The Type of Game that I Love to Borrow.
[Prototype] is the type of game that I love to borrow. There are moments when you are scaling sky-scrapers, destroying tanks, hijacking helicopters, and you feel like an elite, über antihero. And there are moments when you have to do lame repetitive missions and totally suspend your disbelief to swallow the video game-iness of the experience. Bottom line if I haven't caught you attention with these first few sentences, this game is a two week treasure. Play it. It's great. But don't expect to pull it off the self in a year and say, "Oh, remember when Alex Mercer consumed that guy...it was awesome." Because I think most people will wonder about the eBay/trade-in value of the game.
If you are still with me, let me say that conceptually I really enjoyed the core experience. I won't go into the plot or basic core game play experience because if you are reading this review then you most-likely know [Prototype] has a sandbox setup and so on. Rather, I will just tell you about my overall experience with the game.
The game has a healthy level of difficulty--meaning that I was frustrated at times, I died a few time, but I never went into a rage over any one (story) mission. It also has a healthy amount of fun moments. The first time you sneak into an Army Compound and stealth kill most of the soldiers is really rewarding. But as the game progress moments like these become fewer because the challenge doesn't alter itself; rather the developers just stack boring steps to the operation. For example, the game adds Viral Sensors that you have to sabotage before you break in to a compound. Okay, that's annoying but not really a big deal. Then they add flying Viral Sensors that you have to shoot down, without getting caught, before you sabotage the ground sensors just to break into an Army Compound for a machine gun upgrade (which I did not use very often). It feels like the developers were adding hurdles to the experience as compared making players develop a new strategy.
The "add hurdles" mentality is also prevalent for the battles. Once I got the best viral weapon, I never used anything else. Why use blade claws when you have a blade arm? I ended up blade/elbow dropping everything. The battles got harder, but it wasn't because the AI was smarter. Rather, the enemies just become more bountiful as the game progress. That's not to say battles are not fun because destroying a house-sized monster in Times Square is exciting. But glide, elbow drop, glide, elbow drop, becomes tiresome. I know the game offers different attacks, but why use a butter knife when you have a sword?
Admittedly, I am a story gamer. I want something, some characterization, some plot. I'm not expecting a Joyce novel. I just want a driving purpose behind the experience. And for the most part [Prototype] delivers. The idea of consuming memory and the presentation of the action is very stylish, but there are so many pointless memories. After I got the basic plot, I did not want to watch thirty scenes about one solider yelling at another solider about the upcoming viral outbreak or the Idaho back story. Many of the memories reveal little about what I really cared about. The main story events were awesome. But I collected 75% of the memories and felt that 30% were actually adding to the development of a cohesive narrative. But the 30% was good. The story was fun. It was just cluttered with unnecessary events.
Finally, the game-iness problem. You can disguise yourself as a solider to sneak into a base, which is cool. But it makes no sense when the Army is looking for a guy with super powers, and you fall from a helicopter and land flat footed--the ground shatters under your impact--and the soldiers act like that is a normal thing. The game is like, "We're on the lookout for someone that has the power to run up wall and jump over tanks." And Alex does these actions disguised as a soldier and the AI ignores it completely. “Oh, you can pretty much fly, but you are wearing a uniform so you must be one of us, right?” There are also some issues with tanks and mass human death, but I won't complain any more.
Bottom line, rent it. Better yet, borrow it for three weeks. [Prototype] is worth your time, but I'm not sure it’s worth 60 dollars.
