Daily Loaf

It’s hard to feel guilty when people don’t even bother to move out of the way of your tank when it’s about to run them over. That’s good, because Prototype is a game that clearly doesn’t want you to be thinking too much about innocent bystanders, especially if doing so would get in the way of tearing the hell out of anything and everything around you. Still, even I felt a twinge of discomfort while going for the achievement points for running over 500 people with a single tank. In retrospect, this actually works within the convoluted framework of Prototype’s story, but at the time it was just one more way of causing mayhem. Prototype’s all about the mayhem.

You play as Alex, a scientist who always wears a hoodie for some unexplained reason, and who has been infected by a virus that’s quickly turning him into a monster/superhero. And of course you have amnesia. So you’ve got to find out who did this to you while Manhattan dissolves into a chaos of nasty soldiers and even nastier infected who’re constantly attacking each other and you. You get to tear your way through both sides in a blood filled, high speed romp up and down the length of the city as you unlock the secrets of your recent past and search for who’s responsible. If the story sounds typical and uninspired, that’s because it is – amnesia, virus, shadowy government agency, trust no one, and did I mention amnesia? Blah, blah, blah. We’ve seen it all before. Protoype’s setting and story don’t break any new ground and are almost throwaway.

But it’s not the why’s and therefore’s that draw you into Prototype – it’s what you do. How do you find out new information from enemies? You absorb them in a bloody, disgusting process that unlocks nifty little quick-cut flashback sequences that simulate you absorbing their memories. How do you race about from one end of the city to another? By running up the sides of building, knocking over pedestrians, and taking great, monstrous leaps that span whole city blocks. And when some soldier, tank, monster, or helicopter gets in your way, just turn your arm into a giant blade or hammer or spiked whip, cover your body in bio-armor, and hurl a truck at it. This game offers pretty much non-stop, furious action as Alex smashes his way through the city.

Not that it doesn’t have its subtleties. It’s a lot of fun to sneak up behind a soldier, absorb his appearance and then saunter into an army base unnoticed by the guards. It’s also cool to glide from rooftop to rooftop while the city below you cries out in fear and chaos. There are scores of mini-missions that break the fourth wall of the story telling, but offer nice variety to the game play. And while the game’s main story missions confuse and bore more than they reveal or inspire, they offer some pretty interesting game play variations. There’s a ton of options for upgrading your powers, probably too many in fact, but the game remains fun even when you stick to a chosen few that you really enjoy. All that action can get pretty overwhelming at times, with the camera losing sight of Alex and so much going on that it’s impossible to tell what’s happening. But those moments are the price for an otherwise frenzied but controllable experience that gives players an absolute sense of being the most badass thing on the block. So don’t think of those poor pedestrians as people when you run them over in a stolen tank. Think of them as points, if indeed you think of them at all, which isn’t something I or this game is encouraging you to do a whole lot of while you play it.

I’ve written elsewhere about the final boss battle, and in general the last few missions are more challenging than they are fun. I imagine that experiences will vary, and some people might become overwhelmed by the game earlier than I did. But for my money, the sheer excitement of whipping a helicopter, flying up to it, hijacking it, then using its missiles to blow up a giant monster before jumping out of it and slamming into the ground like a human wrecking ball makes the game worth playing. It’s dumb, brutal, loud, fast fun. But it’s totally fun. Except that final boss.

Prototype retails for about $60.00 and is available for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and on Windows PCs.

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