Prototype Review

The big battles are a great sight, but there's often too much to contend with.

Another positive to be gained by consuming is health. Mercer may be pretty extraordinary, but his health depletes very quickly if you get caught in a fire-fight – and there are some pretty large scale battles on offer here. Unless you're a ninja with the control pad you're going to die a lot and when you're not dying you'll probably be retreating in order to replenish your health. At times the game gets so chaotic, throwing so many enemies at you, that it's hard to keep track of what's going on. Death at the hands of a pack of mutants that you can't escape and a series of attack helicopters pelting you with explosives becomes common and somewhat annoying as you progress through the campaign.

You can of course choose to use the army's weapons against them, picking up guns and rocket launchers, and also hijacking tanks and choppers. Vehicles make the game feel completely different, but do give you some impressive fire-power if you're in a tight spot – it's just a shame that the mutants are able to take down a tank with a few brutish slaps. Helicopters can generally stay away from the pink nasties, so you're able to shoot from distance, but a few shots from the ground is enough to send your ride on a nosedive to the tarmac.

If there's a real problem with Prototype it's that the game only really has a couple of tricks up its sleeve: combat, crazy superhuman parkour and disguises. Initially the combat is a little underwhelming and a touch clumsy, the dodge mechanic isn't great at all and the enemies you face start to grate far too quickly. The combat still provides plenty of fun moments, but at times it feels like you're doing the same thing over and over again. The parkour elements to Mercer's movement are by far the game's biggest strength. When he's fully maxed out in the key stat areas he can run at insane speed, leap miles into the air from atop a building and then glide across the city. This never gets old, but sadly gets interrupted too often by an unwelcome rocket to the arse or mutant punch to the face.

And then there's the disguise mechanic. A bit of stealth mixed in with the combat seemed like a solid idea, and it's tied into the game's web of intrigue (the fairly clumsy way the game tells its story, giving out tiny morsels each time you consume a key character), but after the first few consumes the whole thing starts to get a little old. Enemy AI borders on dumb so you can usually get away with some odd behaviour and the actual stealth missions are rarely much fun. It's a shame as the mechanic has been implemented well.

Jacking vehicles is nice, but they don't last for long.

While Prototype might not look like much in screen shots it really shows what it's made of once you're in the heat of a battle. With the mutants, army soldiers and Mercer all going at each other while the streets are packed with civilians and cars, the game can throw up some quite stunning sights. The problem is that these moments are joined by a dreary city with repeating scenery, a general lack of detail, some odd animations and a less than brilliant draw distance. While Radical clearly felt it had to sacrifice some quality in order to get as much on the screen as possible, the result is a fairly uninspired looking game that borders on being dull.

Prototype looked like it was going to be a hell of a lot of fun each and every time we saw it over its extended development, and it is fun, just not all the time. The combat can grate at times, the stealth elements grow tiresome quite quickly, and from time to time the game just doesn't know when to give you a break – there's so much going on that it's hard to see a way past a mission that's been sending Mercer to an early grave over and over again. There's plenty to do, with the core story missions and plenty of optional side activities making Prototype a game that you won't clock in a few sessions, and the upgrades and abilities are plentiful, but it just doesn't quite come together well enough to create a really great game. Give Prototype a whirl, but there are better open-world action games out there.