Game Review: PROTOTYPE

It's been a few days since my last post seeing as how most of my time is spent either writing my thesis or recovering from said writing. Yes, I'm a nancy. It's strenuous.


In any case I've been playing PROTOTYPE to alleviate my stress, and in this regard, it is one of the better games for the task.

The game follows an amnesiac hoodie-wearer named Alex Mercer, a guy in his late twenties who is attempting to find out why is body can transform into an arsenal picked straight of the dungeons-and-dragons guidebook - a blade, a mace, super strength, a whip and a shield. He goes about the city and instead of asking people questions, or subjecting government lackeys to advanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding, he simply "absorbs" them What does this mean? It means whenever he punches a dude, he punches a hole straight through them and turns them into an easily digestible serving of raspberry pudding.

He eventually finds out who he is and who the big bad is (Surprise! It's the government! Spoiler alert!) but by this stage the entire sandbox of New York city has been turned into a zombie apocalypse scenario. Any semblance of moral choice systems goes out the window faster than my last malfunctioning Wii-mote. There's no need to agonize over the decision whether to absorb hapless citizens for health restoration when they're all all the Alex Mercer face-eating diet.

The real fun of this game is being able to jump from building to building, falling from a magnificent height and crushing some random passerby like a human-sized cockroach. Bodysurfing is especially enjoyably viseral as you ride their newly corpsified carcass into freshly squeezed pavement juice.

The gameplay mechanics are adequate - at times the controls are sluggish to respond, especially in some of the more complicated fight combos. I've never seen a game with a more unnecessary martial arts mechanic when you can simply extend your arm like Mr Fantastic and rip out the other guy's ovaries. Good times...

I do have one complaint about this game - the player character is about as interesting and compelling as a Chinese exchange student at an accounting party. The story isn't bad and I thought the twist at the end was fairly unexpected - worthy of being in an early Shyamalan film.

You may think that this sort of violent indulgence is bad for the soul but I find it enormously cathartic; at the very least it prevents me from throttling that guy in the post-grad study room with chronic flatulence.