It's flawed, but still an outrageously fun game to play.
You play as Alex Mercer, a man with a both a virus and amnesia, who sets out across Manhattan to put the pieces of his memory back together and keep the entire area from being destroyed. Along the way he's going to fight off both Infected (mutated humans) and some of the military's finest. And although Alex's cause sounds noble, how he executes his missions is anything but noble. Anything that stands in his way, including civilians, is going to be mashed to meat chunks before it's all said and done, and there's truly no way around it because panicky people are running around everywhere.
Then again, you would expect to see people running around with so much happening on-screen at once, and it's impressive how you can have a crowd of civilians, a military force, and several Infected all running around at the same time with no dips in the frame-rate. Things do look somewhat "plain" in terms of vehicles, weapons, A.I. characters, and the environment, but the visuals here run ultra smooth and Alex himself is animated beautifully. So despite some graphical repetition, what you see on screen really adds to the overall fluidity of the game and helps make Alex's powers feel very real.
This is easily the best part of the game, because Prototype does give you a lot of powers to choose from. You'll have claws, hammer fists, super-strength, an extension arm, two types of armor...the list is rather extensive and even includes the use of military weapons and vehicles. You're also given a handful of extremely powerful abilities called Devastators, which are useful for everything from clearing out entire waves of enemies to wearing down extremely tough opponents, and are a lot of fun to watch in action. Each time you use one of them, the camera intentionally slows down for a dramatic shot of the destruction which adds an extra little thrill in the middle of all the mayhem that ensues throughout the game.
All of this power does come at a premium, however, in the form of Carpal Tunnel-inducing controls which can cause a lot of confusion, twisted fingers, and are sometimes unresponsive during both movement and combat. Protoype's developers (Radical Entertainment) had trouble deciding exactly where to stop, so it isn't always easy to remember exactly which power to be using and which button combination to use to get the desired result. There will also be times where you hit the right combination, but Alex does something unexpected on-screen just because it thinks it should be doing something else. This opens you up to some very nasty combinations from your enemies that will cost you over half your life bar. While this issue is infrequent enough to not ruin the game, it creates some unnecessary frustration by happening at the absolutely worst times imaginable: boss battles and difficult missions.
Frustration is also going to come at you in the form of some incredibly high difficulty spikes. You'll literally cruise through many of the story missions, and then suddenly find yourself in the middle of one that will completely piss you off and leave you wondering where it came from. That said, all of the story missions are at least have a purpose, and the more difficult ones do help remind you that Alex isn't invincible and help keep him from feeling like an overpowered character.
Side missions, on the other hand, are a completely different matter; the majority of which serve no real purpose whatsoever except to give you more experience points to help you gain another superpower. Most of them involve checkpoint runs or killing a given number of enemies within a certain time frame. And not only are these types of missions unimaginative, they're done way too often. Thankfully, you're not forced into these missions and you are provided an alternative means of building up experience and abilities, so you're not stuck with the tedium unless you want to play every single side mission available and grind your way to more abilities. Some are worth it, however, and have you using your gliding ability to land withing a bulls eye on the ground. Others require you to absorb enemies, which in turn gives you their memories and helps fill in some gaps in a storyline that is convoluted to say the least.
While it's great that that Prototype keeps you guessing as to where the story is heading, the confusion and amnesia go on for too long and cause you to lose your connections with the characters. Everything with the story eventually ties together, but by the time it does you''ll find yourself not caring as much as you probably should...especially seeing as Alex's character goes through hell and back to get there.
Just don't fool yourself into thinking that any of these many flaws will stop you from having one the most outrageously fun gaming experiences you've ever had in your life. The open world aspect combined with Alex's outrageous abilities completely overshadows any problems the game may have, and the problems it has aren't significant enough to ruin the game. You will spend a lot of hours running up and down skyscrapers, infiltrating military bases, hijacking helicopters and tanks, and tossing monsters around like bean bags, and it offers a sense of true freedom that very few games manage to pull off.
Recommendations for this game are easy. Unless you object to the high levels of blood that will spilled in the game, or you're not a fan of open-world titles, then this is more than worth a purchase. You'll be amazed how addicted you are by the time it's all over.