eat.sleep.geek.

Prototype puts you in control of Alex Mercer, an enormously powerful, mutated badass. As you play the game you unlock abilities and combat options that are equal parts flash and brutality. this combination definitely works as combat is rarely routine. In addition to the hand to hand stuff, you can pick up weapons and start blastin’ fools that way. Although to be honest, you probably won’t be doing much of that. Hopping in a tank or helicopter and tooling around a panicked downtown Manhattan is easily as fun as it sounds, possibly more so. Needless to say the combat works. That being said, your character can sometimes be moving so fast that it’s hard to keep track of all the crazy shit that’s going down. This occasionally confuses things but it never really becomes a major problem because the game is kind of on the easy side.

Getting around the city is an absolute joy once you upgrade and unlock a few key abilities. Traversal is one of Prototype’s strongest features. Superhero sandbox games take note: make getting around fun and intuitive and we will keep coming back.

The graphics are pretty workhorse here, never bad but nothing that we haven’t seen before. The city looks good (and densely populated) and the animations are smooth. This is a game in which you probably won’t notice the graphics. But that’s not why you should be playing Prototype anyway. You play it to whomp on pretty much everyone and everything in the environment.

Which brings me to something that I really liked about the game: it didn’t have an overt moral choice system in place like some other games that have come out recently. It took a little while for me to get used to but I loved just letting loose after a while. It was a nice change to not have to fit into the ‘hero’ or ‘villain’ mold and just be a character wielding powers that can only be described as ‘godlike’ to pwn evolutionary noobs. Prototype, in this way, deals with a deeper issue about super-heroes. Granted such power, how many of us wouldn’t move beyond morality? Feel above it. For more on this issue, go read some
Nietzsche. Actually The Boys does a pretty good job here too.

Anyway, the bottom line is that this game is fun. It can get a little campy at times but if you like your action games fast, violent, and beyond good and evil (see what I did there?) do yourself a favour and pick this sucker up.