the same genre. The military and Blacklight are in a constant war between each other, with blue circles on the map showing the government’s current occupation, red ones indicating the infection, and purples showing the confrontation areas. Both sides have bases (or Hives in case of the Infected) in the middle of their zones, which you can destroy to suppress the party in question at that particular place and gain a little more EP.

I will destroy you all… after I buy the skill

Oh, and about EP, or the Evolutionary Points. All I’ve written above is accomplishable, but almost everything needs to be bought/upgraded in an RPG-styled shop. Even the secondary powers, sprint speed and stealth consumes need to be acquired with points. Which, ironically, are gained from anything: killing, blowing stuff up, progressing the main storyline or completing the side-missions. As the developers promised, the storyline missions almost always vary, starting from basic escort/defend routines and ending with impressive chase sequences and few, but epic boss battles. The side-missions, however, are mere challenges like races from checkpoint-to-checkpoint or “kill as many as you can within the time limit” routines. They are tolerable if you need another 10,000 EP for your assault rifle skill, but often seem, and are, way too hard.

Speaking of rifles, the stealth element of the game seems to work: after becoming a soldier, you can help them in conflict zones and gun down the infected using one of the 4 types of weapons and a handy auto-targeting system. There are other possibilities too, for example, you can accuse another soldier of “being you,” which results in the poor lad’s murder by his own comrades. You can also call in artillery strikes, silently hijack helicopters or tanks and more.



All of this combines into a heavily action-packed gameplay which somehow doesn’t feel as easy as it should be. Sure, Alex can scale buildings, move with incredible speed, even glide through the air. He can impale dozens of enemies from the ground, take down a heli with an unfortunate bystander or punch the hell out of a tank using a mutated fist. But there is balance, and a smartly crafted one, too. Strike Teams, which include a few choppers and viral detecting drones, are always there to help the military suffering your wrath.

The Blackwatch constantly try to figure out new ways to take you down, starting from poisonous gas and ending with super-soldiers almost as good as you. The infected will send Hunters (massive mutants, a real pain in big numbers) after you, and close to the end you will learn to navigate the town with utmost precaution. Who knows, you accidentally run over a soldier, he calls in reinforcements, they roll in from infected zones followed by curious zombies. So there you go, a sandbox game about an almighty hero but with balance and a level of difficulty to explore. Who knew it was possible?

Impressive for what it does

Some thought that, with so much to do, the developers would forget about the visual aspect of the game completely. It looks mediocre, sure, but it’s impossible to name another game with a similar setting and better graphics. GTA IV or Saint’s Row 2 focus on 2-dimensional navigation, they don’t need to render a whole town’s rooftops at breakneck speed. Compared to more similar products like Spider-Man: Web of Shadows, Prototype proves to be the best looking example in the genre, additionally representing Manhattan quite diversely as opposed to the webslinger’s game adaptations. Nevertheless, the monotone red/brown tone starts to bore out at the end, and some secondary textures lack quality.

Animations, however, are what sell this game. There are hundreds of them. In fact, you can even witness a zombie miss a punch and stumble. It’s so delicate and accurate that Assassin’s Creed is forgot completely. Adaptation systems are everywhere: parkour mode, vehicle wheels/caterpillars, even the damage system on pedestrian cars is real-time calculated. Alex moves with impressive style and constantly shows off flawlessly captured badass-moves, the infected crawl and run realistically and the military somehow manage to stay coordinated in the complete mess.



There is a slight oddness regarding the AI though. While playing stealthy, the NPCs react quite realistically: if you shove them aside or knock them down they’ll throw a few insults and even shove you back, much like (again...) in Assassin’s Creed. But start obvious aggression, and they’ll give you obvious chaos. Not only do they constantly make it harder for THEMSELVES to track you down, sometimes the Strike Teams prove to be quite oblivious to you transforming into another human in mid-air, while maintaining direct visual contact. Result -- a glitchy escape. The same goes for Infected Hunters who often find it hard to scale a few meters without falling down at the last inch.

But there are obviously no flaws with the audio. Radical used quite some cash to develop the sound systems for Prototype. They acquired their own studio and even implemented a software-based support of 7.1 Dolby Surround in consoles, something that seemed impossible in theory. As it appeared, the game delivers on audio quality expectations. Actors are great, and that’s even with Alex’s strange accent and constant blurting. It only adds up to the depressed atmosphere of the game. The audio score, which starts to become recognizable only at the end, is dynamic and fits the action on screen perfectly. The ambient noises, especially the chatter of the military and the whatever-it-is-that-the-infected-yell, is top-notch.

Summary

What we were promised is what we get; many believed that Radical would simply not be able to pull that much off. But they did. Prototype is a perfect example of how an old-school concept can work for a modern game, even without ruining the balance and still delivering fun and adrenaline. Some say that Alex is one of the most powerful heroes to ever make an appearance in videogames, and sometimes that sounds true. The amount of possibilities you have to tackle every situation, the amount of role-play you get (militia, citizen, Alex himself), and the diversity of the uncontrolled and chaotic action make Prototype one of the most satisfying games to date.