[Prototype] - Video Game Review

The past few decades have done a lot for superheroes. From Spiderman to Batman and The Boys, they went from comical in the 90s to one of the biggest things in pop culture. Yes, there were comics beforehand, but back then the wide masses probably only thought comics were for nerds. But relating to The Boys, not all superpowered "heroes" are good. This review isn't about The Boys though, it's about another original property that is kind of a nostalgia trip for me. Back when I was in high school in 2009 a lot of impressive video games came out: Left 4 Dead 2, Borderlands, Angry Birds, and Assassin's Creed 2. It was a wondrous year for video games. But there's one game from that year that changed me a lot more than these other games and show me the dark side of superpowered beings: [Prototype].

[Protoype] (or just Prototype) is the game about Alex Mercer, a man with amnesia who wakes up to discover he has superpowers. But these aren't ordinary superpowers. He does have have inhuman strength, speed, agility, and endurance, but he also has somehow gained the power to shapeshift his body into weapons. Additionally he can "consume" other humans and be able to morph into them while gaining all their memories. Soon after he wakes up and discovers these powers though a biological weapon spreads throughout the city of Manhattan and the military and a mysterious organization called Blackwatch comes to the island to keep the entire island quarantined from the rest of New York. Mercer in response goes on the run and starts trying to discover the truth about his condition. Very quickly though he learns whatever has happened is a lot deeper than he ever could have imagined.

Imagine basically you're the monster from The Thing, but you also got superpowers and are trying to find out how you became The Thing in the first place while parkouring around Manhattan. It's a very brutal game in terms of what you can do and now that I'm older I realize I miss games this Prototype. I miss being able to play maybe not a hero but an anti-hero and do whatever I want. We can have a karma system so you can make evil choices, but that's not the same as being a straight anti-hero. That edginess of character, making choices that are focused on the character while being not "pure of heart" choices, and the amount of destruction you can cause... Prototype gives me all that and it just lets me be bad to the core if I want or at the very least kind of destructive and dark in my positive choices Alex Mercer is just a very emo guy, but I love the tone he brings to the game because it's so unique for a superhero themed property.

Let's give some examples of this. Some of the collectables in the world are memories from certain individuals that pop up every now and then on the mini map. You got up to them and you can either stealth consume them or grab them by the throat, slam them into the ground, and punch their face into until they're squishy enough for your weird body to consume it. Either option is fine with me because they're both fulfilling for me. Another example is how you deal with the military that's on the island. If you get caught (accidentally or on purpose) you can either destroy the military attacking you or run away enough to change your form and hide away. I love either way for this as well because there's no karma system that berates me for being a bad person. I'll happily pick up a car and throw it at the soldiers or any helicopter that won't piss off and leave me alone.

Now as I mentioned already this game came out in 2009. Now it's 2020 and the graphics look terrible. Maybe they were great back then, but they have definitely not aged well. The models look somewhat block, from the humans to the vehicles and everything in between. The textures are worse, so blurry and with not much detail to them. The animations are pretty damn good still, especially with the morphing parts of Alex Mercer because even now I like how they portrayed the transformation and shapeshifting powers. Today though all of these would look a hell of a lot better. Still, if I'm to rate it from a time much closer to 2009 I'd say the graphical aspect was... nice? The animation definitely makes me smile, but the textures... not so much.

Another problem I had replaying the game was that game engine has aged even worse than the graphics. The game was built for only 4-core processors and most computers now have 8-core processing, so trying to play the game now with today's computer standards causes the game to lag severely and closes the game as soon as you try opening a save file or start the game. I had to look about for a few mods and some tech tricks to get the game playing on my PC and even then my FPS was never higher than 30 frames. Additionally the cinematic cutscenes and memory flashes would have audio problems to the point I just skipped them as soon as I could. I tried as hard as I could to watch them, but eventually they just didn't work and I gave up around half-way through the game. It sucks so badly and I hate how I couldn't enjoy Prototype to its fullest.

Saying that though, the cinematics are great (though I had to watch them on youtube). For their time they look excellent, especially the introductory cinematic. That one perfectly sets up that Alex Mercer isn't your typical hero, he's a dark person and he's done some terrible things in his quest to find the truth from Blackwatch. We start off with him on a rooftop, which he drops from with no damage to his body on impact and he running about with inhuman strength, running up the walls of buildings and jumping all over the city. Then Blackwatch is also shown and we see that while they're very efficient and prepared to clean up Manhattan they'll also do whatever it takes to hide the truth, even killing innocent people who have "seen too much." Then comes my favorite part where Alex appears and shows off his shapeshifting, massacring all of that squad of Blackwatch with a few of his powers, including tricking a man into thinking he's one of them before squiring him on his massive claws. It's so badass and one of my favorite introductions in a game. You can view it here for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc3XptLacMM

But even with these engine and graphical problems though I had the time of my life with this game! The combat is so fucking fun in Prototype! I know this is going to sound stupid and hilarious, but guns are the least useful form of combat in this game. Your powers and shapeshifting are must more effective. You can turn your arms into claws, a giant blade, a tentacle whip, or huge blocks of flesh that can smash through armor like you're the Hulk. There is one other power that gives you boosted strength, but I never used it. But with all these though, plus a few other shapeshifting powers, you become a force of a nature, a biological machine of rampaging death that butchers apart any military or infected that get in your way. You still have to be mindful of the damage you can take, but no game has ever, and I mean ever, made me feel so powerful before. Most of the time I'm sure people will just use the whip power because it's pretty overpowered in this game, but I like to mix things up and used almost all my powers to utter fullest.

There's more though, oh there's definitely more. I'm not just talking about the epic, powerful devastator moves that can released more piercing tentacles than a Japanese hentai or fields of spikes that pop out of the ground or laser beam that instead of a laser instead consists of rock hard flesh. I'm talking about the possibilities of how you can have fun with all these skills. For instance you can consume an old grandpa and become them, then start picking up taxis and throw them at people while in real life imagining you're playing an old man who forgot to take his anti-crazy pills or is hating on the "young people and their hipster ways." It's all these dark options at your command that you can just unleash on the city... It just fills me with bloodlust and a sense of destruction I don't get out of any other game.

Now the story is... fine I guess. I personally found it had a mostly smooth flow to it, but the whole dark, edgy conspiracy plot might scare away a few gamers because that type of story has be done to death. I'll get more into the story later. But with Alex Mercer having no memories we are basically pulled down a path of events we have no control over. Even so I thought they were pretty fun and challenging, even on an easy difficulty. I have heard on the higher difficulties there are some missions and boss fights that can get scream-inducing intense. Sadly though while the main story missions are pretty good in terms of gameplay, the side missions are kind of boring with not much variety. Most of them are killing people with a sprinkling of racing and flying games (we'll get to the flying stuff in a bit). The side missions are basically to gain more experience to obtain purchase new skills and upgrades.

Now I have been going on and on about how epic it is to be violent and making scenes, but there's a great use of stealth in this game. By transforming into any person you can blend in with the crowd and it's fantastic. Take the appearance of a military man and you can do even more, from sneaking into military bases for additional upgrades to calling in air strikes to calling out other military, saying they are Alex Mercer (though that last skill should be unlockable much earlier in the game). As the game progresses and the threat becomes bigger we get more devices about the city that can detect you in your disguised form, some of which can be disabled. Stealth is required for certain missions and learning how to be stealthy, even with your incredibly durable body, will help you survive better throughout the city.

There is something about this though about the stealth that did take me out of the game a bit: The AI is stupid. Really stupid. I mean it was 2009 and 15-year old me didn't mind in the slightest that everyone on Manhattan was as blind as bats. But even so you're continually hunted by the military and in the game if they see a man flying about, literally running up the Empire State building, or something obviously not human and they go "Huh, that's weird... Hey Jerry did you catch the football last night?" Unless you grab or punch a soldier they won't take notice of you which is weird. But if you do anything violent, even accidentally bumping into them they go on high alert and it's just... Stupid. It should be better than that, even for that time period. Though I did have a lot of fun and laughs stealth consuming soldiers on bases and just keep doing that until the base was entirely empty.

The environment is also great! Now it is basically as if the developers, Radical Games, just copied Google Maps version of Manhattan and turned it into a sandbox game, but I'm fine with that, especially since there are no loading screens while traveling about the map. It works here because there's also a lot of people and object you can interact with in the game. One of my favorites is bringing out your shield power and running on sidewalks, sending innocent civilians flying into the air. With such a large area of land though you need to be able to travel quickly and you got several ways to do so. There's of course running at super fast speeds, but there's also hijacking helicopters. My favorite (and most likely used way of traveling for any player) though is gliding. It's a very early skill you can unlock in game, but you basically propel yourself through the air by shooting blood out of your wrists like an emo Peter Pan. Thanks Zero Punctuation for that comparison. Plus there are bunch of collectables, some of them located at famous spots around Manhattan, that are fun to collect as you travel about the city.

Another great thing about the environment is the territories. There's areas controlled by the military, areas controlled by the infected, and neutral territories. As the game progresses the infected and military take over more and more of the island, but during free roam you can change about who owns what by destroying bases of either side. I haven't gone into the infected much because they mostly consist of the normal human infected and the more brutal Hunters. Not much variety, yeah, but the hunters are very dangerous to the player until you get your blade power, then their danger is reduced some. Anyways, the map is always changing as the infected and military and you duke it out and I really like how it's all implemented into the game. It makes the world feel more alive and affected by your actions. Both sides have their ups and downs and it's hard for me to choose which I'd rather have control Manhattan. Whatever the case, you're always the odd one out in the city.

[Prototype] is kind of a relic of gaming, but it's one I absolutely adore. And so have a bunch of other people. I've been looking about and I have seen a lot of people want Prototype to come back with a third game in the series or a remaster. I personally want a remaster because of how dated the engine is for the first game. This is could also be done for [Prototype 2], especially since it was never adjusted for PC play, still having a massive memory leak bug that'll crash the game on computers in less than 15 minutes of play. Sadly the studio behind the game, Radical Games, was canned by Activision soon after the second game came out. But if we get enough voices we can possibly bring back the [Prototype] series with proper glory it deserves. It's stupid, epic, bloody and gory fun that makes you feel like you can take on the world.

Tentative Score: 7/10

Definitive Score: 7.25/10

I'd give it an higher score if the game's engine wasn't so terrible and I didn't need a bunch of mods to play it. The hack and slash of it all is just amazing and it changed a lot about me and my preferences for video games.