I Can't Believe I Forgot About Prototype

Prototype came out in 2009 for 7th gen consoles as well as PC. I played it on PC, which was a bit of a mistake. If you ever drop in on the Steam page and see the game wiggling between Negative or Mixed, while it consistently got between a 7 and 9 out of 10 on other platforms, that's because of the porting job. The game has crippling audio bugs, doesn't even support 16:9 natively, is poorly optimized, and would occasionally crash indiscriminately. All these problems are fixed with a single fan patch I'll drop below. I'd normally be perplexed by the dev team not cleaning up the port job with patches. However, Activision did what it always does and laid off the entire dev team the moment they started turning any kind of profit at all. Effectively sucking the juice out of a box for all it's worth, then throwing it away. But, in Activision's case, they prefer to drink a third of the carton and pour what's left on the concrete before demanding another one. Normally I don't waffle this much about the heady business with developers and publishers, but it's actually pretty important because Radical Entertainment had no business making a game like this. Beforehand, they put out some heaters like both the good PS2 Simpsons games, the Hulk games on the PS2 & Xbox, and Scarface: The World is Yours. Besides that, most of their stuff was licensed shovel-ware and some actually pretty good sports games (if you're into that kind of thing). So, in 2009, of course they put out a gory sandbox action game about the true evil a government agency can inflict on its citizens when there's no one around to check their power. It's common since, really. But, actually, it does kind of make sense. If you played Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, you've basically played the first rendition for Prototype. The stupid little air dash, glides, parkour, throwing heavy shit for extra damage, screen clearing super moves you have to build up to, and what the devs called "Combat on the Richter Scale". So, once they finished that up, they looked at their game and thought "hmmmmmm". Then, effectively repurposed a good deal of their work into an original property. At least, that's how the project director put it. Also, the idea of a virus causing a character to change and develop new appendages was because the team just really liked The Thing. Interestingly, that was their first idea. A sort of The Thing fan game that ballooned from there. After the first game, the series ended on kind of a shrug with a few half-decent comics and a sequel none of the leads from the first game got to work on. Which is probably the reason the second game was slightly lower rated than the first and sold slightly less overall, despite beating COD:MW3, Dragon's Dogma, and that Star Wars game on Kinect everyone wanted for some reason. As well as hitting about 2 million copies (after a few years) in comparison to the first game's concurrent 2.1 million copies. But, Activision wanted at least double that in half the time, so to the fire pits Radical Entertainment went. Was that because the heads of Activision truly, in their hearts, believed that this fledgling franchise was capable of straight up outselling Max Payne 3, Diablo 3, and New Super Mario Bros. Wii? No, not even remotely. Activision has just always been a terrible publishing company that can't handle money properly, and any quality that slips out their door is purely by coincidence.
But I'm not talking about the sequel yet, because Prototype 1 actually has a good story. I do mean that. It's fair to think of an emo demi god throwing cars at helicopters with edgy sword hands, and having a hard time squaring the circle of it having a good plot. That's part of the reason I know with certainty that Activision didn't give a flying shit about what was in the game as long as it sold and didn't brick people's consoles. Effectively, the best summary I can give without intense detail is that Alex Mercer was a scientist. He was a whistle blower on what the PMC Black Watch did in 1969 Idaho. Wherein they experimented on immigrants to develop a new biological weapon. After getting cornered, he smashes the vial and releases the ultra deadly airborne virus, becoming a host. The two types of host are Walkers and Runners. Walkers are just zombies, but those with specific genetic patterns, and almost exclusively women, can become Runners. They're a dead meat puppet animated by the virus that exists to propagate it and consume. After getting shot to death, his wounds heal and, since he's no longer Alex Mercer, just a bunch of discordant cells in the general shape of Alex Mercer, he has no memories. So, throughout the game, you relearn what went down in Idaho in 1969, try to stem the virus that Alex unleashed, recontaine Elizabeth Greene (the strongest Runner to ever be produced by the virus), and stop Black Watch before they completely wipe out the city. I didn't fully summarize the whole thing, as there are a lot of moving parts and I don't want to just regurgitate what happens moment-by-moment. And, if I could make a critique, that's really the main flaw with the story. There are so many characters that it's really easy to get lost in the sauce and totally forget who someone is until they come back into the plot and feel relevant again. With some characters, like Alex's ex, just sidestepping out of the story with little explanation. The characters individually feel realized and have understandable motivations, but they could've cut a few out and made the script a lot tighter. Also, some genuinely important information like where Black Watch came from, what some of the primary motivations were for creating the virus, the origins of Elizabeth, and why the US government can't stop Black Watch from wiping out the population of Manhattan, are tucked away in tiny little cutscenes you can only unlock by chancing across specific wandering NPC's and absorbing them. Not to mention, some characters, like Karen, give performances that are genuinely terrible in a way that you don't see anymore. But, considering this game was sitting butts-to-nuts with Assassin's Creed 2, Arkham Asylum, CoD: MW2, and Borderlands, its story is a resounding success for 2009. Although, some may argue that Infamous competes with or outdoes the narrative of this game, and yes Infamous came out 13 days before Prototype. I always thought Prototype was just riding on the wave of Infamous' sparking of the not-super-hero hero game genre that would be seen in Saints Row 4 and Sunset Overdrive. Nah, it was just convergent evolution, and probably part of the reason Prototype is hardly remembered. Poor bastards had to release a game in an identical genre to Sucker Punch's new flagship less than a month afterwards. Personally, I think Infamous can come off as a little sophomoric once in a while. And, it feels so enamored with giving you the paths of good and evil that it will sometimes just throw out common sense by warping the reality of the fiction because the writers desperately wanted a plot beat but couldn't also make it work within the domain of player choice. Prototype prefers to have a consistent and morally dubious story about what it actually means to be a murder versus an employee and what the greater good really means if you make a pile of bodies to reach it. The game never sits you down and explains that killing is bad actually, and you shouldn't take revenge because it's no no bad. But, it does keep a tally of every innocent civilian you kill in the crossfire and reminds you with an unobtrusive little stat bar after every combat encounter. Just like a government agent, you passively watch a number tick up at the edge of your screen. The game's plot is an extremely frank look at what the US government has done, and will do, not for the sake of progress but to maintain their fictional status quo. The virus that destroys New York is flatly stated to "be genetically engineered to target racial minorities." Which, if you know anything about US history, that probably didn't even make you blink. We literally just don't get games like this anymore coming from big studios. Like, Cyberpunk 2077 is alright, the story isn't very good. But, that partly comes from the fact that there's nothing "Punk" about it. Is the game about fighting as hard as you can against the corrupt police regime that are now privately owned by a small group of aristocratic capitalists that have so much power, they're beginning to eat their own tales? Nah, the police are cool. You can work for em' if you want. With the all-out destruction of the middle class, are the 99% barely clinging to the bottom rung of society as the corporate leaders churn through them like tissues? Valuing an individual based on their tolerance for pain and humiliation over their experience and talents? Nah, they're pretty alright. There are some poor people, but they aren't that upset about it. I'm not dunking on Cyberpunk for the sake of it, despite it being a pretty fun pastime. I'm just pointing out that there's a reason the word "Republican" is never said in Far Cry 5. Despite the writers clearly wanting to just burst out of their shirt like Bruce Banner while being forced to speak in nonconfrontational terms. So, the game just saying the US government wanted to make a bio-weapon to turn people into melted zombies, experimented on its own citizens ala Tuskegee, and if it could also kill anyone that isn't white that would be great too, is pretty refreshing. The words refreshing and earnest are how I describe a lot of the game's plotting. This game came out after Iron Man but before The Avengers, Game of Thrones, The Boys, basically every modern post-ironic pop culture franchise. So few mainstream studios are willing to just make an edgy story in a grim setting with the full intent being taken completely seriously. There are no gags, superheroes destroying skyscrapers while talking about falafel, sexual absurdism, or cloying grimdark edge deployed to the point of parody, all being used as a defensive mechanism and saying "Hey guys, don't take us that seriously, it's just entertainment! No need for critical thinking. Just watch these two hookers bang!" Which, if you look for them, that's probably why you can still find ultra-dedicated fans to this series. Forums and Reddit boards just dedicated to this game are still running strong today because this game can still give people the taste of what it was like when high budget productions could come from the heart. Prototype doesn't exactly have that cold and calculated rhythm to its moves, but it'll still bust it down on the mat and bring its own quirky style.
Since most people probably picked this game up in 2009 because the cool edgy man turned his hand into a sword and stabbed the monster really good, they didn't give much thought to the story. As a goblet, playing this game on the PS3, I was much the same way. The gameplay was enthralling enough that I would just skip the cutscenes and spend my time jumping over buildings and stabbing monsters really good. While the game obviously isn't as ahead of the curve as it was in 2009, it's still barrels of chaotic fun. Chaotic is the name of the game actually. Even from the very beginning, Alex shoots around the combat arena like a 3D game of pinball. Just within a few seconds of an ongoing fight, you can hit a screen nuke to cripple the boss you're fighting, but immediately get hit by a counter attack that chunks your health. So, you run over to the nearest soldier stupid or arrogant enough to point a gun at you, and eat them alive. But, just as you absorb them, a pinky demon dives at you from a nearby skyscraper and you dodge into a pile of burnt out cars. And, since the military are fighting the infected, the infected are fighting you, and you're fighting both, a Black Hawk gets knocked out of the sky by another monster. So, lifting it up, you run up a building, hurl the burning wreckage at the monster and follow it up with a black flip into elbow drop from 50 stories up to double tap it. Then, using your whip maneuver, you grapple your way onto a chopper that's still in the air to give yourself some leverage against the boss via liberal use of cruise missiles. The vibes and micro-level engagements are where Prototype really starts to butter its bread. The whole world is literally out to get you, and you have to be clever enough to wiggle out from beneath its thumb and lash out like an animal. Even some games that favorably compare to this one (Infamous, Just Cause 2/3, Saints Row 4, Sunset Overdrive) are all third-person shooters that require the player to keep their distance and avoid getting overwhelmed. Prototype is much closer to Doom or Devil May Cry. The only ranged attacks you have also have pitiful range and require high commitment. You and Alex have to get up in there and tell them whose king Shit. The only way to heal yourself is to overpower and eat the same thing that's trying to kill you. That may also have to do with why I actually like Alex as a character. He has some edgy dialogue once in a while but it doesn't feel unearned or like he's saying "I am the ultimate lifeform." He doesn't need to. He and I were both there when he took that TOW missile to the jaw and came out of the plume of smoke in full dropkick position at the poor pilot who shot him. The only problem I have with the moment-to-moment combat is that I only ever felt like using the armor power sparingly, since the game's movement system is how you stay alive. Although, that might've been on purpose. I think, once the game tries to structure itself, instead of letting all the mechanics breathe, is when some issues come up. There are diversions of about 5 or so flavors that populate your map at regular intervals. They're all pretty fun the first few times, but they never meaningfully evolve. Saints Row 2, for example, had a pretty similar system of doing odd jobs to score free cash and shake up the gameplay loop. The main difference is that none of the side missions in Prototype are thematically appropriate or have you do anything you weren't already doing in the open world. So, Alex both has to save his sister, who was kidnapped by Elizabeth so she could lure Alex in and consume his genetic code, but he also has to do a jumping minigame to land perfectly in the center of the basketball court on the way there. It would be easy to argue that you don't have to do any of them, but the very last fifth of the game has a difficulty spike so intense that you're just flatly unlikely to get through it unless you unlock a few upgrades with the XP you get from side missions. Also, a lot of the missions are good-to-fine. None are really that part of the game that you would remember and decide against playing it again, but a fair chunk of them feel like they were implemented poorly. Anytime you have to chase someone in a main mission, they're completely invulnerable for arbitrary reasons. Even though, when you catch them at the end of the set piece, you just kill them anyway. For a modern audience this might feel like a really minor complaint. But, in a game that prides itself on open-world chaos, it's just so jarring and out of place to be suddenly railroaded so hard. Like, if in Hitman you assassinated a guy while he was talking on the phone, and a developer themselves blocked the bullet and said "Hey asshole, this is important to the lore. So, stop being a dick and let me finish." That being said, a majority of missions are just black box areas that require you to destroy X things or fight X creatures, Just Cause style, which is where the game shines. The real meat of the game shows up when you get to pull out your bag of tricks and cause some unrepentant havoc.
I hope it's clear how much I love Prototype. On a nostalgic level, a visceral level, and an artistic level. It's just one of those games that has never been replicated by anyone else. But Alex and I both have a dark secret. I never played the sequel. I heard the story wasn't very good and it's kinda just more of the same. So, hopefully I find something to love about that game too.