A promising concept marred by a shoddy story, amateur game design, and poor graphics.
Fast forward to 2007, when Radical announces their next game: Prototype. From day one, it's evident to fans that Prototype is a spiritual successor to Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, and so the hype train leaves the station. A current generation Hulk? Yes please. Unfortunately, after two years of waiting, Prototype fails to live up to it's promises. A disappointment on all fronts, Prototype feels like a missed opportunity in every way.
The game introduces you to Alex Mercer, a cookie-cutter character who wakes up with superpowers, amnesia, and two hefty helpings of anger. Over the course of the game, Alex works to connect the source of his mysterious new abilities to a deadly virus that spreads across New York as the story progresses. The story isn't terrible, it's just utterly average. Twists and turns are usually predictable, and little to no effort is made to make any of the characters sympathetic. Alex in particular makes several questionable moral decisions throughout the game, and does nothing to redeem himself from them. He is not a flawed hero, he's just flawed. The deplorable, unrelatable main character renders the rest of the story meaningless. When you can't care about Alex, it's difficult to care about anything else either.
Of course, the story only exists to serve as a setup for all the action and chaos the game delivers, and it would be excusable if said action was worthwhile. Like the story though, the gameplay wallows in mediocrity, and is hurt even more by unpolished combat and lazy design. Story missions all feel like they were designed from generic templates used in other, better games. Side missions are even worse, almost universally checkpoint races and collect-a-thons. These kinds of missions are fun in small quantities, but they do not constitute an entire game. Again, all of this would be excusable if the combat was fun, and again, it isn't. While Alex boasts some genuinely cool abilities, the combat ends up feeling overly chaotic, frustrating, and highly unpolished. Leaping in a straight line from building to building is nice enough, but once he's in a combat situation, Alex's movements become ugly, glitchy, and difficult to manage. Add to this the unfair AI of some of the "monsters" that run faster than you, don't react to being hit, and will try viciously to prevent you from healing yourself, and combat becomes a chaotic mess where potentially exhilarating moments devolve into repeated deaths, where you can only hope you'll eventually be lucky enough to reach the next checkpoint in one piece.
Visually, the game once again fails to impress. Even Alex himself, visually the best part of the game, is average at best. Facial expressions are simply non-existent, character models are of poor quality and move stiffly, and the city itself looks scarcely more impressive than it did in Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, a last-gen game. Somehow, even with the ugly, barren graphics, the game still finds a way to suffer from slowdown and framerate issues seemingly at random, regardless of the amount of action on screen. This sort of poor presentation is simply inexcusable in 2009, especially in a game that already has so many issues.
All in all, Prototype is an enormous disappointment, average at best and just plain bad at worst. No-one wanted to like this game more than I did, but it simply won't happen. Radical has demonstrated that they know how to make this kind of game work, but they seem to have overstepped their bounds with Prototype. The gameplay formula is a simple one, and I wish I could excuse Radical by saying they "Tried too hard" or "Tried to do too much" but it wouldn't be true. The game is just, in every respect, lazy.