So imagine my surprise when I played Prototype for the first time. After the opening sequence in which you're introduced to all your abilities, the cutscene explaining the character, etc...for once, I didn't care. From the very beginning of the game, the entire city is free for you to explore. I ignored the mission markers and just ran around the city, throwing cars, running up the side of the buildings WITH the cars, finding the tallest building around, climbing to the top then jumping off, trying to land on a car somewhere on the street below. It was fantastic fun. The controls took a long time to get used to and were a little clunky, but I didn't mind, because they allowed for so much freedom of movement and exploration. I looked in my upgrades menu and saw all the little toys I could get if I only had some more experience, so I decided to start playing the actual game.
Imagine my surprise when the actual game turned out to be shit.
Obviously, when you play any game, the game is going to have its strong points and its low points. Nobody expects a masterful story from a Mario game, while Phoenix Wright is more an interactive book than a video game. However, there is a problem when the game's story has a completely different tone than the actual game. There's to be had jumping around buildings, consuming people and taking their appearance, shooting blood out of your hands to fly at high speed, and all that suggests a game that's comical and funny. However, the cutscenes in the game suggest a dark, brooding storyline with an anti-hero out on a serious quest for vengeance. He does what he has to to survive. But when you start playing the actual game your thoughts are less on the serious side and more "I need health. Time to eat everyone around me." It doesn't help that the storyline makes no sense, is difficult to follow, and when I finally beat the game I thought "Wait, that's it?" There's no buildup to the final battle. There was another important battle earlier on that had a lot of buildup, and they could have used that as the final boss just fine, only for the game to just go on. Point is, the story's a piece of crap, and Alex Mercer just isn't an interesting character at all.
But hey, who cares about the story, right? After all, the freedom of movement and the options available must mean that the actual game is great too, right? Well...sadly, no. The missions in the game are repetitive, tedious, and frustrating. They're littered with a ton of poor design choices, the most prominent of which being that no matter where you are, there's always some asshole with a rocket launcher with 100% accuracy to shoot you and mess up whatever it was that you were trying to do. At first you think the game is going to be easy; after all, you're a superpowered mutant that can do just about anything. For a bit, that's true. Then you have to start putting up with other mutants and supersoldiers and whatnot who can move as fast as you do, who can't be grabbed and can hit you for tons of damage while you're waiting for an attack to finish up so you can jump out of the way. Not to mention when hijacking a tank, there's a few seconds of mashing Y before you can enter, and during that time you're vulnerable to all enemy fire, and if you get hit with a rocket, surprise, you get knocked off and have to try it again. Not to mention the hijacking process is painfully slow, with the camera zooming in for dramatic effect, forgetting that the player might want to immediately shoot at the nearest threat, rather than be forced to swivel the camera back around every single time.
Some design choices in the game were painful, too. A certain boss had a gigantic health bar and sat stationary in the center of an intersection. You try tackling it head-on, you get a bunch of rocks shot at you that are too numerous to dodge. Get too close, it does this area-of-effect attack that drains your health bar. The only reliable method of hurting this thing was to run up the side of a nearby building, lock onto it, use the right analog stick to make sure I'm -actually- locked onto it rather than a harmless military grunt, jump off the building (because standing still is a deathwish in this game), and use my extendo-tentacle to chip off a small portion of damage. And I had to do this over and over for like half an hour. My hands cramped up with all the buttons I had to hold down at once to get this to work right. Also the mission where you're supposed to pursue a specific tank, taking out all it's support along the way, only for the mission to end with you opening the tank and consuming the guy inside it anyway. Was there a point for all that delay? Why couldn't I just get it open from the start and save all that time?
For all my rambling, the game does have its strengths. Playing through the story mode is ultimately worth it, because there are so many upgrades you get that make exploring the city and just being a douchebag so much fun. It's crazy how much stuff they fit into the game, even if the controls do suffer because of it. Yeah, the controls are difficult to learn and a bit clunky at times, but it's the only way for the game to work the way it does, so I'm not going to really call that a flaw.
I really don't think Prototype is worth putting down money for (thank god I rented it instead of going for that 40 dollar deal at Amazon), but it does some things right, so at the very least it's worth a look if you're interested. However, throughout the game there was something that really bothered me: the advertising. I know advertising doesn't necessarily affect the quality of the game, but it is unsettling. Seeing Gamestop and Game Crazy ads everywhere just bothers me (and isn't that kind of wrong having two competitors both advertising in the game?) I mean...the game is made by Activision, who I seriously doubt needs the advertising revenue in order to keep going. Also, they really took efforts to push the game's sales and promotion, and the game ended up selling pretty well anyway. So were advertisers even needed?
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