Purely Review

Players: 1
Platforms:PS3, Xbox 360, PC
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Radical Entertainment

The ground shakes. The citizens tremble, despite not knowing what befalls them next. The military is tracking this event and moving towards the location in the hopes of stopping it. But by the time they get there, it’s too late. The citizens of New York have been wiped by the most evil and powerful force imaginable.

A game delay.

Such a phenomena would happen many a time in the development of Prototype. The hype train kept chugging it’s slow path and people held their breaths that the world would be saved by this game. Now, it’s here. Our saviour. Maybe.

You are Alex Mercer, a scientist with the dress sense of a street punk who has been infected with a virus known as Blacklight and now can kick all kinds of ass. Your mission is to find out who made you the way you are and make him pay.

The controls are much like the Spiderman game series, with (on the Xbox controller) X and Y attacking, B grabbing, A jumping, right trigger for running and other buttons for targeting and selecting your powers. Although some combos are hard to pull off, this is a very good control scheme. The game itself also behaves like Spiderman, particularly Spidey 2. You can run and climb up walls, glide acroos buildings and do massive jumps, much like the man of spider. The setting also helps, and if you’ve played the open-world Spidey games, you’ll like this.

The main drawcard of Prototype is that you are an ass kicking machine with loads of super powers to massacre military, monsters and Dave Everyman with. Early powers including plain ol’ strength, giant claws that would make Wolverine jealous, a giant shield and the ability to shift thy shape. Consuming people not only gives you health, but also their identity. Hide for long enough and you can come back out with a new skin. Those military won’t know what hit ‘em.

Consuming people can also, sometimes, give you their memories to unlock on the Web of Intrigue. Consuming certain people at certain times can unlock more of the plot, though not necessarily the game, and brings you closer to finding your man. I’m gonna be honest, a lot of the WOI entries were very unsatisfying. The best ones came from the main story missions, which gave me a lot of backstory and information. Thank you.

The story is pretty lame. It’s one of those games that doesn’t really explore the motives of your individual missions, has some pretty tame concepts at the beginning, and just ditches and forgets about past concepts and characters. When you get to what happened to Alex Mercer before the events of the game at the end of it, it’s not worth it.

The graphic are also pretty rough. Low textures abound, and that dreaded pre-loading also. There’s a lot to take in on the screen, though, with a massive draw distance and sweet special effects. Gore has surprisingly been toned down. You’d expect this game to have buckets of blood and limbs flying everywhere. But this game was banned originally or something.

The learning curve of the game is pretty good. The military start off with mere footsoldiers, then start bringing in copters and tanks. They also develop technology specifically for use in fighting back the infection. And you. The infection itself also holds a bigger presence the more the game goes on.

To combat both of these armies, you gain evolution points, or EP, for killing, consuming and completing. The EP you gain flows at a very steady rate, and so do the price of the upgrades. Both go up at various stages of the game, but you always feel like you are getting stronger and better at a comfortable rate. This feels very satisfying and thus makes up for the crud story.

Side missions are pretty basic, but they get the job done. Most of them boil down to consuming or killing, but there are also a few jumping, racing and basejumping missions. The best ones force you to temporarily take the side of either the military or infected in a massive battle. Though hard, these are very fun, and it’s nice to stop killing one side for a while.

Other people have literally called this game a prototype, claiming that there have been one hundred and one glitches in the game. Apart from some occasionally retarded enemy AI, I think of this as a polished game and contender for open world game of the year. Supervillainy has never been so much fun.

Graphics: 7/10
Sound: 7/10
Difficulty: 6/10
Glitch Factor: 9/10
Pure Fun: 9/10
Length: 8/10

Total: 8.5/10