by Yell! Magazine Review: Prototype rocked. That game was developed by Radical, who put together the utterly amazing Incredible Hulk Ultimate Destruction way back in 2005. At the time, Marvel Entertainment had passed the rights to make video games based on its IPs to Sega in the run-up to the awful Avengers tie in games (Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Thor and Captain America Super Soldier) that were so bad Marvel has recently announced there won’t be anymore Sega Marvel super hero games.
Unperturbed by having the big-ticket character IP taken off them, Radical Entertainment put together Prototype, and it was awesome. An incredibly dark and unsettling, open-world game involving a Lovecraftian super-powered anti-hero as a protagonist. It had its fair share of repetitive button-mashing combat, but it was a good, solid game. If you can imagine the parkour element of Assassins Creed 2 combined with the ability to sprint up the side of 30-story building, jump and glide through open spaces, and morph parts of your body into blades, razor-sharp whips, or sledge hammers to smash enemies, you’ve got a rough idea of how fun this game is. Low on health? Easy, “consume” passers-by, that’s grab and press consume to activate a weird power that basically eats innocent passers-by alive to regain health.
I loved it. It was a little unbalanced in the combat, but a very entertaining story with some fun stealth elements and a fun single player campaign. It did well enough to earn a sequel. At the end of Prototype your character, Alex Mercer, was left as powerful as a steroid-infused super-powered son of a particularly sadistic Cenobite, this in mind, rather than have some random event strip Alex Mercer of his powers and leaving you back at the start having to level up the same powers again (which a lot of sequels tend to do these days), you play as one of Mercer’s victims, James Heller.
As the game progresses you can upgrade your powers in different slots to improve your combat and traveling abilities.
In Prototype 2 the combat abilities are a lot more balanced and instead of just upgrading the whip fist (which was all you really needed in Prototype), it’s beneficial to upgrade all your abilities because what might be effective against a Blackwatch soldier might be flimsy defense against an infected beast or a 10-foot tall super soldier. The shape-shifting mechanic makes a comeback, allowing you to take the form of the last person you’ve consumed and vanish off the radar quicker or sneak into military bases to learn more about what’s going on.
As Prototype 2 progresses, you get the idea that Radical are trying to build a world here, that Alex Mercer – anti-hero in the first game, bad guy in the sequel – is just part of a larger cast of characters and that the main star is the Black light virus that imbues its victims with super powers.
Throughout the game collectables flash up, such as for the black boxes that are somehow attached to uncollected downed soldiers. Each collected black box plays a recorded conversation designed to set the scene; of sociopathic Blackwatch soldiers enforcing martial law in New York and mad scientists experimenting on civilians by feeding them to monsters, allowing you to start wondering who the good guys are. Oh right you are… even if you do have to eat people alive when you’re low on health.
Get the verdict on Prototype 2 after the jump…
- Yell! Rating (x/5 Skulls):
- [rating:3.5]
- Published by:
- Activision
- Developed by:
- Radical Entertainment
- Year Released:
- 24 April 2012
- Also Available On:
- PC, Xbox 360, PS3
- Genre:
- Action Adventure, Open World
- Official URL:
- Prototype 2
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