Game Improvements 10.20.09: Prototype

Posted by Chris Lansdell on 10.20.2009

We go back to the drawing board on Activision's shapeshifting slasher!

Hey yo! Welcome to Game Improvements, the column where I take a recent (or recent-ish) game and make suggestions on what I would have liked to see to make the review score just a bit better. We'll also be encouraging you the readers to tweet, comment or email your suggestions for improvement as well!

Why are we doing this? Well it seems to me that as game reviewers, we spend an awful lot of time saying what's WRONG with games and not enough time talking about how to make them better. It's just so much easier to complain. To paraphrase Lennon and McCartney: "Hey dude, About your game…We took the bad parts, and made them better". With that mandate in hand, bring on the

TEMPORARY BANNER!

Project 2 – Prototype

Reviewed by: Trace Aber
Review Score: 8.0
The 411: Prototype is an entirely different type of sandbox game that will attract and please most gamers. There are plenty of objects to collect, a wide variety of abilities to master, and the story is very engrossing. But, like most open-ended games, it suffers from its share of downfalls. They're mostly typical of the genre, however, including downgraded graphics, lack of interactive environment, and hit or miss voice acting. Overall, however, Prototype creates an interesting character in Alex Mercer and hopefully is a sign of things to come in future games.



The Good

For me, the best part of Prototype was the atmosphere. The sound effects, dingy backgrounds, pulsing hives and eerie background music all combined to draw you in to the setting and story of the game. Manhattan FEELS infected, and Alex feels like someone who is on the run from everybody. This is an aspect of games that is oft overlooked, and Prototype did it right.

It's also a lot of fun to play. Alex gets a lot of abilities and a lot of attacks, and they're all good fun to unleash on the vast and endless waves of enemies. For example, where else can you unleash a jump kick on a fully-armed helicopter...and destroy it? Or pick up a tank and launch it at a mutant? The destructible environments add to the fun factor, as does the ability to just absorb people at will and recover some strength. Literally anyone can be absorbed, and there's something hilarious about absorbing an old grandmother and beating the tar out of a series of army guys.

The story in this game is deeper than almost any other game out right now. You can play through the game from beginning to end and unless you dilligently explore the whole game world and every side quest, you will not have a sweet clue as to what is going on in the story. There are numerous nodes on the Web of Intrigue, and the characters you need to absorb to connect them all together are spread out over the city. There are subplots and twists and all sorts of other fun plot devices to uncover, and if you really get immersed in the game (which is easier than with most games, as I mentioned above) you'll find yourself playing it again to get the full story.

As I just mentioned, the game world is huge. It's New York, baby! Not only can you traverse the streets of the city, but you can go up the skyscrapers and explore on a whole new level. If you're the type of gamer that has to find every hidden collectible and bonus, then you'll find even more in this game to draw you in. There are also side quests and minigames that yield all sorts of treats, and once again they are scattered throughout the city.

And of course, it's bloody. Should you be of a mind, you can go around and kill everything that moves (although it's not a good idea), or you can avoid killing everything except the people you have to kill. Some of Alex's attacks will rend flesh in some most visually appealing ways, and throwing people off high buildings never gets old. The level of death and destruction is totally up to you, so you can go right ahead and clear a couple of city blocks of civilians if it makes you feel better about your life. But it won't make daddy love you.



What do you mean this song isn't in the game? Boooourns!

The Bad

For the first hour or so of playing Prototype, I tried to figure out why it felt so familiar. I was sure I hadn't played it before, or even anything similar to it. Then, as I was stealth-absorbing a Web of Intrigue target in the middle of a crowd, it hit me: this is Assassin's Creed with a mutant instead of an assassin. The games aren't developed or even published by the same people, but everything is so similar: the parkour, the focus on stealth, having to hide to get the heat off you, starting off weak even though you know the character gets crazy strong, a deep story...even the Web of Intrigue feels the same. It's not that Assassin's Creed was a bad game – it was a very cool concept that was fun – but it had its faults, and by copying it so closely Prototype has taken some of them on.

For example, take the basic gameplay elements. Although the shapeshifting, absorbing and use of different styles and weapons is fun to start with, it soon feels repetitive. It's not hard to upgrade Alex and unlock all his moves fairly early in the game, and once that's done it becomes a question of "what should I use to kill this wave?" instead of a fight for survival. Run to a part of the city, kill some guys. Run back to base, get next mission. Rinse and repeat. The occasional "protect" mission doesn't add much variety, mainly because you still have to kill a bunch of guys and get back to base. The focus on stealth fails more here than in Assassin's Creed because ther'e's less of a need to stay hidden. Even if the strike team finds you, all you need to do is – yep, you guessed it – kill some guys.

And those guys you kill get real boring, real fast. There are a lot of army guys who all look the same, even if they have slightly different weapons or some have radios. There's no difference to the way you have to take them out, The Hunters are all the same too, except when you get to the alpha ones, and even then THOSE are all the same. The few boss fights that the game offers are really your only respite from the samey-samey feel of your victims.

Part of the problems with the enemies feeling the same is that they are way too easy to dispatch. In fact, the game in general is too easy. Alex's powers grow much faster than the difficulty of the enemies, making the challenge slim to non-existent. It's like playing through Marvel Ultimate Alliance as Galactus: sure, tooling around as an all-powerful über-being is fun for a while, but the novelty wears off pretty quickly. Aside from the enemies, it's also far too easy to traverse the city without ever having to actually face any army guys outside of quests. Just like in Assassin's Creed, you can do most of your traveling on the rooftops without much difficulty, and you'd still be able to finish the game. You'll still have to odd mutant to handle, but they don't set off alarms and send strike teams after you.

Unusually for the games of this era, Prototype's graphics also suffer. Not on Alex himself, who is beatifully picked out and detailed, and not in the environment which as I mentioned feels real. The problem comes in a lot of the enemies, especially the half-human Infected, who are almost impossible to distinguish from the civillians, and the hunters who look very bland and undetailed. After you've been playing for a while you notice that the scenery feels like it's been copy-pasted in, which is a real shame. There's also some slowdown, which they try and hide by strategically going to slo-mo-cam for some of the more demanding attacks.



The Fixes

Make it feel unique - The story and concept behind Prototype, where it's Alex vs the world, is unique enough that the game shouldn't feel so much like another one, especially one released last year on the same system by a different company. The easiest way to accomplish this would have been to remove the parkour element. I know people love it, and I find it fun myself, but with Assassin's Creed and even Mirror's Edge around you're going to draw comparisons. The stealth element is also fairly half assed, since the terrified civilians who see you absorbing or killing people will never actually tell anyone about it. More on that idea a bit later.

Variety is the spice of life - With all the missions and side quests in the game, it should have been easier to make the quests seem a bit more assorted. As it is, they don't. Instead of "Kill X bad guys", "Survive long enough to collect Y genetic material" or "destroy the base/hive", why not make use of the destructible environment to make missions like "block off the infected zone" or "retrieve x civilians from the infected zone", as a couple of examples? You could also put some missions in a confined space so that some of Alex's attacks won't work, meaning you have to adapt.

Variety is the spice of death - Making the enemies feel different is not hard at all. Start with some mini-boss fights, sprinkle in some enemies with resistances to certain attacks, and top it all off with some immunities. Do more with the weapons that the army are holding; as it stands, only the RPG guys make a big difference. The Hunted could come in different flavours, each with different powers. After all, they're supposed to represent virus mutations, therefore it makes sense that they would mutate differently.

Tone down Alex, toughen up the bad guys - These two go hand-in-hand. Alex is way too powerful, but that's kind of the point of the game. Still, some of his powers could be nerfed just a little so that killing people actually requires some modium of effort. You don't want to take that too far though, so making some of the enemies stronger might be a more viable strategy overall. Give the army guys some shielding, make the Hunters have some powers of their own as we mentioned above. The Infected can stay as irritating cannon fodder. While we're on the subject of increasing the challenge, the simple act of stationing more troops on the rooftops would add a lot to the difficulty of the game. Finally, scaring the bejeebus out of civilians is nice and all but it should mean something. If enough of them run away from you screaming, it should alert the army. You could even have certain people alerting the army themselves if they see you doing something untoward. Maybe some of the pack heat. It wouldn't be tough to dispose of them, but the surprise factor would add a layer of complexity that makes the stealth element mean more.

Looks aren't everything, but they help - I can forgive the copy-pasted scenery in a game this vast, because SOMETHING had to suffer. The fact that most of it is blow-uppable mitigates that somewhat anyway. What you do need to do is make the people look different. The civilians already do, but the army guys need some variety and if we're going to take the suggestion of giving different Hunters different powers, then they need to look different too. While we're at it, let's add some detail to them and remove some of the washed-out look.

Well folks, that does it for this edition of Game Improvements. What game would you like to see next month? Drop me an email or follow @lansdellicious on Twitter. Until next time, Stay Cool, Rock Hard.

Lansdellicious – Out.

Screenshots
All 26 PROTOTYPE Screenshots