This was one title I was excited for, for a while. Not because any of the press releases talking about its sandbox dealings and all the cool powers, but just because of the sheer bad-assery this game exudes. After popping Prototype in for my initial test drive, I got all giddy from the intro trailer alone! Dude jumps off a building, cuts people in half, survives an explosion, and more… in the first 30 seconds of the game!

So as those who have been following gaming news might guess, this game shares a few similarities to the recently released inFAMOUS, while I assume this to be poor timing, it is most unfortunate that everyone playing these two games will begin by comparing them directly. While some parts are uncanny copies, for example the introduction of inFAMOUS has Cole in the centre of a giant catastrophe, no one knows what happened or why and why this one guy is the sole survivor and has all these powers, but they think he’s a threat and is labelled the most dangerous terrorist in the United States. Ditto for Alex Mercer in Prototype. I think this is where the majority of similarities end.

So prototype starts off with Alex plowing through hundreds of zombies, soldiers, monsters, and freaked our civilians. You’re given a quick tutorial and a taste of all the powers available in the game (minus the body surf ability, which you can access with the following code: right, right, left, down, up, up, up, down), you absorb their commanding officer, and the screen goes black as Mercer explains himself to a mysterious stranger on the roof of a building. He then goes back to the beginning explaining what happened, how he woke up on a morgue table and how he all of a sudden was being hunted by the Black Watch and had all these insane powers, you go on from there.

This is an open ended action game where you can pretty much run up any building, pick up and throw any item (including trucks) and do nearly anything you want without fear of running out of people to mess up or damage done to buildings. And yes, unlike inFAMOUS, you can scale chain link fences. Basically from as far as I can tell there are only three things that cannot be done in Prototype, go in water (he automatically jumps out), enter buildings (unless they’re for missions, and even so, it’s usually the same military looking base or hive infected base), and destroy buildings (again, unless it’s for a mission). Developers Radical Entertainment did an amazing job with this title, and it provides a lot that most other games say they offer in theory but fall apart in practice.

Falcon Punch!

The basic gist of the game is that you lost your memory (of course), are being hunted down, and the city of New York has been infected by some sort of virus, turning people in zombie-like monsters. As you track down your answers not letting anything stop you in your path, you have choices. Will you cause destruction and use brute force to get to your objective, or will you use your shape shifting ability to sneak to your target? Transitioning into Mercer’s shape shifting powers, Alex has a lot to offer and a lot to gain. Alex has the ability to regenerate his health, leap high into the air, run (or crawl) up buildings (much like Spider-man: Web of Shadows… which was also published by Activision), morph his arms into a number of different shapes, change his appearance into anyone he consumes, gain the ability to use military weaponry (yes, even with all your powers, you can still pick up a gun and blast away old-school styles), and much more.

Moving on to what we see in this game, first off, I think Radical made the right choice sacrificing amazing graphics for amazing gameplay. Don’t get me wrong, the game looks fantastic, it’s just not as polished as say… oh, I don’t know what to compare it to… inFAMOUS. The upside to this negative is that since the character models require less detail, there can be many more of them on the screen at any given time. Imagine walking into the centre of Time Square, picking up a truck, and chucking it at some unsuspecting blond wearing Uggs (yes, Uggs make their first game appearance in Prototype… as far as I know). Now imagine the ensuing panic and chaos that follows. Hundreds of people running in all directions, taxis backing away and crashing into other cars, you running and throwing people out of the way (reminding me of Altair in Assassin’s Creed). Now imagine all this without a single lick of slowdown. As well, climbing up the Empire State Building you get a magnificent view of all that is New York, and still are able to see cars driving by below and even throw items and see them hit the ground! The detail to the outside is where I find this game really shines most as it is (as far as I can tell), a full replica of New York City. Finally, the downside to the lack of polish in graphics, the character’s faces during cut-scenes really weirds me out, while the eyes and mouth move when they talk, expressing emotion, I feel like I’m watching a puppet. It’s hard for me to explain without knowing the mechanics of creating facial expressions, but the way these people look up close seems very dated in terms of modern gaming. A second issue with cut-scene graphics come from shading issues and glitches from time to time, ironically enough, on the shadows of the faces (which happens often as Alex Mercer wears a hoodie throughout the game… the same clothes he was ‘killed’ in at the beginning). Finally in order to accommodate all the locals of New York without slowdown, the last issue I noticed was that there really weren’t that many different character models around, Radical did try to fix this as best they could by offering the same character model in different colours to differentiate them all a little bit though.

Utilizing both Dolby Digital or THX, this game sounds amazing with the volume pumped up and surround sound in action. From one direction you could be hearing a helicopter approaching, another, a monster being hatched, and all around a hundred people screaming and cars honking. The voice acting in this title is decent enough, not so bad that it would draw my attention, but not good enough for me to want to praise it. I feel though that when I see the characters talking, the audio lost some points because of the visual aspect of it. As well, during certain ‘heated’ parts of the game, the ambient noise turns into this industrial hard music that really fits the mood.

Call me Cole one more time, I DARE you.

Now, when I said before you could pretty much do anything you wanted in the game, I meant it, for example, at one point in the game I was fighting a bunch of army dudes that were coming down from a helicopter, a strike team if you will, so I grab a rocket launcher and shoot a few missiles into the helicopter bringing it down to low health as it began to fly away. At this point my launcher ran out of ammunition so what did I do? What any self respecting monster of limitless power would, I grabbed a near by flattened car and chucked it into the distance towards the fleeing copter, as it was nearly out of view, I saw a small explosion and something fall. I run, flipping myself over cars and through street lights, towards the downed item only to find the remains of a burning helicopter. I then proceeded to grab this flaming carcass and throw it at another low flying copter, bringing that one down as well. Just for fun I decided to see what would happen if I threw that copter carcass (still on fire) into a lake, and wouldn’t you know it? The lake put out the fire! The small details in this game really made me smile as I played through, cars swerving into each other to avoid hitting you, people running around and massive battles between soldiers, civilians, and zombies going on while you do your thing, Radical really put a lot of thought into their latest title.

Aside from playing the story mode (and replaying it in “NEW GAME +” (allowing you to play again with your powers and experience carried over, there is a lot to do in New York. There are three sets of collections to travel around and find, for starters, there are purple orbs hidden throughout the game that not only give you experience boosts, but also provide tips (that you probably already knew anyways). As well, one can find blue orbs hidden around New York’s most popular landmarks (like the top of the Empire State Building or Time Square), these orbs are called Landmark Collectibles. Finally to get some background into what actually happened and why it happened to Mr. Mercer, from time to time if your close enough, a red icon will appear on your map targeting a specific person who has information about the infection and your past. By walking up to these people and consuming them, you get a little glimpse into what they know, a little bit of experience, and you expand your “Web of Intrigue”, which is like a time line of the story, for every one you unlock, a few more become available… like a web. There are also mini-games / side-quests that you unlock as you progress through the story. By approaching these green icons on your map you get little challenges to try and complete and earn either a platinum, gold, silver, or bronze medal and experience points based on how well you do. These side quests can be races, killing sprees, helping a side of the conflict out in a battle, and more. You can also try and wipe the military, the infected, or both from the face of New York altogether.

While this review has gone on for much longer than I anticipated, I still feel like I haven’t even scratched the surface, but like everything in life, for every good, we find a bad side as well. Prototype isn’t without its own issues aside from the graphical ones I mentioned before. This title suffers from one of the worst cases of “Overloading” I have ever seen. By overloading I mean that there are so many times where you will play for five minutes only to be interrupted by a loading screen, it feels like almost 20% of the game consists of loading screens alone! As well, something about the menu rubs me the wrong way, I think it’s the way they ask if you’re sure about every decision you make in the game when purchasing upgrades or saving. Would you like to save? Press A, are you sure you would like to save? Are you sure that you are sure you would like to save? (no, it doesn’t really do that, but that’s what it feels like sometimes). Now that that’s out of my system, back to the praise. Prototype is a blast to play, the chaos you can create feels great in your hands and you can’t help but smile when you cut a helpless soldier in half with your blade hands, this along with the gore and profanity give Prototype a rightful M rating, and it makes me feel that much more sadistic to say I enjoy it. As I said before, there’s a lot I didn’t mention about prototype, heck, I didn’t even say anything about the story beyond the introduction, but that’s mainly because half the fun of this game are the surprises (I didn’t know zombie / infected people were in this game until I started playing myself) and the story being so convoluted if you don’t collect all your memories that it really isn’t all that important to the game (besides a final goal). In the end, Prototype was not what I was expecting at all, but you know what? I’m thrilled with the outcome and enjoyed every minute playing this challenging wide spread game.

Gameplay: 4.5/5

Graphics: 4/5

Sound: 4 /5

Replay Value: 4/5

Read more at andPOP. andPOP - POP Culture with Substance

And now part 2 of my prototyp-o series… again, the game is SOOOOO FUN!! watch for our review!!!

This week, we not only have two comics, but our first colour comic as well!

Basically I’ve been obsessed with Prototype for a little while and decided to pay homage to another game that recently came out.

ALSO this week I got excited about the MMVAs! you know, the MUCH MUSIC VIDEO AWARDS!! probably the best thing out there when it comes to music award shows.. I mean it’s outdoors and it has great live performances!

So I did another comic.. Again it may be at the expense of Rob at andPOP. He was a great sport and I hope he knows it. But no ill intentions.. more like a tribute .. to my early work from 2 weeks ago.

As always,  to see the web comic in it’s full size glory, all you have to do is click on the image and enjoy!

Read more at andPOP. andPOP - POP Culture with Substance

Its been a very busy and unusual week. But Thanks to some much needed inspiration and direction I’ll be making a miniseries based on Prototype. I figured after every 3 to 5 comics ill do something of a change.. in style etc.. just to keep things interesting.

SO PROTOTYPE IS OUT NOW!!! Well it has been as of Tuesday, the 9th of June . The game is really fun and if you were a fan of Hulk Ultimate Destruction, well, you’ll love it.

Available for PS3 and 360.. and PC. You control Alex Mercer.. a strange person who wakes up in a morgue.. finding out the city is fighting some weird virus and you having no memory what so ever, things get even more complicated when you discover you have some pretty insane killer powers.

The main story arc is Alex is trying to remember and figure out his past.. By consuming people.. Literally consuming their minds.. assimilating these people with himself.. quite violent and entertaining. So Ive taken the liberty and made it seem like Alex just consumes their thoughts.. to make the comic sort of G rated.

Enjoy!

As before, to see the web comic in it’s full size glory, all you have to do is click on the image!

Read more at andPOP. andPOP - POP Culture with Substance