From the start you should know one thing: Prototype is not a game, it’s not a sandbox game, nor an action game, nor anything else: it is a huge explosion. A blast. The biggest nuke in the world, detonated on the screen. What does that mean, after all? Well… read my Prototype review and find out!

First, a few details: Prototype was developed by Radical Entertainment, the developers of games like Scarface: The World is Yours and The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction – games I wasn’t really delighted with, but one can always hope for the best, right? Also, the title was published by Activision and right now you can probably secure a good deal since it’s been out for quite a while!

Prototype tells the story of Alex Mercer, a ruthless revenge-seeking antihero who, obviously, has lost all his memories but gained instead incredible powers: from shapeshifting to flying and many in between. Thrown in a city infected by a lethal virus that turns humans into zombies and surrounded by military forces that wish to destroy both the infected and Alex, our main character will simply run through packs of enemies (and regular people), draining life and trying to figure out what the hell happened. And yes, “hell” is a good word to associate with the game’s world.

Basically a sandbox action game, Prototype packs in much more button mashing than I normally accept in a game and since chaos will be the general term in most of your missions – you’ll have tons of infected civilians running around, cars racing madly to nowhere, military shooting everything in sight, plus a few tanks and helicopters… since all these will become regular, you will mostly have to resume to hitting the attack buttons like a mad man, spinning around and destroying everything in sight. Which, even though quite fun at first and really impressive to look at, becomes boring and way to random in the end.

Fortunately, you will have some things to make your life better: you will win experience points by completing in-game missions and these experience points can be spent on upgrading Alex: speed, resistance, special attacks and so on, they can all be unlocked through playing and most of them will add some extra fun to the player… but yet again it’s a short lived fun. Because, in the end, in the chaos dominating the open world in Prototype, it will all resume to choosing a few attacks and performing them over and over again.

But if you want to put some effort in playing Prototype, you will see that there are quite some nice options. By using Alex devouring skills you will be able to drain life from any living being in the game’s world, as well as their memories and skills, you will be able to shapeshift into any devoured person, you’ll be able to drive tanks, use weapons, destroy buildings, run, fly, jump and do whatever you feel like doing. And even if you don’t really wish to, you’ll destroy TONS of innocent civilians (but don’t tell that to Jack Thompson!)

Unfortunately, you can play most of the game without taking advantage of all these cool things and usually there won’t be a real need to do so. Which is sad, because once you get used to mashing the buttons, you won’t try too many other things – and won’t really be allowed to since the chaos I kept talking about will make randomly hitting the attack buttons the best choice as you will have trouble controlling Alex.

Visually, Prototype is a real eye candy and, even though gory as the D-category horror flicks, it is quite enjoyable from the point of view of an adult, sane gamer. However, kids would certainly feel better if they never knew about this game (at least until they get older). The animations are slick, the “finishing” moves are awesome and you’ll certainly love to perform them over and over again and the world you can almost fully destroy is very well done. The sounds, on the other hand, are not one of the strong points of the game, but you’ll learn to live with them, even though you would certainly like to hear something better.

Conclusion

Even though a blast, as I said in the introduction, Prototype is kind of a chaotic one. It still remains a blast, indeed, but one you can’t really control as you would’ve wished to. However, Radical’s game does manage to deliver what an action title should: fun, tons of enemies (or at least living beings) to destroy, awesome attack moves and superhuman abilities. It also gives the player a well done game world and some impressive visuals, so if you don’t care too much about the depth of a game and the moves that require finesse, but instead you would go for brute force, Prototype is the perfect game for you. It’s not perfect for everybody, but there are certainly a few people in this world who consider Jessica Alba ugly, right?

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Would you like to purchase this game? Get it from Amazon.