Despite doubts over the amount of hype generated for Prototype before its releasing raising fears that it might be yet another small, muddy shitball of a game, Radical has managed to create do something truly special and actually deliver on said hype.
If you're not familiar with the premise, Prototype puts you in the shoes of Alex Mercer, an amnesiac shapeshifter as he searches for his lost identity in a gigantic open free-roaming New York City as a war rages between the monstrous zombified hordes of a terrifying virus (that incedentally gave Alex his powers) and the awesome might of the US military.
"Awesome" really is a word that can be applied very very easily. When you're not mutating your body into a variety of deadly weapons such as blades, hammers, claws or whips, you're running about the rooftops of New York telling the laws of physics to go fuck themselves in a huge blaze of hyper-parkouring glory marvelling at the enormous draw distance of a spectacularly rendered New York. While attack helicopters fire rockets at you.
I had my fears for this game. But they were completely unfounded. Radical has nailed the core gameplay - combat and free-running - so well. The little touches is what makes it great - the 300-esque snippets of slow-mo interspersed through hardocore man-zombie-tank-monster brawls are a particular example.
One of the main problems with free-roamers is that the world often feels empty, with a few strolling civilians thrown in as window dressing as you spend fun-killing hours hiking from one spot to another through vast environments that may be pretty but contain as much of interest as Paris Hilton's small deformed brain (see Just Cause 1, Far Cry 2).
This isn't the case with Prototype. Every street is literally chock full of either helpless innocents, marauding zombies or a few small nations' worth of military hardware, all trying to kill each other, with you caught in the middle. Not that you're exactly defenseless. If you grow tired of smashing helicopters out of the air and then using their flaming wreckage to brain huge zombified monsters with before they in turn brain you with a taxi or two, then jump to the nearest rooftop, hyper-freerun over to one of the many challenges which are admittedly a little lower on the awesome scale than missions or just regular free-roaming but still a nice distraction.
Radical of course bought us Hulk: Ultimate Destruction for previous-generation consoles and the similarities are immediate and very obvious. The ground and air-based area-effect attacks are triggered by the exact same buttons and require the exact same conditions, for example, but that's okay, it works.
Although facing initial comparisons to Crackdown and Bioshock, I would sooner describe this game as a bizarrely effective cross between Spiderman 3, Assassin's creed (oh, I didn't mention that stealth is a viable alternative to mindless Michael-Bay-level carnage due to the ability to consume people and copy their appearance exactly) and the aforementioned Hulk: Ultimate Destruction.
My overall statement for this review is that this game simply WORKS. It generates FUN in the human brain constantly because the developers haven't inserted any cheap shots to lengthen gameplay. Even my main gripe about free-roamers - long boring slogs through dead spaces to reach the next quest - has been silenced due to the sheer fluidity and awesomeness of Alex Mercer's movement.
There is one thing that bothers me about the game, though. It'll probably constitute the majority of Yahtzee's review if he ever does it for Zero Punctuation. When impersonating a solider, you are free to use your superhuman agilitity to its fullest. For example: I was required to sneak into a military base. I kidnapped and consumed an officer, then flung myself from the nearest skyscraper, landing with a pavement-cracking slam in the courtyard of the military base. A nameless grunt standing a few feet away saluted me with a brisk "sir" and a salute as I walked through the front door. I know the US military must have rigorous training regimens, but I didn't know superhuman powers were commonplace.
However, I can already see the reason Radical allowed this. Do you REALLY want to have to go dawdling about the stealth sections or do you want to get them over with so you can go back to chucking tanks at zombies?
Final score - I'm a self-confessed sucker for hype and I admit I was sweating like a pedophile at a Wiggles concert when I got the game in my hands but Prototype has lived up expectations. In fact, it has surpassed them.
10/10.
If you're not familiar with the premise, Prototype puts you in the shoes of Alex Mercer, an amnesiac shapeshifter as he searches for his lost identity in a gigantic open free-roaming New York City as a war rages between the monstrous zombified hordes of a terrifying virus (that incedentally gave Alex his powers) and the awesome might of the US military.
"Awesome" really is a word that can be applied very very easily. When you're not mutating your body into a variety of deadly weapons such as blades, hammers, claws or whips, you're running about the rooftops of New York telling the laws of physics to go fuck themselves in a huge blaze of hyper-parkouring glory marvelling at the enormous draw distance of a spectacularly rendered New York. While attack helicopters fire rockets at you.
I had my fears for this game. But they were completely unfounded. Radical has nailed the core gameplay - combat and free-running - so well. The little touches is what makes it great - the 300-esque snippets of slow-mo interspersed through hardocore man-zombie-tank-monster brawls are a particular example.
One of the main problems with free-roamers is that the world often feels empty, with a few strolling civilians thrown in as window dressing as you spend fun-killing hours hiking from one spot to another through vast environments that may be pretty but contain as much of interest as Paris Hilton's small deformed brain (see Just Cause 1, Far Cry 2).
This isn't the case with Prototype. Every street is literally chock full of either helpless innocents, marauding zombies or a few small nations' worth of military hardware, all trying to kill each other, with you caught in the middle. Not that you're exactly defenseless. If you grow tired of smashing helicopters out of the air and then using their flaming wreckage to brain huge zombified monsters with before they in turn brain you with a taxi or two, then jump to the nearest rooftop, hyper-freerun over to one of the many challenges which are admittedly a little lower on the awesome scale than missions or just regular free-roaming but still a nice distraction.
Radical of course bought us Hulk: Ultimate Destruction for previous-generation consoles and the similarities are immediate and very obvious. The ground and air-based area-effect attacks are triggered by the exact same buttons and require the exact same conditions, for example, but that's okay, it works.
Although facing initial comparisons to Crackdown and Bioshock, I would sooner describe this game as a bizarrely effective cross between Spiderman 3, Assassin's creed (oh, I didn't mention that stealth is a viable alternative to mindless Michael-Bay-level carnage due to the ability to consume people and copy their appearance exactly) and the aforementioned Hulk: Ultimate Destruction.
My overall statement for this review is that this game simply WORKS. It generates FUN in the human brain constantly because the developers haven't inserted any cheap shots to lengthen gameplay. Even my main gripe about free-roamers - long boring slogs through dead spaces to reach the next quest - has been silenced due to the sheer fluidity and awesomeness of Alex Mercer's movement.
There is one thing that bothers me about the game, though. It'll probably constitute the majority of Yahtzee's review if he ever does it for Zero Punctuation. When impersonating a solider, you are free to use your superhuman agilitity to its fullest. For example: I was required to sneak into a military base. I kidnapped and consumed an officer, then flung myself from the nearest skyscraper, landing with a pavement-cracking slam in the courtyard of the military base. A nameless grunt standing a few feet away saluted me with a brisk "sir" and a salute as I walked through the front door. I know the US military must have rigorous training regimens, but I didn't know superhuman powers were commonplace.
However, I can already see the reason Radical allowed this. Do you REALLY want to have to go dawdling about the stealth sections or do you want to get them over with so you can go back to chucking tanks at zombies?
Final score - I'm a self-confessed sucker for hype and I admit I was sweating like a pedophile at a Wiggles concert when I got the game in my hands but Prototype has lived up expectations. In fact, it has surpassed them.
10/10.
