Prototype
- June 09, 2009 14:59 PM PST
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For most of us, walking around a crowded metropolis is a hellish experience. Being surrounded on all sides by jostling people, honking cars and immense buildings can make you feel powerless and trapped. Prototype's virtual Manhattan also seethes with a veritable wall of humanity -- along with soldiers, infected creeps, and other menaces -- but Alex Mercer is anything but an ordinary pedestrian. For him, the madding crowd isn't an annoying fact of life: it's an all-you-can-eat buffet.
I reviewed inFAMOUS recently and have also started playing Red Faction: Guerrilla, so I thought I didn't have any more room for sandbox titles on my gaming plate. But after reading through Cameron's review, it's pretty obvious I need to make some more room. Prototype sounds like an absolute blast and I'm most looking forward to abusing the superpowers that Cameron talks about. It sounds like the game is an immense playground and I honestly can't wait to jump in and have fun.
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Medicine Man
As soon as the game loads, I'm thrust into a world brought low by some horrible biological crisis, and I'm at the height of my wrath. For a few minutes I'm practically unstoppable, crashing through military hardware and doing grotesque things to my fellow citizens with my insane powers. When this short tour of the possibilities and a besieged Times Square ends, I'm thrust 18 days into the past to piece together what happened to New York City and how I came to be this angry and inhuman demigod.
I encounter more satisfying action and memorable unscripted moments in the first five minutes of Prototype than I have in the entirety of many lesser action games, and the whole experience is serviced by a sense of flair and meaning that's compelling without ever becoming suffocating. While so many free-roaming sandbox games commit their resources to ho-hum day/night cycles and dozens of generic four-door sedans, and then bore you to tears with endless errands and uninspired tedium, Prototype makes abundantly clear within moments that you're in for a lightning-paced and intensely cinematic exaggeration of a profoundly damaged urban life.
