I was very unsure of Prototype as to whether it would be a decent game, mainly because it was something different and if the developers couldn’t pull it off, then it could be a poor game. But, after playing it, it’s pretty good.

When the game first loads you are shown the trailer that was released fairly recently, which is nothing new, but the quality, it was absolutely amazing. You could have thought you were watching a real film it was that good. Unfortunately, this was only a movie and the game wasn’t quite up to that quality, although the graphics were very good.

You play as a character, Alex Mercer, who has been ‘infected’ with some sort of virus that a company called Gentek has been developing, however, this infection goes wrong and starts to spread across the city. You are tasked with trying to find out what happened to you and try to stop the infection before it consumes everyone. At the beginning of the game it throws you about abit. You start in the middle of New York City on ‘Day 18 of the infection’, at this point we have no idea what the infection is and how it came about. You are entered into combat with the army and some sort of infected creatures. Once you complete this section it really starts to jump into the cut scenes and eventually you start back at the beginning of the infection at day 1 acting out the story as you tell it to someone in day 18. This is where the cut scenes come in, after completing a mission it will go back to day 18 where you are explaining what happened to an unknown person on top of a roof top.

I’ll leave it at that for the story as I don’t want to spoil it too much. But like I said earlier, you are tasked with finding out what caused this infection and what happened to you. While you are doing this you get some pretty awesome moves and upgrades which you unlock by completing missions and side missions, aswell as just killing anything during the free modes. Once you have these experience points, you can spend them on a range of upgrades like combat, defence, health and movement. The movement upgrades have to be my favorite, you can upgrade your jump height, sprint speed and get a couple of new moves like Air Dash and Glide, the Air Dash move allows you to take another quick jump after jumping make yourself go that little bit further. As for Glide, this allows you to glide through mid air after jumping, which increases the amount of distance you cover hugely.

All of these upgrades make Alex pretty amazing, by having all the movement ones, plus when you add on that you can run up walls, you turn into a cooler and more deadly Spiderman.

There’s also some more features you can use throughout the game. One being Consume, this allows you to walk about to anyone, a civilian, army personnel and event infected mutants, you can consume then and regenerate health by doing so. However, back to the army personnel ones, there are some personnel that are pointed out to you on your mini map, this is because of one of two reasons. The first one is that they are able to teach you new skills, for example, if you consume a soldier that can control tanks, you will then have the ability to hijack enemy tanks and drive them around, pretty cool.

The other reason is that they are part of your ‘Web of Intrigue’. The web of intrigue is a tree of information that links different people to the story of how you became infected. Once you consume a new person, several new people will appear as part of the web and by consuming more of these people you will eventually unlock the truth behind what really happened to you at Gentek.

Summary

Overall the game is pretty amazing, although it is extremely hard at some points, even on the normal difficulty it’s very trying at times, although if you can persist and like they say in the loading screens: ‘try different approaches’, then it’s a very good game and will keep you entertained for hours on end. The amount of detail that has been put into the storyline and graphics is outstanding, particularly, when you fall from a huge distance or a car explodes right next to you, the amount of detail that has been put into the dent that you cause on the floor is extremely good and I must say well done to the developers of the game simply for that. So back to my overall point, the game reminds me alot of the Spiderman games where you can swing around the city and jump in and out of campaign missions aswell as side missions, so if you’re not a fan of the Spiderman games then Prototype really isn’t for you, but if you do enjoy them then this is an even better version, much cooler, much faster, plus more brutal.

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