One freaking long comparative review. (Spoiler: turns out the game is pretty damn good)
The following review will contain a number of comparisons between this game, Crackdown and Assassin's Creed, as well as a number of superhero/comic book references. If you are not familiar with these, this review may not be particularly helpful, and I advise you to skip over it. -warning over-
I'm sure that this is not the first review of this game that you have read, and that you have at least watched the Gamespot review for Prototype. If you have not yet seen or read any other reviews, please do so before continuing to read this. Still here? Good, lets begin then.
I'd like the start off by correcting a bit of a misrepresentation of Alex Mercer by both the Gamespot review of this game, and a number of other reviewers. Most reviewers have referred to Mercer as an unlikeable antihero, because of all of the death and destruction he causes, seemingly without remorse, yet he still feels that his cause is just and righteous. I have to be a bit of a stickler and disagree with all of these reviewers. Alex Mercer is not an antihero, he is a rising villain, plain and simple. Someone like the Punisher, is an antihero, since he kills without remorse, but he only kills villains, never civilians, unlike Mercer, who kills indiscriminately, making him a villain. In essence you are actually playing as the lesser of two evils, Mercer, and fighting the greater evil, the military, who has unleashed a deadly, zombifying virus upon Manhattan.
I actually like to equate Mercer to Lobo, one of superman's villains. If you don't know who Lobo is, shame on you, and you should go and find out using Wiki, the article is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobo_(DC_Comics)
So here is the deal, you play as a VILLAIN. If you don't like playing as a villain, then you should go ahead and buy inFamous, or whatever superhero game you have been itching for, and play the good side so you can save orphans from burning buildings, because Prototype is not the game for you. Mercer is more likely to orphan a few hundred children by driving a tank through crowds of civilians, then set their orphanage on fire, in order to attract the attention of the military, hijack a gunship, and then blow the crap out of the military base that sent said gunship than he is to save people. Ok, have we all agreed that Mercer is not a hero? Good, moving on the rest of the game.
Lets move onto the story. There isn't much of one. Ok, so there is a story there, and you might actually like it, if you are into a bunch of anti-government conspiracy theories, but the story itself isn't really that important. The story is really just an excuse to go out and kill. In Crackdown there was almost no story. You were a supercop, given the authority to kill anyone you wanted, with few repercussions. Why? Because the city was infested with gangsters. In Assassin's Creed you were told to go out and kill people. Why? Because you are an assassin, and for some reason the people you are killing are actually bad. The story here in Prototype? You are trying to kill everyone in the evil military organization. Why? Because they gave you superpowers accidentally, then they took away your memories and are now trying to kill you. The story really isn't important in this game, but if you are really into sandbox style mayhem and destruction my guess is that you don't care too much about the story anyway.
Speaking of the story though, I do find one glaring flaw in it. Why would the military want to shoot someone who can absorb people's memories by killing and eating them? I would have guessed that they should have put him on the CIA's payroll, and had him eat some terrorists to find the location of Osama Bin Laden. Torture doesn't work? Ok, plan B, you suck out his brain and tell us where Osama is. I guess this wouldn't make too great a game though, which is probably why the devs decided that the military should be shooting at him. Whatever, I already said that the story isn't very important.
Now, lets get to the good stuff, the gameplay. I bought the game Crackdown with the idea that I would get to play a superpowered badass who can leap tall buildings in the single bound, toss cars hundreds of feet, and kill whoever I want, with anything I can find. I was generally not disappointed with that game. I bought Assassin's Creed with the idea that I would get to do some awesome parkour action, getting to stealthily kill anyone I want, and then disappear without a trace, like a medieval ninja of sorts, but cooler, sadly Assassin's Creed didn't quite meet my expectations. Prototype on the other hand takes all of these ideas, rolls them into one, and then adds an extra helping of awesome.
In both Crackdown and Assassin's Creed, you never really got to select what you upgraded, and therefore never got to mold your character to your own play style. In Assassin's Creed you got new weapons and abilities, but they were given to you in a linear order. In Crackdown you never got new abilities, just upgraded your current ones. Prototype's skill and upgrade system reminds me more of Devil May Cry, or Ninja Gaiden then anything else, with countless moves, and even more ways to upgrade those moves, you can completely customize your character to the way you want to play the game. Do you like to be stealthy and play the game like a shooter? Upgrade your weapons skills, your shape shifting, and stealth kill skills, and make the military think you are one of them while you kill infected, and quietly eat half of the military personnel in the area. Do you just want to run amok? Upgrade your parkour skills, and every outrageously powerful attack you can think of (and trust me, there's a lot). You can play this game in any way that you are most comfortable, and most missions can be approached from many different angles, utilizing any skills you want. I've only been playing this game for less than 10 hours, but I can already tell that you will need more than one play through to get all of the powers, and it is definitely worth it to get them all.
Some people's reviews will tell you that Alex Mercer's character doesn't feel powerful enough because he can't destroy all of the buildings in this open world adaptation of Manhattan, and consider this to be a flaw. I completely disagree with them. Firstly, how often do you see an open world game that is completely destructible? Not very often. The only recent one I can think of actually is Red Faction: Guerrilla (maybe that's because the box is staring me right in the face from the bar to the right of this review as I write it), and even that is only semi-open world, and not as truly open world as Prototype. Furthermore, I can tell you, in complete confidence, that if Manhattan was fully destructible in this game, that all of the buildings would be gone within about 2 hours of playtime. Alex is so ridiculously powerful, that it would actually be a drawback of the game to have destructible environments, since that would mean that Mercer's parkour skills would be completely useless, since there wouldn't be anything more than completely flat ground where Manhattan used to stand by the 3rd hour of gameplay.
The best way I can describe the intensity of the game, is by comparing it to Crackdown again. In Crackdown, if you are able to kill both enough civilians, and gangsters at the same time, both groups send death squads after you (a rare event, to get both the agency and the gangsters on your back at the same time in full force). Now imagine fighting both groups at the same time, but instead of using a gun, you use amazingly brutal superpowers to dispatch your opponents at close range, with devastating claws, a blade arm, hammer fists, and any other move that you can think of and have bought. This is pretty much a constant throughout Prototype, fighting two groups of enemies, the military and infected, at the same time. It's violent, and chaotic, and a complete thrill the whole way through.
I truly have to say, now that I have played Prototype I don't think I'll be able to play the last game in the Assassin's Creed trilogy (or however long ubisoft wants to milk that franchise). I think we all know how the story will go. The first Assassin's Creed, Desmond went through the memories of his ancestor, Atair, from the crusades. In the next game he goes through the memories of another Assassin ancestor of his, Ezio, from the Renaissance. And in the last game of the series, I predict that we will get to play as Desmond in the future, imbued with the knowledge of all of his Assassin ancestors, combined to becoming a super assassin. To bad Prototype has already beat Ubisoft to it. Not only is the game faster, the protagonist is more powerful, a force to be reckoned with, with a much less repetitive mission types, and he wears a hood that hides his face too. Prototype has really spoiled me, and I will be hard pressed to be impressed with another sandbox game's gameplay to this degree, unless Prototype 2 comes out.
Well now you must be asking yourself, wow, if this game is so completely over the top amazing then why did it garner an 8.5 instead of a 10 from you? Well, the answer is a rather simple, and a slightly disappointing one. The graphics really didn't impress me. Not that the graphics are bad or anything, they are just bland. I don't blame the game for this in any way however, because I understand the reason for this. It isn't that the devs didn't try to make the best graphics that they could, but what was most important was to create a living city within this game, one with hundreds of people on screen at once, and one where there wouldn't be any frame rate issues. Unfortunately, that meant turning the graphics down a notch, so that the hardware of the Xbox 360 could handle all of the awesomeness without stalling out atrociously.
Assassin's Creed had much better graphics than this game, but that was only possible because of the slow pace of the game. Altair doesn't run as fast as a speeding car, nor does he fall a hundred stories at any point in the game, thus the system requirements to make the graphics for that game were lower. Crackdown also had a more detailed and colorful city than Prototype, but it was also slower paced. Despite the amount of shear stuff on screen at once, and despite the breakneck speeds at which the protagonist moves, Prototype keeps a consistent frame rate throughout, with very little pop in, (less pop in than Crackdown). I really feel that the overall gameplay was not only saved, but enhanced do to the great frame rate of the game, and I feel that the overall sacrifice of aesthetics paid off. Also, the animation of characters, especially Alex Mercer, is very smooth, and fluid, showing off that the game is capable of great beauty, but that the Xbox is lagging in its hardware.
Never the less, sadly, I couldn't in good conscience give Prototype a 10, or a 9, because of the underwhelming graphics, and so the highest score I could give it was an 8.5.
Anyway, my review was very long, and I thank and congratulate you dear reader, if you stuck all of the way through it. Unfortunately I didn't include some things like the side missions, of the web of intrigue characters, but I am tired of typing now, so please go ahead and read through some other user reviews to get any other information I have missed, might I suggest T35513R's review, or smithbubbajones's, both of whose reviews are locating a little below my own.
Also, if you enjoyed my ramblings, and found them helpful, don't forget to click the thumbs up button directly below this review, so that other intrepid reads might also feast upon its knowledge, and shear wordiness. And if you didn't enjoy reading my review, well then, you can go to hell, and you should ask yourself why you read all the way up to this point if you weren't enjoying yourself. Are you stupid or just a glutton for punishment?
Cheers to all of you.