For the longest time I have lamented that there were really no decent free-world super-hero themed video games for the consoles. And along came Infamous and Prototype. Being an X-box-specialized gamer, the latter drew my hand for practicality’s sake.
Prototype is a pandemic-themed sandbox game, set in the heart of an alarmingly detailed Manhattan Island. You take control of Alex Mercer, a man who has suffered memory loss at the hands of corporate genetic experimentation. In turn he is infected with a bizarre viral entity. Mercer, being part of the 0.001 percent of humanity who apparently doesn’t turn into a feral monster when infected, has his own unique set of symptoms – superpowers that visually manifest in a spawn-meets-Venom manner. His arms can turn into monstrous melee weapons, he can scale vertical surfaces with almost no difficulty, and in a process that hints at some deep-rooted sociopathic history (a history the game doesn’t particularly explore) Mercer can absorb anyone – a terminal process – in order to mimic their appearance.
As you progress through the game you unlock memories that form a rather jumbled but structurally cohesive whole to the back story behind the infection and Mercer’s involvement.
The game begins in a manner I see fairly frequently in melee-based games – you are dropped immediately into the game to learn the controls through plot-relevant conflict, rather than a paced and patronizing tutorial.
Activision has a history of New York-themed gaming – their hand in the Spider-man franchise has no doubt given them the time and experience to perfect the 3-D map of Manhattan Island down to the buildings and the trees in the sidewalk. The city is under military control and every bridge off the island has been sealed, confining your movement to the island. But there is more than enough room to explore, and as the infection spreads through key hotspots, the chance for action increases.
Prototype brings to city-based melee something the Spider-man games never really accomplished – the thrill of traveling on the ground. As you upgrade Mercer’s powers through experience-points earned in the process of campaign missions, you unlock various boosts to his stock powers, as well as stronger and fancier ways to dispatch your enemies. The results are nothing short of satisfying – sprinting faster than traffic down the street, leaping stories into the air, and an exhilarating process of going instantly from ‘sprint down the sidewalk’ to ‘sprint straight up the side of the building.’ The element of parkour gives the game its brilliance. Mercer can scale buildings, leap between skyscrapers, and a few upgrades in, glide between destinations.
Graphics-wise, the city and landscapes have clearly been given the strongest focus, but the characters haven’t been completely written off. They reflect a level of graphic quality we have come to expect from this style of game. Mechanically the controls are fairly simple and with minor practice the attack moves become second-nature.
How these elements come together is a little different. This is yet another example in my personal history with Activision where I have to question the developer’s understanding of balance.
Mercer carries around this virus, and in tandem with the military control of the city, he has become the country’s most wanted man, hence his need to camouflage. You engage the world and their awareness through a detection meter – if it redlines, you’ve been seen, and the military opens fire. Even the simplest of actions can trip detection – any superhuman movement through a populated area will do. Attacking anyone usually speeds up your reveal, to the point where armed soldiers and strike teams rally to exterminate you. Escaping them is on some occasions no simple task, but one tight enclosed alley and the consumption of a hapless civilian later, you’re off the radar.
The real show of imbalance comes in the campaign missions, particularly in the boss fights. For a boss fight to be practical, the enemy needs to be tougher, but your character has to have some edge. In Mercer’s case, that edge would be the speed and agility. There’s one simple problem: the hunter-mutation enemies are for all intensive purposes exactly on par with Mercer for physical speed and agility, and when they unleash an attack pattern, there is no option to block. Combined with the fact that in sprint, the game will automatically leap over debris and off certain angled surfaces, it becomes a near-uncontrollable process of running circles around an enemy, waiting for it to center itself so you can release yourself from the wall and attempt an attack in the two seconds of vulnerability the enemy offers. Checkpoints provide relief from the multi-phased battles, but in the end there’s a certain tediousness and potentially controller-throwing rage fuel from these battles that offset the greater fluidity of the game.
I’m not saying it’s difficult to have fun with the game. The free-roaming itself is very entertaining. But the free-roam in Prototype lacks a very specific something that the GTA series and the later Spider-man games all offered in droves – stuff to DO. Here, in free-run, you can journey to the infected hotspots and battle various mutating humans and their nastier counterparts, the hunter variants. Beyond the proper campaign missions, that’s it. You’re limited to absorbing people, wandering the map looking for landscape tokens, or scaling a tall building and stepping off to a gut-twisting plunge… where you land without any damage at all. When it’s a 90 story fall, Mercer is apparently Superman.
My final word with Prototype is simply that there was so much the game could have been that fell short. The free-roam concept is perfect for Spider-man – stopping crimes of all shapes and sizes. For Mercer, it’s a constant process of trying to enjoy your powers without dicing a pedestrian and drawing the curious, though rather dim-witted, glances from the soldiers patrolling the island. Being the anti-hero is what stacks the game against Mercer, and though the environmental interaction is nothing short of brilliant, there aren’t enough activities in the free roam world to provide a necessary relief from the halting and frequently frustrating nature of the harder campaign missions. I definitely recommend playing the game, but if you’re a more emotionally controlled gamer, you’ve been warned that by the end you might find yourself replacing a controller.
-Nick-
So we've signed up for the very cool, very new Audioboo service, which is basically like audio Twittering, run by a few dedicated souls in the States. We get to record 5 minute podcasts on our iPhones, and upload them to Audioboo, who in turn have been kind enough to create a podcast on iTunes for us!
