I'll say this right off: If you own Hulk: Ultimate Destruction or a Spider-Man game, then you can probably pass up on this game because it is practically the same type of gameplay. However, this game does not have a MARVEL label and can be considered an original piece of work.
-Graphics. The overall look of the game is good. Manhattan island is replicated beautifully, and it shows. If you need to figure out where Gold's Gym is, just have Alex Mercer (the Prototype) jump around the city until you find the sign. Then maybe you can find it while you're driving around! However, some textures seemed stretched or PS2-esque when you look closely. However, this can be somewhat forgiven as the city looks gorgeous when looked at from a tall building.
The animations are smooth and well done. From Alex running over cars and up buildings, to the solider that was just the victim of a Patsy maneuver, to the simple pedestrian puking their guts out because of the virus, everyone seems to come to life, regardless of the outdated graphics.
-Gameplay. I will admit, I was a bit surprised as to the simplicity of the controls. My original thoughts were that you would need more buttons than one could fit on a blackberry just to pull off some of the stunts. But with a nice upgrade system and button layout, wreaking havoc on the army is a breeze that looks fantastic. Some moves don't need to be bought to beat the game (in fact, a lot of them don't even need investing into), but its just fun to watch you uppercut someone into the air and then grab them in mid-air and slam them into the ground. And in case you forgot how to do that one move you love performing in front of your friends, the skill-purchase screen gives a wonderful diagram that tells you what to push in what order.
-Story. Let's face it, the people who buy this game are in it for the action and chaos. However, if you pay attention to what is going on in the life of the protagonist, you may find yourself CARING and WONDERING how the virus got to this point. To enhance the story and make you care, the game shells out people that contain memories vital to Alex Mercer's own mind. Apparently he has some kind of amnesia, so instead of waiting for the effects to tide over he simply abosorbs the people that know something about him. The more memories you collect, the more the puzzle fits together, and the more you want to absorb to find things out...and the more tanks that get destroyed when they kill someone that has a vital memory you need.
-Other Comments. I enjoy this game very much, regardless of what others may think. This is just an opinion that you don't have to listen to. In the end, you will have to play the game yourself to see if you like it or not.
Also, I would like for people to consider this when talking about the graphics: should under-par graphics get in the way of an enjoyable experience? That's like saying a super model is ugly because she's wearing a hand-me-down dress from her mother's side in the 50's. A game's replay value should not be based on graphics alone. Besides, texture loading and framerate would be major issues if released with next-gen graphics. Mass Effect had that problem, Gears of War had it, and so did GTA IV.
Overall, the game is great. [PROTOTYPE] is one of those games that sticks with you until you beat it, then you want to start over to see if you can beat it on hard mode or try a different skill set. The only major downside is that there is no multiplayer. Period. If you want co-op action as you run down the streets of a fear-stricken neighborhood, go play Crackdown.
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Prototype allows you to grow organic body armor with blades sharp enough to cut 10 people in half, jump 50 yards, run up a skyscraper, karate kick a helicopter, grab onto it, force open the cockpit, throw the pilot to his death, fly the helicopter through the streets of New York unleashing guns and missiles on traffic, zombies, tanks, and soldiers, bail out of the helicopter crashing it into a building, glide to the ground, grab an unsuspecting human, digest him, steal his appearance, and blame someone else for what you just did. If that sounds awesome to you, buy Prototype!
Concept: 10/10
Take Spiderman's Symbiotic Suit (aka Venom & Carnage) push it to the limit, give it to a maniac, have him kill an army of zombies and a misguided military in, around, and above the streets of New York. You get to be that maniac!
Story: 9/10
You are Alex Mercer, a very bad man who has inherited superhuman powers. You're on a quest to stop a viral outbreak that turns people into mutant zombies and to stop a rogue general with the military at his disposal. The story is told through cutscenes and missions. Additional story detail can be obtained through "Digesting" key NPC's and stealing their memories. It's exciting, compelling, and well acted.
Gameplay: 9/10
The abilities bestowed upon Alex Mercer are amazing! You get an arsenal of military weapons. You can hijack tanks on the ground and helicopters out of the air! You can run up skyscrapers. You can glide through New York. Your body can morph into different types of weapons. You can take the shape of any NPC, so stealth is also an option. When you destroy things or complete missions, you get points that you can use to upgrade Alex. Rampaging through New York is fun, but it does take time to learn how to use all of Alex's upgrades and there isn't much guidance on what you should upgrade. There is a lot of depth in the game, and you won't fully understand it until you are about 90% of the way through. Once you understand how to fully use all of the powers, the game becomes amazing!
Graphics: 8/10
The graphics are good, considering that the game has to draw all of New York from the ground and the air. The character models are also pretty good. You can expect to see 100 characters, tanks, cars, helicopters, zombies... on screen at once!
Level Design: 7/10
Some levels are better than others. There's a good variety, showcasing all of Alex's Powers. The difficulty differs between easy and you'll die before you can read the Mission Objective. There is no 'right' way to complete a mission. You can use speed, stealth, brute force, or hijack military vehicles. If you fail a mission, you can always upgrade and try new tactics.
Replay Value: 7/10
The game is open ended, there are a ton of optional missions, and different difficulty settings. Prototype's single player campaign is 11-20 hours long, depending on how many optional missions you do. I would strongly suggest taking your time and learning how to use Alex's powers before attempting the later missions. You'll have more fun that way.
Maturity:
The game is rated M for throwing people to their deaths, chopping them in half, blowing them up, crushing their skulls, impaling them, running them over, gunning them down, and splattering them against the ground... Oh, and there's some harsh language, too.
Overall: 9/10
Prototype is a very fun open world superhero game. Trashing New York with super powers and military vehicles is a great way to blow off some steam. Some of the gameplay could use a bit more polish, but the scope of this game is so huge any slight faults are forgiven.
Buy it if you want New York as your playground and you're feeling destructive, if you've ever wanted to play a Venom game without Venom, or you loved Hulk: Ultimate Destruction.
Actually, this game could have been called "Skinny Guy: Ultimate Destruction."
Rent it if you like action games, have an extra 15 hours, and only play through games once.
Avoid it if you like linear missions, playing good guys, or you don't like violence.
If you like this game, I can recommend Red Faction Guerilla, Crackdown, or Infamous (if you own a PS3.)
Best Deals for PROTOTYPE - Xbox 360
A lot of reviewers have discussed a lot of the finer points of the game. I will only to add a few things that I felt were inadequately treated.
GAMEPLAY: PROTOTYPE has two features in this category that work very well for it. Indeed, I think that these are its only two selling points and the source of all its fun. First, its leveling content. You gain evolution points by defeating baddies (no surprise there), and use them to unlock a wide array of abilities. One thing PROTOTYPE can boast is its library-sized selection of powers suitable for almost any style of play with relatively simply controls to execute what amounts to visual ecstasy. I found the ability to skyjack helicopters to be extremely satisfying, but being able to dash up and down buildings and cut hordes of enemies into ribbons was thrilling. And all this points to what I have already mentioned as its second strength: namely, that these abilities should be so flexible and yet so easy to execute. A final positive thing worth mentioning is its use of shape-shifting. Catch the unwanted attention of military personnel? Quick run around the corner after consuming someone and mimic their form. If you were out of line of sight, you'll no longer be sounding the alarms. This is an innovative way of escape, which lets you get right back into the action.
Unfortunately, the game play is not perfect. The targeting system is the cause of great frustration. Since all it takes is a flick of a thumb-stick to switch targets, dashing around or trying to maneuver the camera to get a better view of what you're doing can cause you to switch targets. It might seem like a relatively small complaint, but when you become surrounded by tons of them and you need to target specific foes then, well, it will be an exercise of self-control to not throw your controller across the room. Only choppers have target lock, and this needed to be implemented globally, especially while on foot.
Another sore spot is the redundancy of the game's features. Go here, kill this, go there, kill that. The only break in the monotony is the ability to infiltrate military bases, which thankfully shows up in a fair amount of the story missions. But this is only of minor concern, since people who buy this type of game myself included are more interested in causing chaos than a whole lot else.
GRAPHICS: As some others have indicated, PROTOTYPE's graphics really do not make use of what the 360 has to offer. It seems somewhat reminiscent of PS2 days. I would agree that at high elevations, the city's artful rendering is something worth marveling over, but the truth of the matter is that you spend the great majority of the game close to the ground (especially since nearly all of your powers revolve around this kind of play). You cannot help but notice the inferiority of the detail with respect to other 360 games. But this is not to pooh-pooh on them altogether: the individuated animations do, as other reviewers have mentioned, allow the city to seem as it has a life of its own. But at the same time, we should demand that we, as consumers who spend so much on a game, get both. They should not be mutually exclusive, and in PROTOTYPE they are.
PLOT/STORY: The protagonist of PROTOTYPE is subject to the cliché, yawn-inducing condition of amnesia as a result of his contact with the game's virus. While this presents a novel way of learning the details of the story consuming others to collect their memories it does not really speak to any originality on the part of Activision/Blizzard. You spend your time, as you might expect, working way the up informational chain until the AH-HA! moment is revealed by eliminating the game's pesky antagonists. Unfortunately, the AH-HA! moment is less of a eureka and more of a head-scratching anticlimax. Though story is not usually a primary driver for the design of a sandbox video game, it would seem as if PROTOTYPE has clearly announced that it has no interest in delivering one. By the last third of the game, any interest that the evolution system might have generated for me had worn away and I was scrambling to beat it only so that I would not feel compelled to play the game anymore.
All characters are flimsy and one-dimensional. Even the main character lacked any really interesting features that would set him apart from any other generic antihero. He wants his memory back and he wants revenge for what happened to him. His sister drop an f-bomb every third word even though there really isn't any reason to. The military is super evil because they like making weapons. Nothing new here.
SUMMARY: The game can be quite a bit of fun, but it seems like Activision/Blizzard did not actualize all the game's potential. I would suggest that it is worth at least renting, seeing as it would not take more than ten or twelve hours to beat, but it is certainly not worth sixty or even forty dollars. I regret spending so much. I would advise everyone to wait until it's in the discount bin, and then pick it up.
Honest reviews on PROTOTYPE - Xbox 360
She: "Oh my god. This is the most violent thing I've ever seen. Why are you crushing all those people?"
Me: "No! Watch this. Even if I tried to steer the tank around them, real slow like..."
[demostrating...]
"Look, they keep running in front of the tank. They are stupid! Plus if I get out of the tank and kill enough them for the purposes of eating, I get to do this thing where I look like I am going to take a dump, except instead of s**t, tendrils shoot out of my head and impales everyone in a 20ft radius."
She: [speechless]
Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for PROTOTYPE - Xbox 360
I truly believe that if the developers took a few more months to polish it up, [PROTOTYPE] would have been a real jaw-dropper. There are so many moments that the game almost becomes immensely fun to play, but for me, there always seems to be some irritation the prevents the game from really dropping into "5th gear" so to speak.
I won't rehash the plot. It's a little different and modestly interesting, but the way that it's told, in my opinion, makes it extremely difficult to really immerse yourself in it. The basic idea is that you wake up with amnesia and need to "consume" certain people who are flagged in the city as having a small piece of your memory. Doing this triggers a flash-back and from there, you put together what happened to you. In a nut-shell, it plays like a big jigsaw puzzle. The issue is that you start off knowing so little, that for me, it was difficult to feel like you're understanding what's going on. This lends the game to degenerating into a "run here" "Hit this check-point" "Take out the target" without really understanding why you're doing it. This might be something that certain gamers don't mind, but for me, the style of story-telling was a bit of a turn-off.
The city itself is a replica of New York City. Unfortunately though, it's really pretty ugly. There not a lot of color or variety and it can make it difficult to just "know" what part of the city you're in just by looking at your surroundings and not checking the map. Think for a second, for comparison's sake, at GTA 4. That game was stone-brilliant at the way it crafted its environment! This definitely is a missed opportunity here. Even the citizens don't have a whole lot of variety to them. You can probably count the number of character models on one hand.
The graphics are a pretty interesting mish-mosh of above and below average points. On one hand, the frame-rate is absolutely absurd. There are points where there is so much going on that the feeling of complete chaos will be totally and convincingly conveyed. This is one of the things that [PROTOTYPE] is doing really well and it's impressive! On the other hand, on top of a fairly ugly city, the amount of "pop-in" graphics, I thought, was unacceptable. For example, there's a mini-game throughout [PROTOTYPE] that has you collecting these "landmark" and "hint" orbs of light. One of the best ways to accomplish this is to hijack a helicopter and do a fly-over of the city in order to look for them in open-areas or building-tops. The orbs won't show though, unless you're virtually right on top of them. The ability to see objects at a distance is really poor.
The controls definitely needed work. I had the same complaint about 'Star Wars: The Force Unleashed', but the environment being as destructive as it is, is both a blessing and a curse. There's so much debris to pick up and potentially so many enemies on screen, that in highly-chaotic situations (which is often) it becomes frustrating to try and target the object that you want. I could be mistaken, but the AI seems to default to selecting artificial targets for me to attack, regardless of distance. So lets say I'm in the middle of a war-zone and I'm being besieged by both tanks and a bunch of these mutant hunter-things. If I just hit the "target-lock" button, it'll default to selecting the tank, NOT the monsters that are directly in front of me and beating me senseless. That extra second or two it takes to get the targeting correct makes a huge difference in maintaining your character's health on the higher difficulty levels. The other thing about the targeting is that it's being controlled on the same joy-stick that controls your camera. This isn't doing you any favors when you feel you have a good angle on the action ...
Where [PROTOTYPE] really becomes a game worth checking out though, is your super-powers and your ability to upgrade them! There's a ton of really cool stuff that'll keep you playing just for the chance to unleash some of these beauties! Organic blades, whips, Hulk-like biceps and fists, full body armor, a shield, the ability to glide ... [PROTOTYPE] has got it all! It's wildly fun to drop yourself in a military base (for example) and just go bananas, you really start to feel invincible! Conceal your identity by absorbing a military officer and sneak into a military base. You can then turn around and take an APC, tank, or helicopter for whatever use you please. Wreaking havoc is what you gain experience from, and that's how you earn the ability to upgrade your powers. It's all very cool and a lot of fun!
It's just frustrating that a lot of, what I felt were, missed opportunities here were totally fixable, if the proper time was just taken to do it. Whether it was because of time or money, I was left with the impression that [PROTOTYPE]'s designers really wanted to do more then they were ultimately able to. I'd still have no reservation about giving it a thumbs up though, especially now that it's been released for a while. I'm not sure it was worth fifty or sixty dollars, but at this point you should be able to grab a copy at a price that's more then fair.
