Visionary Nexus Network

Greetings residents of Visionary Nexus. As you might know, I am Kachi. I shall be the one writing random-ass reviews on things I’ve played in the last two years, mostly involving DS, Xbox 360 and more recently, PC games. Hope you enjoy reading.

This time I’ve decided to review a game that I previewed about a year and a half ago on RPA. I was very excited for it at the time, and then I heard some of the cool online components were removed from the game, and my expectations sank for it. Here’s my review for Prototype.

For 360, obviously.

The game opens up with the trailer for the game in which you have a small military squad walking down a city street. As they move along, a few tentacles move along the ground and begin to cover the nearby scenery, enveloping a car. The camera pans out to show the damage of the street, including cars scattered, street signs toppled, and the buildings looking to crumble at any moment. The game’s protagonist appears on the rooftop looking down upon the squad, and reveals his name as Alex Mercer. ‘They call me a killer, a monster, a terrorist, I’m all of these things” he says, as he jumps down into the street from the rooftop, leaving a small crater in the ground, and knocking a few cars into the air. Alex then sprints over a few cars, and leaps over the large barbed wire fence into an abandoned military base. He continues to run and reveal a couple of basic plot points: that someone released a virus onto the city; that he woke up in a morgue without any memories. It then cuts to a shot of him running up a building, shattering glass as he runs over windows, and leaps onto another rooftop, announcing his intention of vengeance for the ones who did this to him.

If only the game could continue the momentum that the opening cinematic leaves for the gamers.

After another small trailer, which shows him fighting a couple more soldiers, the game breaks into the tutorial level, in which it basically gives us a taste of the destructive powers that you will only really have access to in the end of the game. First the game showcases the claws. After defeating all the enemies in the area, it shows you to sprint to the next objective, and allows you to use the hammerfists. Sprint to the next objective and they allow you to use the blade, which is the most powerful and effective weapon in the game, transforming your right arm into a large blade. After dispatching all the soldiers this time, they show you one of Alex’s “devastator” moves, which allows you to perform a massive area of effect power, but some of your health is sacrificed in turn. After doing so, the game will show Alex on a rooftop, speaking to a masked soldier with a disguised voice, and he was speaking to him about the events that led up to the infection of the city. Then the rest of the game basically plays out as a flashback until you reach that moment in the story.

The first major complaint about the game is that the tutorial level pretty much makes you invincible. After a couple more poorly-looking scenes (in comparison to the opening cinematic), you are given control of Alex in the sandbox world of Manhattan… with literally no powers but punching people. You have to play through the lackluster story to unlock new powers. I say the story is lackluster because you have a really good idea where everything is going, especially after witnessing the type of abilities Alex possesses. He will get his revenge, no doubt about it. There is basically only one twist in the story that happens at the moment before the final boss, and if you were paying attention to the story up to that point, you should have figured it out.

It slices, it dices!

Of course, I’m sure most of you won’t be playing this game for the story, but for the awesomely cool powers and abilities that you get. The only problem is that you have to go through these uninteresting and sometimes downright annoying missions in order to get access to those powers. It would have been nice to have all the powers available to buy right from the start, so that you could simply spend the game running around and murdering everyone you see in order to get points to purchase the upgrades. Instead, they force you to play through roughly 7 hours of gameplay to get the blade ability. In retrospect, I can understand why they made you play the story in order to get the powers, after you’ve sliced and diced through the identical enemies about 10 times, even with the coolest powers, begins to quickly become old and boring.

However, the game does switch from these horrible cut-and-paste missions for the occasional boss fights, which in all honesty, are completely unfair if you try to fight these bosses with any power except for the whip. If you get close with these bosses with the claws, they will simply knock you back like you’re a fly and then rape you for half of your health instantly. The same can be said for every boss in the game except for the final boss, in which I was forced through trial and error for roughly an hour, getting killed by him about 12 times until I figured out the one second intervals between his attacks that rapes you for 2/3 of your health to hit him with the blade’s jump into the air downward slash, which is the strongest move in the game. In actuality, using the whip was also effective for him, but you have a six minute time limit for this boss, and it’s impossible to defeat him with the whip in this time period.

Additional complaints about the game include getting attacked randomly by the military. Their infantry soldiers basically do no damage to you, and are quickly scaled up to soldiers with rocket launchers, which do about 1/5th of your HP per hit. Then just about ever other attack in the game against you does more than 1/5th of your HP every time they hit you. It’s very difficult to say that you are some kind of super-being when taking only a couple hits forces you to flee from the fight. It’s especially annoying in the later missions, one in particular when you have to destroy a blood toxin factory. It’s amazingly annoying having 4 tanks, 5 super soldiers, and 3 helicopters ready to fall in any position to distribute horrible rape radius effect on Alex Mercer, who seems to be utterly incapable of taking any damage whatsoever.

The game’s powers look polished and play well for what they are intended to do, but fall short when it comes to their combat effectiveness. As soon as you get the blade, you will likely forget about every other power that you have. Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, you have to suffer through about 7 hours of bladeless gameplay. My personal favorite was the whip, as it was the only way to really beat most of the bosses without getting killed instantly. The coolest thing about the whip was being able to upgrade it to grab onto midair helicopters about 50 feet away, pull yourself on, and hijack the helicopter.

Prototype has plenty of “Oh shit, that was badass” moments such as the one I mentioned above, but they get old after doing it a few times. After you’ve grabbed a random civilian on the street to butcher him to restore health, it becomes more of a chore than a badass thing to do, which is what annoyed me the most about Prototype: it is horribly repetitive. The fun things become a chore, and that’s not a good thing when it comes to games.

Another random complaint that I have was about the weapons in the game. Strangely enough, Alex can use a vast array of weapons. The only problem with this is that you have to physically pick up the fallen weapon from a soldier in order to use them, and when you have the gun equipped, you become incapable of using any of your powers. It would have been fun to be able to switch inventory and mix and match powers with weaponry. I imagined that Alex could use the whip to grab onto and enemy, and raise him into the air with it, then pull out a machine gun and unload onto him while he’s being held midair; unfortunately, the game doesn’t let you do things like that. Also, you aren’t able to hold onto weapons. It would have been better if they had guns within some kind of weaponry wheel by activating the RB on the 360, similar to selecting powers from the LB button on the controller; instead, you are only able to pick up fallen weapons and then, after realizing they are made worthless, drop them and never use them within the game.

In conclusion, Prototype is a good concept that falls short of my expectations because of the repetitive gameplay, lackluster story, bad weapon configuration, and horrible boss fights. The only real redeeming quality I have for the game is the moments of badassery that Alex performs, but after seeing them a couple times, you’ve seen everything that Prototype has to offer, and leaving you wanting the game to consist of more moments like this. Good idea, poor execution. Worth a rental or borrowing from a friend at best, avoid it if you enjoy compelling stories.

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