Prototype Hands-on Preview - PC
- May 05, 2009 14:57 PM PST
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Ordinary action game heroes kill enemies. This dude consumes them.
More Prototype Coverage
We've admired the twisted urban world of Prototype for ages, but it's only after we've taken an early turn at the controls that we really understand the ambition driving this project. Alex Mercer isn't just another growling tough guy; he's an immensely powerful anti-hero, with a chip on his shoulder the size of the Empire State building.
Destroy anything that cops an attitude, or hijack a tank and turn the government's own hardware against it.
Marathon Man
Prototype's narrative begins almost three weeks after Alex wakes up in a morgue to his new life as an amnesiac freak. Right out of the gate, I'm stampeding around Times Square like an Olympic sprinter hopped up on growth hormone and crank. This guy can freaking move. I hold the right trigger, pick a direction, and tear off like I've got the hounds of hell nipping at my sneakers. Before I can jot down a quick note about the sense of speed, I jump and make contact with a nearby theater, and start running straight up the wall like gravity's an inconvenience about which I needn't worry.
When I reach the top of the building, I launch myself into the sky, and glide around like a denim-clad flying squirrel, leaving black contrails of disturbed air in my wake. For a minute or so, I just test drive Alex, floating between and running up the sides of the gorgeous steel and glass canyons that make up this alternate reality version of New York City, admiring the simple pleasure of the intuitive controls and smooth visual flow.
Between the military and the plentiful mutated monsters, you'll seldom have just one threat with which to contend at a time.
Murdering Manhattan
But I've been neglecting the tanks, the helicopters, and the soldiers, and they're more than a little testy. It's time to get to work. Targeting is simple: hold the left trigger to lock on, flick the right stick to switch targets. The hard part is deciding which of the many offensive options to use, but inside of thirty seconds I'm serving up a dozen different kinds of inventive brutality. I turn one of my arms into a giant blade, and harvest uniformed flesh like an alien grim reaper. My hands become oversized Freddy Krueger mitts, and I slice and dice pedestrians and soldiers alike, yielding grisly bisected bodies that collapse with meaty squishes. I even hijack a tank and go on a blast-happy joy-ride through a city that dares not sleep, and try not to cackle like a lunatic.
I'm not terribly concerned with objectives for a while, but exploring the story has its own meaty rewards. Wreck havoc for its own sake, but complete side missions if you want to earn evolution points with which to upgrade your abilities. After all, Alex must balance property damage with cunning if he's to get to the bottom of the conspiracy behind his transformation. Case in point: the next sequence demands that I infiltrate a military base and steal a chopper. I'll need to use my shape-shifting talents to more subtle effect.
Whether you're dealing with an ordinary human being or a genetically modified monster, consuming an enemy is always gloriously messy.
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