Yet Another Sandbox Title: A Review of Prototype

Ugh, I thought I'd never write a review here, it's not like there isn't enough already out there, and no one comes here for reviews, so anything I write about games I tend to try to stay away from just reviewing them, but everything I started writing about this game just turned into a review - or something close enough to a review that it might as well be a review anyway. Anyway:

Ok, Prototype is an "open world" game, which means an inevitable comparison to the Grand Theft Auto series. So here it is: Prototype is like GTA, except you're an unstoppable killing machine, and the zombie apocalypse is involved.

Sound interesting? Triple-A titles tend to do that. Oh yea, this is a big title:

I'm a huge GTA fan and a huge open world fan. I love open world games because they're stress-free. If you don't want to worry about a story, you don't have to. You can just drive around, doing jack shit, playing around with guns and explosions without any motivation to do anything. It's great, and I spend hours doing just that. It's actually rare that I finish the storyline of any given sandbox title.

My latest sandbox game that I'd been sinking countless hours into was GTA 4. Though, it kept pissing me off. You see, I kept longing for the days of GTA 3 and Vice City, where jumping off of the tallest building wouldn't kill you, the cops couldn't take three shotgun blasts to the chest and still shoot, there were tanks, helicopters with missiles, rampage mini-games, and the main character actually wore their seat belt.

I was also sick of the wonky controls. Too often I would try to climb up to a ledge, but instead would vault over it and fall 50 feet to my death. Cuz that's what I wanted. Or I'd be firing an RPG on top of a building, but the game decided that I wasn't actually aiming at the FBI agent below, but the ledge at my feet, and I'd have to watch myself get blown to bits in slow motion. This happened in the earlier games as well, but it wouldn't kill you, so you could do the health cheat afterwards and go back to killing. Sure, the graphics in GTA 4 are better, but hey, the developers name is Rockstar, not Glam Rockstar.

Um, anyway, imagine my delight when I found a game where the main character not only is completely unaffected by gravity, but is also mostly unaffected by explosions. Though he could probably lose the overly-angsty hoody and popped collar.

You are Alex Mercer, a guy who wakes up in a morgue having lost his memory, but gained ridiculous super-powers. Which I would say is a pretty decent trade off. He goes on a hunt to try to uncover why he is the way he is, and kill the people responsible not only for doing this to him, but also for releasing a virus on Manhattan that turns the city into zombies. Or something like that. The story's actually not too bad if you're into the whole "governments are evil" thing. It's told fairly well, cutscenes aren't painful, and voice acting is decent. It's not Deus Ex good, but maybe it's Deus Ex 2.

Though, like Painkiller, It's not really the story that's important. What's important is that you can tear an innocent civilian in two with your bear hands, and absorb their body for health. Your power is basically you can alter yourself at a genetic level, and turn your arms into claws, a giant blade, Hulk fists, a whip thingy, and a giant shield. You can sprout spikes from the ground, shoot tendrils from your palms, and morph into anyone you absorb. There's an absolutely huge list of powers and moves you can buy with experience points (called "evolution points" in the game, which is pretty lame) that you obtain for doing pretty much anything.

In this way it's almost like an RPG, you can choose what powers you'd like to upgrade and taylor them to your playstyle. It's actually what kept me playing the game, because I knew if I finished just one more level I'd get acces to a new ability.

Actually, I'm sick of telling you what the game is about, go read (or skim) the Wikipedia, and Metacritic entries for the game. Good? Ok, moving on.

First, huge props to the devs for the PC version. I was very pleased. There was no apparent DRM of any kind, except for a CD check. The install was simple and went on without a hitch, there was automatic gamepad support, as well as keyboard support, which I know sounds weird, but it's outrageous how many games I play on the PC where, during a tutorial, the game will say something like "Press [Left Trigger] to aim." and I have to open up controls to see what they're talking about. But none of that here. The game also ran exceptionally well on my middle-of-the-road system (and man, it pains me to say that, since just two years ago it was top-of-the-line. Damn you moore's law). I was able to crank up all the shinies (even vsync and AA) and run it at my native resolution of 1680x1050. The game ran smooth and never crashed, which is saying a lot for a 1.0 release. It's really great to see a game that is actually a final product, and not a buggy POS that needs 3 or so patches before it's even remotely playable (here's looking at you, S.T.A.L.K.E.R). The graphics themselves are not really that great, They look almost last-gen with higher res textures, which is unusual for a big title. The game still looks damn good, though. And again, it's not about the graphics as much as it is about killing people. Plus a lot of effort was put into the animations. Everything is very fluid and killing people is very, very satisfying. Most people say that you really should use a gamepad for this game. I used both, and found that I actually liked the keyboard and mouse better. It all comes down to personal preference, but if you're worried about it then I can say it was definitely a better experience with the keyboard and mouse, as the difficult combos and such are simply easier when there's more buttons. Ok, so moving on to that actual game. It starts off really great, once you get past the tutorial levels. But as the story progresses and things move on, the game actually gets significantly worse, for a variety of reasons: 1.) The more powers, abilities, and attacks you gain. The more difficult it becomes to control your character, so what used to be a simple jump or climb, is now a quadruple flip into a glide attack that destroys a city block. It makes simple things like grabbing people (which becomes more and more important) very troublesome. There were many times where I'd try to pick up a gun next to me, but instead would blow up a tank across the street with ground spikes, sending the entire military after me. 2.) The difficulty curve, while somewhat linear, is kinda cheap. So you took out 50 soldiers in the last level? How about 100? You thought 7 tanks and 3 helicopters was easy? Well how about 14 tanks and 6 helicopters? It makes things much more chaotic than they need to be, and combined with reason #1, becomes extremely frustrating and predictable. 3.) The boss battles suffer from the same problem as the difficulty curve, but also, they're FUCKING RIDICULOUS! But not in a good way. Not in the epic way. I remember one of the major boss battles (spoiler) where you fight a main character, Elizabeth Greene, who is literally a giant puffy vagina on a stick. I timed it, and it took me 45 FUCKING minutes to beat her, and I didn't die once. That's just too long. She had so much heath that it just becomes annoying. Here is a 2 part video of a guy doing it in 15ish minutes (which is still a long-ass time for a boss battle), though he has upgrades which you don't have in that portion of that game yet, and has obviously fought her before: Notice she has 4 HUGE HEALTH BARS! WHY ON GODS GREEN EARTH WOULD YOU DO THAT! She spits rocks at you, shoots heat-seeking green energy thingys, sends hunters at you (which are sort of like the zombie equivalent of tanks) as well as a ton of other attacks, and zombies, and the military is also fighting you with everything they have. It's as if the developers realized that they'd made your character too powerful, and tried to compensate. The last boss battle is also stupidly difficult, though a little less absurd. 4.) The missions are rerepepetititivtivee as fuck. Here's the objectives for one of the missions near the end of the game: 1~ Destroy a helicopter before it leaves the area. 2~ Destroy two helicopters before they leave the area. 3~ Destroy three helicopters before they leave the area. 4~ ok, I'm not telling you this one. See if you can guess. That's right, FOUR HELICOPTERS! YAY! AWESOME GAYME DEZINE GUYZZZ! 5.) Free-roam gets less and less appealing as you progress through the game. There is a zombie infection slowly spreading through the city, and while it IS cool to free-roam around a zombie apocalypse for a while, it is a novelty that quickly wears off and I ended up yearning for the ability to explore just plain-old Manhattan. The game makes up for it with the ability to, once you've finished the story, start a new game with all of your existing powers retained. which is cool, but at the beginning you lack the ability to hijack choppers and tanks, which again makes free-roaming not as fun as it could be. 6.) The targeting system is abysmal, and again gets more annoying the more enemies there are and the more chaotic the missions get. So often I'd try to aim at the giant boss charging at me, but the targeting system would decide that it was more important to focus my wrath upon the taxi behind me. All in all though, a whole lot is forgivable when you go back to the fact that you can run through cars and crowds of people with a giant bio-blade. Free-roaming is still a real blast. And not all of the missions are a total bust. Did I mention the bio-blade?

The stealth aspect is actually really well done. It's pretty simple, the devs weren't really out to try anything new and wonky, but what's there is solid and it works. basically one of your powers is the ability to morph into other characters. So to infiltrate a base, you'll consume and morph into a general, then just walk in. It's pretty cool, and you can escape the military this way in free-roam. There's also the affectionately named "patsy" ability, where you accuse others of being you in disguise, and get to watch the other soldiers hesitate, then open fire. It's great. So, overall, this isn't a game that's going to stand the test of time. It's not going to win any awards, and it's not really deep or insightful. But hell, it's a damn fun game, and really, isn't that what we're going for here? I mean c'mon, there's over 20 animations just for eating people. As well as hundreds of other ways to reign destruction and terror upon a city already dealing with a zombie infection. If the missions annoy you, just blow off steam by attacking a military base and watch as the puny soldiers cower at the might of your bio-blade. I've certainly got more than my money's worth, and I'll continue to blow shit up for at least the near future. In fact, I think I've found my new go-to sandbox title.