This Green One

I finished the game Prototype the other day.  Most of the pro gaming review sites were scoring the game pretty high and it’s been selling like hotcakes at least here in Australia.

In my opinion, the game is good.  I enjoyed playing through it right to the end, so I’ve decided to list some of the more noticeable good and bad points I encountered when playing this game.

The Good

• Extreme bad-assery.  If there has ever been a game before this that makes you feel as powerful as Alex Mercer, I’m yet to see it.
• The game gives you a lot of freedom right from the get go.  You can explore at your leisure right from the start.
• Great boss fights.  A couple of the boss fights are simply awesome.  Even though you feel invincible, some of the boss battles do require some strategic thinking in order to get past them.
• Good, intuitive controls – at least on the Xbox 360.
• A replay option with all your powers active.  This one is important. One of the things that annoyed me about Assassins Creed 1 was that I wanted to go back and enjoy some of the early assassinations but I wanted to do so with the abilities that I had unlocked and gotten used to such as the grab break and the counter.  Prototype facilitates this.
• The action.  Sometimes the action taking place on screen can border on the insane, all without a drop in frame rate.  Other people have criticised the graphics in this game but I don’t think it would be possible to experience the same level of action with hundreds of entities on screen at once without a little drop in graphics quality.  The game doesn’t look like GTA4’s Manhattan, but I’ll take it.

The Bad

Not trying to nitpick here, but a few of the small annoyances I found are listed here as well as some of the aspects to the game I felt could have been done a little better:

• Zombies. I hate zombies and can’t understand how anyone could like them.  Why do so many game and film companies think its cool to have some sort of viral affliction that turns people into mindless flailing losers who can’t even run?
• Web of intrigue.  Good idea, but I don’t really want to watch 130 short epilepsy inducing trailers that clarify almost nothing.
• The citizens of New York.  This was actually done ok, but Assassins Creed did it a lot better.  Especially during the early stages of the game when the city is relatively clean, the people don’t react enough like real people.  In Assassins Creed, the people used to stand back and make comments if you did something odd such as run up a building or smash an ornamental jar.  In Prototype I can jump off a skyscraper and land harmlessly while pedestrians don’t bat an eyelid and simply step over the smashed concrete I had just sent flying right in front of them.
• Bad and unfinished storyline.  I don’t get what Alex’s goal really is here, because at the end of the game he’s in the same position he was at the start.  Nothing is resolved.  The city is still infected and the military are still after him.  And what happened to his sister, Dana? And what happened to Karen Parker, his ex-girlfriend who betrayed him? None of this is resolved.
• More responsive AI.  I think that if the military see me sprinting down a street faster than the cars, or running up the side of a building that this should twig that I might be ‘Zeus’ as they say.  I realise this would make the game much harder but still.  The soldiers are a little dumb.
• Targeting.  The left trigger targeting system is both a blessing and a curse in this game.  It lets you target enemies at ease but precision is left waning, especially in hectic battles.  If a tank is shooting at you and you desperately need a civilian to consume for health it is quite frustratingly difficult to target one because the targeting system almost always defaults to the tank.
• Short.  Took me only about 10 hours to finish this game.  Some of the events are fun but most are not really worth bothering with.  I mainly stuck to the mission objectives and hence it didn’t take me very long to finish.