It’s 2019 and the first post is from a game that was made in 2009. Well, a lot has changed in ten years and it is great to see how far we came. Prototype 1 is a game that I had no prior knowledge of until PlayStation had a holiday sale. I asked a lot of people what they thought of Prototype 1 and 2 before I streamed the game and a lot of people told me just to play Infamous. That didn’t seem like a complaint to me since I love the Infamous series. I have played all the games in the series, including the stand-alone dying light. But, instead of comparing the game to Infamous, I just decided to play it with open eyes.
Prototype is set in an apocalyptic New York City—not very original, but I’m not going to subtract points for that. The location actually helps out a lot since you play some parkour god that can easily run up buildings like you’re Spiderman. I reference Spiderman because your character, Alex Mercer, in infected with a symbiote. His strength/acrobatic abilities have been increased to a superhuman level, while also having to deal with a lapse of memory. To top it off, you have to deal with all these people trying to kill you. What will you do? Will you become a villain or will you become a hero?
This isn’t Infamous, so it’s time to become a villain and consume all your enemies.
The game doesn’t age well when it comes to graphics—even if we put it side by side with Infamous 1, which came out the same year—but we get a pretty fun game to play. The story itself revolves around the people in the city and the enemies you fight. You have to scour the whole map in order to collect all the pieces of the puzzle. So if you are someone that has the patience to do all this, then you will definitely find out the secret to the story.
Now I didn’t do any of that because I was streaming and wanted to jump into Prototype 2, but I still learned a lot about Alex Mercer based on my choices in the game. You can choose if you want more of a stealthy approach or a really loud and destructive entrance into the mission. Now, if you make a character that is pretty powerful, then why would you ever choose stealth. I enjoyed going the carnage route and consuming everything in my path.
The story aspect wasn’t the strongest part of this game, which is strange since this is a single player game. I went into the game expecting to compare Prototype’s story to Infamous’s story, and I don’t believe I ever really did since Infamous was littered with story dialogue and character development. Prototype gives you two different types of cutscenes to introduce you to new story points. They either give you short, uneventful cutscenes that shouldn’t have been put into the game at all or long and meaningful ones. Hey, I never said that this was a perfect game that you instantly needed to play. Truthfully if I knew that the games graphics were just a little bit better than Metal Gear Solid 1, I wouldn’t have bought it.
The biggest thing I regret the game didn’t have was a compelling story. I wasn’t fully invested with the character Alex Mercer. Even though he went through a bunch of really messed up things, I didn’t actually care. I cared more about the destruction he was causing to the innocent people around him. He didn’t seem to care, so why would I? They even show you how many people you have killed after every mission and I was never in the single or double digits. These numbers only work because we were in a place as crowded as New York. I have to give them credit for that, because if this was in Wyoming, then you couldn’t tell me I consumed/killed about half a million people while there are still another 100,000 still waiting to be consumed after the credits rolled.
Still, you should definitely try out the game if you haven’t played it, since you can beat up a tank with your bare hands. That was the selling point for me, and as such, was a great purchase. The game was enjoyable. If you want to play this game, then the first rule is, don’t compare it to Infamous; they are two completely different games. The two protagonists aren’t complete copies and there are two completely different positives for both games.
I plan to do a full review of Prototype 2 next month, so I hope you guys are ready for that.
I am Oni and that is my time.
