Overdue Review: Prototype (PC)

Have you ever wondered what Grand Theft Auto III would have been like if you could scale buildings by running straight at them and had the powers of a horrifying, shape-shifting hentai monster?  This concept may not be able to sustain the weight of all of the concentrated "awesome".

More after the jump!


Welcome, one and all to a feature I have dubbed "Overdue Reviews".  See, if you're like me, and enjoy playing video games, but also have school, work, some semblance of a social life, etc. to deal with as well, a lot of titles slip through the cracks.  This doesn't mean I don't acquire them though, and sometimes it's just a little bit of a wait to play them.  But sometimes a little bit of a wait is what you need to get a solid opinion of a game.  After all of the traditional mouthpieces have voiced their opinions and the buzz of the game slowly fades away, you are then confronted with a piece of software that must stand on its own merits.  The masses have spoken, but the masses are fools!  The opinion of the lay-gamer (unfortunately for me) not being for sale, has become even more valuable as a judgmental tool, and us Average Joes sometimes like to give the dust time to settle before making our decisions.  The lack of timeliness has nothing to do with the fact that this was the only game I had on the docket that I had a prayer of completing by the site launch.  But anyway: Prototype!

Radical Entertainment's Prototype fits firmly into my "like Grand Theft Auto III If..." category for the overall way it utilizes the same mini-map oriented sandbox style.  The action takes place in a pretty decent facsimile of NYC, where our protagonist awakens in a morgue with some pacing-convenient-amnesia and also with super strength.  Naturally, he uses these powers to absorb the people around him and see their memories, as well as assume their appearance (a process I deemed "eating people's souls).  Using this new ability, he tracks down his sister, who has conveniently been helping him investigate the company trying to kill him, apparently as his accomplice (remember: AMNESIA.  Anything goes).  After this, you gain access to the open world exploration portion of the game, which goes in my "Like Assassin's Creed If..." category, with statement's conclusion being "if the side missions were a little less boring".  Unlike AC, the side missions do further the tangled, addled mess that is the plot and backstory, but so much of it is explained to you in the main game missions that you start to wonder what the point is, other than arbitrary completionism.  You get experience to level up your tentacle powers, sure, but I had leveled up almost all of my skills to the max while completing maybe 20% of the side missions, so at the end of the day, it felt like an obnoxious grind-fest and I actively avoided them.

The level up system fits rather neatly into my "Like Devil May Cry If..." category.  This works like DMC would have if there was one move that was obviously way better than all of the other moves, the combos were unintuitive, and everything other than the ability to make tentacles erupt from the ground and defile everything above them was completely goddamned useless.  What I'm saying is, yeah there are lots of abilities and skills, but why even bother when I'm just alternating between "whip with tentacle from a distance" and "impale from below from a distance" followed by frantically fleeing the scene to avoid the military hell that gets rained down upon you once every 30 seconds or so.  And it's not like I didn't try to use the other stuff.  I would think to myself, "Butler, today you're going to figure out how to use that hammerfist upgrade" and every time I thought that to myself, I would die twice as quickly as usual before deciding that "tentacle rape from below" was probably just the safer strategy.

This all probably makes me sound like I hated the game, and I'll certainly say that it is far from perfect.  Obnoxious and grinding side missions, a total overabundance of escort missions (I thought we had cleared this up with Goldeneye.  No one in the history of the world has ever enjoyed escorting NPC's), and a narrative that is so obviously plot-driven that the characters might as well just be cardboard cutouts with their respective character archetypes written clearly across the front have all been factors that have led to some uncomfortable moments of me screaming at my laptop while my perplexed roommates look on.  That having been said, however, NOTHING is cooler than roping a dude with a tentacle from across a rooftop, going to talk to his buddies, accusing one of them of being you in disguise, and then murdering everyone in the ensuing chaos with the aforementioned tentacle rape from below.  Then you flee the scene, scrambling up the side of a building, flying over the skyline for a while, then finally plummeting back to earth to devour a helpless civilian's soul so that you can blend in with the crowd.  You will do this so often that you will keep waiting for it to stop being awesome, and it holds out for a surprisingly long time.  But not forever.

Unfortunately, this game has the classic flaw of building itself around a really neat concept, but then having no content to back it up.  The plot is an addled mess, full of interchangeable sci-fi-dystopia-character-archetypes, and the missions quickly become the same sequence of "go to spot on the map and kill [person/monster]" or "go to spot on the map and protect [vehicle/building/whatever the hell the plot needs your ass to defend]".  So while flying from roof to roof and hijacking helicopters out of the air is SUPER AWESOME for the first few hours, it fades away (as all good things are wont to do) and slowly the realization dawns on you that this is all the game has to offer.  No interesting content in which to use each separate ability, just a bunch of beat-em-up sequences which stagnate at an exponential rate.  All of this culminates in a boss fight that I am convinced is simply not winnable.  You are forced to chip away at this thing's health (while it has an arsenal of moves that can kill you in one hit) until an arbitrary timer is put in place to make you kill it in a time that I just don't ever see happening.  I played this fight for 3. Goddamn. Hours. tonight, and have yet to get even close to a victory.  And that says it all about the content.  All of that posturing and all of that intrigue in the buildup, and instead of an interesting and challenging fight to top it all off, they have a fight made difficult only by the fact that the boss literally kills you in two hits and runs faster than you do.

Perhaps that's why I'm so bitter about this game though.  It has the makings of so many great games in its design: GTA III, Assassin's Creed, Devil May Cry... but in attempting to distill the essence of "cool" from all of these great games, it's as if Radical forgot to give it any kind of structure around which all of this "cool" could reinforce itself.  What starts out as a solid experience quickly collapses under the weight of the expectations it produces leaving us with a very pretty, very interesting pile of rubble, but at the end of the day, it's still just a bunch of damned rocks.  Rocks that have collapsed around a shell of broken dreams.