Prototype 2: It's alright, innit?

Prototype 2 came in 3 years after the first, 2012, on all the same 7th gen consoles and PC. As the game, for now, is the swansong of the franchise, it’s most likely the one a casual audience would recognize. As a matter of fact, if someone played mainly on PC and wanted to poke at the Prototype duology, I’d recommend this game first since it works out of the box. It has native 1080p support, flawless controller support, and no audio bugs. I just downloaded it from my Steam library and it never crashed or required any tinkering afterwards. Although, some reviews of the game claim the opposite, so your mileage will definitely vary. Since I talked at length about while talking about Prototype 1, I’ll just shorten my rambling insanity to “Activision was angry this experimental niche god-simulator game didn’t crush Max Payne 3 and Diablo 3 in sales, even though it sold pretty well given the fact almost no one from the first game worked on it and developer conditions were inhumane. So, they shot the company in the face after pissing in their eye.” Which yeah, if you play the game, it’s agonizingly clear that the lead designer, producer, writers, nor the artists got the chance to come back and work on this game. In any interview you find, the lead designer says “We wanted to fulfill our promise of the first game, and make it a triple-A experience.” This was nobody’s baby. I don’t know for certain, but I’m pretty sure Matt Armstrong had very little to do with the first game’s development. So, it’s hard to imagine he felt he left something on the table and wanted this game to be everything the first could have been. It was a professional project that was foisted on a group of random developers who did what they could, got a paycheck, and were promptly layed off immediately by a power-hungry publisher. It’s a polished product, made by good developers, playing into the trends of the time, and that’s all it endeavored to be. This isn’t to imply the development team didn’t give a shit about the game they were making, but they clearly just wanted to do their own thing. All the charm, earnest framing, and mysterious writing were supplanted by just being marketable and polished above all else. As any fan of the first game can tell you, this almost nihilistic approach to the game’s development is clear from the direct retconning of most of Prototype 1’s themes and plot. 

In Prototype 1, Alex Mercer was a complicated man who did care for humanity as a whole but didn’t really care about the individuals he hurt to meet his ends. If an innocent woman was standing in front of him when he threw a car at an attack helicopter, he would barely notice. However, he was willing to sacrifice himself to stop the government from deploying the final solution on Manhattan and ending millions of lives. He was edgy, but not cringeworthy, and he was cold without coming off as a psychopath. He took the situation seriously, so it was easy to take him seriously. I consider him to be like Ezio or Agent 47. Not as immediately discernible as Mario or Cloud Strife, but he had a great character design and was well written enough to be a proper mascot for his franchise. With all that in mind, take that info, and punt it out the window. Prototype 2 has our man Albert Wesker standing in for Alex Mercer. He has the double cross that becomes a triple cross, the evil laugh, openly plotting to destroy the world for no discernable reason, the horny lady-servant he backstabs just because. He’s got it all. I really don’t want to demean Dan Jolley here, I’m sure his work is fine on its own, but he just didn’t quite have the background needed for this project. He predominantly wrote for the Warriors series (those books about the cats) before this game. The only credits he had on video games were the Avatar game for DS and the 3 previous Michael Bay Transformers games on Wii & Xbox 360. Like, I don’t need Hideo Kojima, Guillermo Del Toro, and Dan Houser to do a handicap match on this game or anything. Part of Prototype’s charm is that it had so many fascinating ideas but kind of struggled to get them out eloquently. But, they didn’t even think about taking cues from the writer of the first game. Whose gone on record to say he has nothing against the developers who were around for this game, but they did ruin what he was going for with the first one and (in the hypothetical situation that a third game came out) he would implore people just to skip the second one. Normally, just a change of character wouldn’t matter much at all. I’ve gone to bat before over Kratos in GoW 3 because I felt it was very apparent that the truly horrible things he did weren’t meant to make you feel like a cool guy with big muscles. Kratos reached his logical conclusion. He lost everything he knew and loved so many times that he just wants to keep killing until something stops him for good. Whereas, any time I talk about Max Payne 3 I can’t help but bring up how much I dislike what they did to Max. The game could have just decanonized the rest of the series without having to change a single thing. Which makes the game itself a bad sequel. That’s generally how I feel about Prototype 2. The mystery of Hope, Idaho, what happened to Elizabeth Greene’s child, what ultimately happened to Blackwatch after the virus subsided, how did Dana come to terms with her brother being simultaneously alive and dead, what did Alex do with the power of a God in a time of peace, all questions you can just kinda shove up your ugly ass. I mostly have mixed things to say about Prototype 2, but this is the one thing that brings it from being a great game to just a decent one for me. The story and themes happening throughout the game are either non-existent or incredibly generic. I’ll start by stating that the story revolves around James Heller, a military vet. His family was killed by what is now being called the “Mercer Virus” since Mercer was the one who released it in the first game (and would later go on to immensely regret at the end of the game) and he’s focused on killing Alex Mercer since he reportedly started the new outbreak. Heller fights Alex and gets infected, becoming what’s called an Evolved. Pause. I actually do really like this. To jump the gun, Mercer wants to turn the world into Evolved, eat everyone, and absorb all their powers to become the biggerest and strongest ever. But, if the writers didn’t go whole hog and just let Alex create the Evolved because he thought it was the only way to protect humans from the tyrannical government and give them immunity to the virus, I would be so down. Mercer having a deep seeded need to protect humanity at any cost tracks with his behavior from Prototype 1. He would be like a morally righteous version of Elizabeth, whose only desire was to spread the virus and take revenge on the people who tortured her for 50 years. Alex was always morally complicated in this way. In Prototype 1 it is stated, in no uncertain terms, that Black Watch developed a cure that would be completely harmless to humans. However, since this would also kill Alex, he stops them and tries to find another way to cure the virus, even if it gets more people killed. I would wager that the reason this didn’t happen is because the writer either didn’t think of it, this was a decision made at the last possible minute, or this would mean Heller couldn’t be the angry stabby man and would have to have an argument why Mercer is wrong. Clearly, unfiltered darwinism isn’t the right solution, but it’s reasonable that Alex would do just about anything if it meant he never personally had to kill an innocent person again. But, Heller just saying “You crazy fucking fucker fuckface” to that, does not a good story make. So, we got this instead. Anyway, Heller is infected and meets with Mercer after escaping the grasp of Black Watch. Mercer tells Heller he was chosen for a reason and that he had nothing to do with the death of Heller’s family because Black Watch blamed him for releasing the virus. Reluctantly, Heller agrees to help Mercer with whatever he needs. Then Heller spawns a leather jacket because Alex wears a leather jacket. The reason Alex has one is because that’s what he had on when he died and the virus is just copying his body molecule-by-molecule. So there’s literally no reason other than brand recognition. Afterwards, Heller teams up with a priest with a sketchy backstory. Together, they work together to loosen Black Watch’s grasp on the city and figure out what Mercer is up to. The game just kinda plays out like this for the next 5 hours or so. Up until the Green Zone, you’re basically just spinning your wheels and everything going on his circumstantial and not particularly interesting. There is Koerning, who is so obviously a villain they didn’t even try to hide it, but he does introduce the concept that there are other Evolved hand picked by Mercer like Heller was, so that’s neat. Up until the Green Zone where I just kinda turned my back on the game’s story as a whole. Heller’s priest friend gets swarmed by Black Watch since they know he’s been sabotaging all of their plans and he has to fall back to the Green Zone with Heller’s help. Then, immediately after, Heller learns Alex was just lying the whole time and he really did release the virus and kill Heller’s family. Like, what? Why the hell would Alex pick Heller if he knew he was the dude’s arch-nemesis and he actually did all the things he was accused of. Imagine if Havelock was known to be the one that killed the Empress, but he just went ahead and asked Corvo to team up with him anyway. Not to mention, everything that happened at the end of Prototype 1 gets backtracked and Alex doesn’t actually care about the people he killed and the lives ruined by him spreading the virus. It just reads like fanfiction that the writer didn’t actually want to make. Either way, Alex is now influencing his Evolved (I forgot to mention that Alex has a subtle sort of mind control on the Evolved for whatever reason, but that doesn’t work on Heller because of his “Resistant DNA” as the writer puts it.) to produce a substance called Whitelight that turns anyone it touches into an Evolved inherently under Mercer’s control. Then Heller meets Galloway. Think of a female videogame character from the late 2000s. You got it. She’s bitchy, snobby, manipulative, emotionally erratic, sexually charged, and gets the exact number of gratuitous ass shots you need to understand how serious and mature this is. A serious “Men Writing Women” situation. Which, let me repeat, sexualized characters are totally fine. Naked Snake’s mother is in a state of undress at the end of the game, but that’s only to punctuate the fact she essentially gave up her body to her country to be a better soldier and it never feels sexualized for the sake of it. Or in the second and third Witcher games, frontal nudity is often just a matter of fact. Geralt usually isn’t turned on by it and it rarely feels like it’s meant to pander to and titillate the player like it is in, say, God of War, unless it’s in the proper context. I don’t understand more about Galloway when the animators have her bent over a table at just the right angle and have the small amount of light in the scene cascade at just the perfect height to silhouette her behind. I want to be informed, not treated like I’m 12. Regardless, she decides to help Heller anyway and basically says Alex is crazy so she wants to help stop him. I don’t know if she also has “Resistant DNA” or is just lying, the writer probably doesn’t either. They stop Whitelight from being released and then the plot just stops for a while again. In revenge, Alex effectively kills the priest who was helping Heller and then Heller links up with the priest’s friend, codenamed Athena. Which, if you know anything about Greecian mythos, it’s painfully obvious who Athena is supposed to be. But, it also just doesn’t make much sense with more than 10 seconds of thought. Athena, essentially, is the daughter of Zeus, which is what Alex was codenamed in the first game. But Dana is Alex’s sister, but this metaphor is trying to imply he gave birth to her somehow. Like, she was reborn when Alex turned evil maybe? But she didn’t change, Alex did. It’s like in Human Revolution when it pushes the metaphor of Icarus flying towards the sun really hard, but that symbolism instantly turns into sand because Jensen had no intentions of being cybernetically enhanced, had few ambitions at all, and states how this was forced on him near constantly. So, it more resembles a retelling of the story where Icarus’ father knocks him out, tapes a bunch of feathers to his back, and launches him at the sun with a comically large trebuchet. But, yeah it’s Dana. She didn’t have much characterization in the first game outside of being Alex’s sister, and she was more meant to tell the player how much Alex has changed and how her fear of him is what makes him take a turn towards looking past just revenge. Aside from that, she was just an oracle without a whole lot going on besides. That hasn’t changed. Then Heller finds out his daughter is actually alive and somewhere in the Red Zone. He goes there and Black Watch starts something called project phoenix. Sounds mysterious, turns out they just wanted to carpet bomb New York. And, apparently, it was such a shit plan they had like 5 helicopters with missile carriers just randomly shooting at things. So, Heller stops it in like 25 seconds. Heller finds out the guy who's been a pain in his ass the whole time, Rooks, knows where his daughter is. From the start I was wondering why Heller didn’t just eat Rooks and save himself trouble, it was for this plot beat: Heller finds out Rooks has a daughter of his own and can’t bring himself to kill and eat him. I like this moment where Heller shows an emotion besides anger or murderous glee, but I don’t think we needed Heller to act like a crayon-chewing moron to get here. Soon Rooks finds out Heller was disguised as his subordinate but can’t kill him even if he really wanted to, and Heller still doesn’t want to hurt Rook so they part peacefully. A moment I also like. Rooks tells Heller he kidnapped his daughter and where to find him. When Heller gets there, Rooks just gives her away willingly, wanting Heller to go away and never return. Which, again, this was unnecessary. Just deliver Heller’s daughter to him and skip the part where there’s a high likelihood he eats you alive and wears your face. But, clearly, it was done to set up the next plot beat where Galloway double crosses the double cross and kidnaps Heller’s kid from under Rooks’ nose to give her to Alex. Why? She came onto Heller and he said no. Ya’know, maybe this game deserved to bomb. But, anyway, Alex plans to eat all the Evolved and rule over the “New World” and apparently make Heller’s daughter the mother of the new world? I’m just gonna assume the writer didn’t think about some connotations that might have and push on. Of course, Heller gobbles up Alex and that somehow kills everyone in the city that was infected with the Mercer virus and then Dana looks at the sunset with Heller and his kid. You can tell I didn’t like this narrative at all. I don’t really like feeling that way or expressing myself that way. Dumping on something you don’t like isn’t constructive, it doesn’t take skill, requires no critical thinking, and it’s just mean spirited. I just really don’t have much nice to say about it. In any other instance, at any other time, and with any other franchise, this story would just be okay. I would point out a few things that felt poorly thought out and compliment the cool things that happened. It is as low common denominator as you can get in 2012 without just being made for TV movie slop like in Subnautica: Below Zero. I like Once Upon a Time in the West. I also like The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. If the latter was a sequel to the former, I would like it significantly less. Making a well choreographed, well shot, and well voice acted story doesn’t inherently make the story very good. Just Cause can be honest about that. I’ll chuckle once in a while, but then I can turn my brain off. Prototype can’t. It was the mystery that underpinned everything in the first game that made the narrative so good. It’s like those slav jank games where the characters are made up of 50 polygons and their voice acting was done in a stairwell, but the story is so interesting you can’t believe they came up with all this. Prototype 2 wanted to be polished, so out went the political complexity and sensitive topics like eugenics being done by the US government. One mission in the game references Project Templar, which is just a mutation of the virus that, somehow, is supposed to only target poor people. Since the story talks about it and then drops it like a hot potato, it just feels insensitive, non-committal. The absolute most important plot beat in the first game is that Hope, Idaho was an experiment to find a way to weed out racial minorities, which included Elizabeth Greene. In terms of story, this game is everything the first game isn’t, which is usually fine, I don’t want the same thing over again. But it’s like in the 8th episode of Star Wars where Luke talks about really wanting to kill his nephew or whatever and now the previous narrative is just tainted. Yeah, that’s different. It makes zero sense though. If the movie wasn’t Star Wars and Luke was a different guy, he’d be a much more complex character, but retconning characters to be wildly different than how they were portrayed isn’t “evolving” them it’s just being kinda lazy. However, Alex isn’t the protagonist anymore, Heller is. I wanted to like him so bad. In concept he’s not that different from Rico Rodriguez, despite being angry all the time. He says one liners and blows shit up. He’s basically Samuel Jackson if he was in The Boys. But, again, it’s about tone. Ignoring the fact that I don’t think he makes it through a single sentence in the game without saying “Fuck”, “Bitch”, or “Asshole”, because that means the game is very mature and very serious. Heller is just a little too tropey. They have half the equation. He’s angry a lot, swears, says one liners, and he loves his kid. That’s not a character, that’s a list of traits. This game came out after the Avengers. So, you get the idea of where this influence came from to make their lead less three dimensional. In any other game, that would probably be fine. I don’t need Travis Touchdown and Laura Croft to have emotional soliloquies about the people they’ve killed to recognize that they’re good characters. In fact, that false grasp at some vague emotional development, insisting that it’s mature and should be taken seriously, is one of the many reasons I dislike the reboot trilogy. But, Prototype does kinda need that. Your protagonist becomes a demi-god among men. No mission in the game ends without “And then I killed and ate them too.” Prototype 1 sets the precedent that this should and will affect your psyche. Heller is funny, I liked it when he punched the computer, but he starts and ends as the angry stabby guy who wants to kill Alex Mercer. I’ve been too mean. I want to talk about some gems, which are mainly the little encounters. Like I said, Heller is characterized as a guy who is enemies with technology and it’s always funny. That side mission where the commander is clearly coming onto Heller in a roundabout way and he’s flattered but confused so, not knowing what to do, just eats the guy anyway. One side mission isn’t uncovering secret plans or stopping a surveillance plot, it just involves Heller killing every goddamn person in a military base to find the guy that said mean things about his mom. And, I wish I was playing as Starnes instead, he likes to keep it weird. If you just chill out near a base, the Black Watch soldiers will just say some out of pocket shit that makes me feel like I’m playing Thief 2. There is plenty of good stuff here, it’s just not the main stuff here.

My opinions on the gameplay are somehow more nuanced but take less time to explain. First of all, the side missions, they nailed them. Unless you want to pay extra to bring back the side activities from the first game, they’re all gone. You have fully fleshed out side missions that have a beginning and end with a little chunk of story in there. Usually it’s just infiltrating the base, killing a guy, or going into a lair to kill monsters, but I was gonna do that anyway so getting a free upgrade out of it is nice. Speaking of, I’m a little mixed on the game’s upgrade system. The first just had a dead simple “Get Xp, spend Xp on upgrades”. Prototype 2 has a much better system that allows you to see what side missions, or getting a full set of collectibles, will give you. You might get an offense upgrade, a stealth upgrade, a defense upgrade, a movement upgrade, or special upgrade that makes one of your weapons stronger. This is great. It does fall apart when you look at your options and it’s stuff like 10% extra damage to soldier enemies. But, sometimes, you can get something like total immunity to bullets, which they thought was a good idea for some reason. With a little tinkering, this could’ve worked much better. Like that feeling I get in Fallout 4 where I’m still giddy every time I level up because I’ll always be getting something I need to make my build better. I’m less mixed on combat, in a lot of ways I think it’s a downgrade but not a huge one. One foot forward, one foot back. It’s much more cinematic feeling and, unlike the first game, every encounter is completely readable. I never got blindsided by something I literally couldn’t see. I loved finding out which moves stunned which enemies so I can do a GoW quick time event on them and chunk their health. Making the shield parry instead of just auto blocking until it breaks was a nice change to increase the skill ceiling without making it any less useful. On the other hand, the combat system is just far less complex overall. Since they, for whatever reason, made it so you can bind two weapons on your left and top face buttons, each weapon has half its move set from the first game. You can’t do the blade run anymore with the sword or choose between light and heavy attacks for your claws. It was just an unnecessary change that, again, I assume was done for mass market appeal. The same reason they also took out half your move set. The curb stomp, fist smash, critical pain, bullet drop, and hammer throw are gone. And those are just the really good moves from the first game they took out. With the new moves being finishers that instantly destroy tanks and helicopters on a whim. I would assume this is the main reason this game is a total cakewalk in comparison to the first. Even when fighting the new mini-bosses that are the guardians, you really have nothing to worry about. I probably died twice at the start of the game and never again. Once again, a change done to make the game more marketable but somewhat betrays the themes of the first game where Black Watch posed a real threat to you and every fight felt like a world war 3 battle. Since your arsenal of weapons and maneuvers is more limited, the game just takes it easy on you. That’s not much of a positive or negative, but it did make me feel a little less invested. Also, the map and presentation of this game is just a huge upgrade from the first, with some caveats. The cutscenes using monochrome with only the red of Heller’s hood looks so inspired I feel like it wasn’t an internal choice. Of course, the graphics are leaps above what the first could pull off. And, the map is ten times more intricate. The first game was only an original Xbox Spider-Man 2 style Manhattan, but the second feels like it takes you all over New York, essentially the places you would see if you actually lived there. Slums, some slightly rural areas, and rounding back to Times Square at the end. The two major downsides being that Heller had his movement speed and air dash seriously gimped to make the smaller islands you trek across feel bigger, when the map from the first game was just big on its own. Second, the first game had a great way of naturally telling the story through what was happening on the map screen. Virus hives and Black Watch strongholds would dynamically spawn on the map depending how far along in the story you were. And, after Elizabeth is killed, there’s a steep drop off in the number that spawn. Whereas the map of the second game is curated to be as static as possible. Destroy an entire Black Watch outpost with prejudice and they’ll repopulate in 10 minutes. I have preference for the former system, but I like both equally.

I was more mean than I meant to be, but I don’t hate this game at all. It’s just disappointing. If we got a third game that improved on the story and themes of this one, I would feel less strongly about it. But, since this is all we got, I just think it was a bad way to end the series. I’ve heard on the grapevine that the first game may be remade sometime in the far future and, while it may be good, I don’t think it’ll be the same. It’s unlikely that all the charm and the trust extended to the player would return with a big-budget remakemasterboot. At this point, I wouldn’t even want a third game. Unless they go for broke, throw away what credibility the series had, and pull a JJ Abrams by backtracking on everything that happened in this game to universal second-hand embarrassment. Prototype 1 was a fantastic game with so much potential. Prototype 2 is just okay. To me, that hurts more than it just being a bomb.