Fuck where to begin. Prototype the newish open world game from Radical Entertainment makers of Hulk Ultimate Destruction, well I just played through this game. I have mixed thoughts on it. One minute it's fun as shit to run around the city jumping super high and throwing cars at helicopters then consuming some soldiers in a very violent manner. Then all of a sudden it's a game that suffers from loose awkward controls that seem to be fighting against your every move. One minute your a super badass slaughtering untold numbers of mutants, then all of a sudden you're so fragile could fall over when anything even touches you. Overall I liked and fucking hated this game at the same time. I'm not discussing any story stuff because I don't feel like it and there would probably be spoilers if I did. But I did like the story and I thought it played out well. It's what made me keep playing.
Briefly the positives. When the game is going right it's just a blast to play. Combat is okay and you have a large number of moves available to you. One complaint I heard a lot was about the weird way you had to press buttons to get some of the moves to work. The only thing I noticed was when you need to hit X and B (square and circle on the PS3, I played this on the 360) at the same time. But it's only for a few moves and except for using one of these moves at one part in the game I never needed them. I guess you'll never need them either so you shouldn't let that steer you away from this. Besides that the controls work, for the most part. I also liked that the whole city is available to you from the beginning of the game. You can go to any part and not see any kind of loading except at the start and end of a mission and that loading is not long at all. The graphics do suffer for this as they do in most open world games but the character animations especially for Alex are fantastic.
Now when the controls work it's great. When are they a factor? When you need precision movement mainly during the timed events you can do during the course of the game. You have timed foot races where you need to touch orbs placed around the map in a set amount of time. War events where you team up with the military or the infected to fight the other side. Kill events in which you by yourself need to kill a set amount of enemies in a time limit. And finally you have the glide events, you just need to glide and land on a marker some distance from where you start. Any other time I can fly and run around stopping and turning on a dime no fucking problem. Just doing really cool amazing things to get around. Then when I start a timed foot race all of it goes to shit. Alex Mercer (The guy you play as) just starts saying "fuck it" and does whatever the hell he wants during these. Not going in the direction you press or not gliding when you need to. Before you go "Well you must just suck" I'll offer this. I platinumed all the events so they can be done but it's frustrating. I don't know how many times I'd airhike and Alex would just fly off away from where I pressed. The war events are equally annoying. Mainly because they're timed and on some of them you can't use your powers at all. Two come to mind where you are disguised as military and you have to use a grenade launcher. Fuck they were tough. To platinum them I had to constantly spam the lock on to slow down time. It's would be like doing one second of fighting in .8 seconds. If that what Radical had in mind for you to beat it that's bullshit because I think I fucked up my left trigger doing it. But these war events are so random in the spawns you can be so close but one last enemy will spawn to far away for you to get to them. Now the solo Kill events aren't that bad but the lock on makes fighting lots of guys at once kind of bullshit.
When you lock on to a enemy in Prototype the game slows down to allow you time to start fighting. Well for me this would throw of my timing. It took me about half the game to get adjusted to it, but the lock on in general was still a problem. When you hit the left trigger it locks on to the biggest threat on the screen, not the biggest threat near you. So if you're looking at a soldier all the way down the street and a tank is right behind you but out of site the lock on will get the soldier way far away as the tank owns your ass. You can select to either toggle lock on or have it to where you need to hold down the left trigger to keep the lock on. I usually like the toggle method but in Prototype it's shit. Usually in a game with toggle lock on when you kill the enemy targeted the lock on stops. In Prototype the lock on switches to the next enemy on the screen no matter how far away he is and this can fuck you up. I switched to holding the trigger and had better luck. But a big thing to me with this is the camera. When you're locked on moving the right analog stick which usually moves the camera switches the lock on target. When you're using toggle it can switch you all over the place when you instinctively go for the right stick to swing the camera around. Sometimes when you have to run from an enemy you're locked on to the camera can't keep up and you end up losing sight of the enemy. This is prevalent during boss fights. Not a problem when you have just a boss but most times the boss has helpers with it so you'll end up losing your lock on to the boss and targeting a minion. Bullshit.
You're built up to be this super badass dude with all these powers and can destroy all kinds of shit but you're frail as shit. You can regenerate health but only half way. You have to consume enemies to raise it to full. You lose health really fast. When you're fighting a few enemies it's not a big deal but when the numbers are large, which is often you lose health way to fast. You can consume enemies for health but an attack from an enemy will knock the consumed target out of your hands, even in the middle of a consume animation. This can lead to cheap deaths and feelings that the game just doesn't want to let you do what you want to do. Any explosion can knock you down. Now I know it's a freaking explosion from a missle or grenade or whatever but you're suppose to be super powerful. Can't he just sometimes shrug the blast off? Hunter infected can knock you over just by bumping into you. This sucks ass during kill events involving infected. You're trying to slaughter civilian infected but they always spawn one Hunter that can jump from far far away to knock you down then combo you as you stand up. Kill him and another comes in to replace him. It's takes Alex so long to get up it's painful and then you lose the event.
Over all I liked Prototype. I would of liked to see things done differently and hope if they make a sequel they fix this shit. I bought this when Amazon had a deal of the day for it at 40 dollars and feel like that's a good price for this game. I put about 30 something hours into it all together playing through the story, finding all the Orbs and Web of Intrigue targets and getting platinum times in all the events so I feel I got my moneys worth out of it and I still need to play through it on hard mode. If you see it for 40 or cheaper I'd say get it. At 50 if you've played it and liked it then go ahead, you'll probably spend a lot of time with it.
If I was Activision I would of released a demo of the first prologue level. It was fucking awesome and they'd probably have sold a lot more copies of the game.
Prototype - 8.5 out of 10
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