Review

Alarm bells were ringing from the moment of Prototype’s announcement back in 2007. The press release spoke of developer Radical Entertainment being “a critically acclaimed developer of open-world games” which is hardly how I would describe a developer responsible for The Simpsons: Hit and Run and Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction! They’re hardly GTA or Crackdown. However, they were also behind the surprisingly decent Scarface: The World Is Yours so I was willing to give Prototype the benefit of the doubt.

In it you play as Alex Mercer (voiced by Barry Pepper), a man with devastating powers and no memory. Your ultimate goal is to hunt down the people responsible for your condition in a wide-open recreation of Manhattan. This instantly throws up the first problem with Prototype as New York has been used too many times as the location for a sandbox adventure game in everything from Driver to three Spider-Man games! The difference this time is that the city is slowly being taken over by a plague that is turning the population into mutated zombies. This is illustrated brilliantly in an opening 10 minutes that takes place near the end of the game and teaches you the controls. Once this is over you are whisked back to the beginning with only the most basic of powers. The knowledge of just how powerful you will become is enough of an incentive to keep you playing, at least initially.

The trouble is, some really poor design decisions have been made with regard to the controls. Take jumping as an example: you don’t actually jump until you let go of the button, rather than when you press it. I understand the reason for this, holding the button down longer charges the jump so you can reach greater heights, but it makes getting out of the way of enemies harder than it should be. In games such as Crackdown a small tap of the jump button is all that’s required for a tiny leap whereas holding it down makes you jump higher. A system similar to that would have been far more preferable here.

In fact, a number of actions are mapped to buttons that don’t feel natural - shooting and running up walls being the two that immediately come to mind. An option to define your own layout would have solved this problem, or even a couple of alternative preset arrangements.

While the city itself looks good, the same cannot be said of the rest of the graphics. The sub-par character models look like they come from the last generation, especially during the cut-scenes. I also had trouble seeing what was going on at times, as whenever the action got intense the dodgy camera decided that I’d like to look at a wall instead!

Despite this, it can be an enjoyable game when everything works, but that’s not very often. Throwing a taxi at a helicopter is always going to be fun and the level of sickening violence you can inflict of innocent civilians (who incidentally will be screaming and trying to run away) will undoubtedly make people want to play it. Unfortunately, Prototype is another in a long line of open-world adventure games that gets boring very quickly. By all means rent it, but there are much better games around to buy instead.

About the Review

Platform

Microsoft Xbox 360

Developer

Radical Entertainment

Publisher

Activision

Released

12th June 2009