Review: Prototype on the Xbox 360

Prototype is a good open world game that utilizes superpowers pretty well and has an interesting plot line to match. The game follows the story of Alex Mercer who wakes up in a morgue in New York and has no idea who he is or why he has superpowers. The military is after him and there is a virus loose in the city that is mutating the populace. Alex soon realizes that he has the ability to “consume” people and take their memories he sets out to find the people that made him what he is and find out who he is and what is going on. The main story line is told through a series of flashbacks as we see Alex talking to a mysterious man on day 18 of the infection. After some narrative the game flashes back and you play through Alex’s story. You have the choice to either continue the main plot progression or go on a number of side quest type missions. This is where the open world element comes into play, it is very much like the Spiderman games where you can go to the main story or side stories, or you can just run around the city. I played the game on normal difficulty and it took me about 10 hours to complete just the main missions so there is a good amount of content.

Now on to the gameplay itself, Alex will gain a number of powers and all of these can be upgraded in the menu of the game. For every opponent you kill you get EP (Evolutionary Points) and these can be put towards the upgrades. There are upgrades for your powers, movement, combat, survivability, weaponry, and vehicle use. On my first playthrough I had plenty of upgrades that I couldn’t purchase by the end of the game but if you play through the free roam element I’m sure there is enough EP to upgrade fully. These powers and other upgrades are really cool and become essential later in the game. Some of the best are the glide move, the groundspike, the longshot with the whip which lets you hijack helicopters from a distance. But the most essential power that you have is the ability to “consume” and become anyone in the game, if you want to pilot a tank then you can consume a tank commander and you will know how to drive the tank. You can also use this to fool enemies, if you consume a soldier, for example, and then walk up to a military base no one will suspect and you can get in close without being fired at. This has a lot of uses but if military personnel see you as Mercer you need to duck out of sight and turn into someone else to lose them or they will continue to attack even if you look like someone else, there are also detectors and certain enemies that will know who you are even with a disguise. But consuming people also restores your health and you will need a lot of that. When you buy the critical mass upgrade you can continue to accumulate health past the max and then you can use that to unleash a “devastator” attack. This attack takes some time to charge but it is a massive attack that will take out or seriously cripple all opponents in about a 20 foot radius.

The control is nice and fluid for movement but switching between powers can be clunky and annoying, the mechanic is that when you press the left bumper a wheel screen comes up (like in Mass Effect) and you select what power you want to enable, this itself is fine but it doesn’t pause the game like in Mass Effect, it slows the game down for a brief period then the game goes back to full speed so you need to be quick and that is annoying. It was also more difficult to find the right weapon when the pressure was on, if they had an option to put your four favorite powers on the D-Pad that would have been great. There is no block button but if you have armor or shields equipped it will automatically engage if you are being attacked. This is a little annoying because certain enemies can beat you to a pulp in a corner and with no block you keep getting knocked over so you can’t attack and you get stuck. The left trigger locks on to targets but I found that when there were big boss battles it locked on to the smaller targets a lot and it really should stick to the boss unless you manually switch it so that could have been improved.

The graphics on the CG cut scenes are absolutely gorgeous, especially the opening cut scene but the in-game graphics can be pretty mediocre at times, perhaps this is a side effect of the massive amount of info on the disk but many of the textures on certain buildings and people got blurry and pixilated at seemingly random times, however regardless of how crazy the action got the frame rate never slowed up so that is really good. For the most part the city and characters looked impressive and there was no lack of blood and gore so the graphics were good for the most part.

The game has a lot of replay value because of the new upgrades and the side quests, after the main story ends you can still free roam the city which is a nice touch. Overall the game is satisfying on all accounts, the graphics are good for the most part, the gameplay is solid mostly but it can get unfair at times, and the story is good but slightly tough to follow at times. What this game does well is the integration of superpowers which is something that has not been done very well in video games to date. I would recommend this title.

Gameplay: 8

Story:9

Replay Value:9

Graphics:8

Overall: 8.5