Over the last couple of months, people thought that there would be a showdown between Sucker Punch’s InFamous and Radical Entertainment’s Prototype, because they appeared to be similarly-themed open-world superhero games. Appearances can be deceiving, however, because Prototype’s protagonist Alex Mercer is anything but a hero. To be more precise, he’s a genocidal maniac, focused only on getting revenge on the people who turned him into an infected freak. Prototype is not exactly the most morally sound of video games but it is a whole lot of fun, though it lacks the necessary polish and depth of content to make it a classic.

Prototype employs an interesting approach to storytelling. The game starts towards the end of the story, giving players a quick taste of what it’s like to play with a fully powered up version of Alex – perhaps a little bit too much of a tease, given that the next time you gain control over him, he’s considerably weaker. There’s a three-pronged approach to unveiling the story from this point forward. One portion of the story occurs linearly, like a standard narrative. Another portion comes from a conversation between Alex and an unknown soldier that occurs near the end of the game but is chopped into bits and revealed before story missions. The final part of the story is made up by the game’s Web of Intrigue, a kind of puzzle where players piece together information about the game’s story by consuming marked targets in the game world. This approach gives Prototype a far more meaningful method of conveying its plot than was expected, even if the actual story is a bit flimsy and the cast is horribly clichéd and unlikeable.


Alex Mercer is out to get even with the people who infected him, but matters are much worse as the infection has spread to Manhattan. Ordinary people are getting infected, the city is under quarantine, and the military is out in force. With the player character being a single-minded bloodthirsty bastard one doesn’t have to worry about collateral damage, and Prototype provides plenty of tools for unleashing hell on the local populace. Players aren’t just limited to Alex’s powers for their destructive needs; one can take advantage of the military’s resources as well; guns, rocket launchers, tanks and helicopters are all yours for the taking.

Players are introduced to Alex’s powers at a generous pace and before you know it, you’ve got more abilities than you’ll ever need. Alex is plenty strong and fast in his regular state; one can put any soldier down with his fists, knock out a helicopter with a well aimed flying kick, execute a massive elbow drop on a tank, run up the side of buildings at fast speeds and even glide to cover a greater distance. Being normal pales in comparison to Alex’s various morph forms, which allow players to change parts of Alex’s body into powerful weapons like claws, a giant blade arm, a whip and rock-hard fists. Not all of your abilities are offensive, though; Alex can absorb any person and take on their form, enabling one to disguise themselves from the military and even invade military bases. Upgrades for powers can be bought with experience points earned for completing missions, collecting hidden orbs, eliminating enemies and other activities.


After you’ve got a few powers and upgrades under your belt, Alex starts to feel like a real destructive force, but it doesn’t just stop at morphing. Players can get an upgrade called the devastator mode, allowing Alex to unleash an extremely powerful attack in exchange for a chunk of health. These attacks let you clear the surrounding area of enemies by summoning large spikes from the ground or shooting giant tentacles from Alex’s body. Devastator attacks require a bit of charging up, so players are totally vulnerable during that time, which can lead to some frustration when you get hit a millisecond before the attack was due to go off. With all of these different powers and abilities, one would think Prototype would have a pretty versatile control system – it gets the basics right, but can be pretty clumsy at times. Tasks that should be simple, like switching between powers quickly, seem to take a lot longer than is necessary. The game also has a tendency to rely on button mashing sequences to draw fights out. Combat is satisfying, but could stand to be a lot more refined.

Prototype is heavily dependent on players enjoying its brand of no-holds-barred violent action, as the open world, mission-based structure of the game is somewhat bland. In a way, it’s a lot like Radical Entertainment’s last superhero effort, The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, in that that the actual gameplay is the highlight, and missions and other window-dressings are superfluous. Missions tend to fall into the usual action game categories; kill something, protect something, or travel to a certain point, with or without a time limit, veering off for the occasional boss fight – it’s not really engaging stuff. The game has a number of fairly severe difficulty spikes that will stop players dead in their tracks if they haven’t kept up with their upgrades; one particular boss fight in Times Square immediately comes to mind.


The main set of 31 missions will take most players all of about six hours. The rest of your time with Prototype will be spent running around Manhattan doing yet another infuriating orb hunt (200 this time), finding Web of Intrigue subjects or running through the usual gamut of side missions. Most side missions involve travelling to a set location and killing a bunch of enemies, either militia or infected, racing through checkpoints, gaining new abilities by sneaking into a military base, or attempting to glide onto a target in a set landing zone. None of it is really interesting or even necessary to the core experience, but it does help by giving players generous experience point bonuses. Considering the team at Radical had almost a year of extra development time, one would have thought they could have injected a bit more variety into Prototype’s selection of missions.

From both technical and artistic standpoints, Prototype’s presentation is underwhelming. Radical Entertainment’s latest incarnation of New York suffers from inconsistent texture quality, slow texture pop-in and frequent frame rate issues. The design of Alex seems lazy and derivative – one cannot claim that yet another angsty, hoodie-wearing fool with a big blade arm is pushing the boundaries of character conception. Alex has the advantage of being well animated; the same can’t be said for the rest of the cast, who look shoddy and move awkwardly. Credit does need to be given to whoever was in charge of editing the substantial amount of Web of Intrigue videos; there’s a heck of a lot of them, and each movie is put together pretty well. It’s just a shame that the script and voice casting aren’t up to scratch – do we really need another gravelly-voiced protagonist in gaming?


Despite major follies in presentation, poor mission design and an overall lack of polish, Prototype’s core gameplay strength keeps the proverbial ship afloat. Unleashing the full extent of Alex’s powers against scores of evil militia personnel and infected mutants is great fun – the variety in the player’s arsenal is a welcome change. The problem is that Radical Entertainment doesn’t capture the same level of enthusiasm with the rest of the product – it looks rough, the story is feeble and the mission design is far too limited. There’s plenty of fun to be had with Prototype, but there’s also a lot of room for improvement in the future.