Prototype

I didn't hold out much hope for Prototype and it turns out my lack of faith was highly justified.

For those who don't know, Prototype is an open world game that follows a young man who has had a genetic experiment performed on him and now he... mutates a lot. or something. He can run up walls, absorb people into himself, he's practically invincible, can superjump etc. etc. etc.

I found it really hard to get into this game. Part of the reason behind this is the total lack of plot. You're never really given an explanation as to who the main character is, who the company who've infected him are, why the hell we should care about his sister and so on.

The writing is incredibly lazy. For example, when your character breaks out, he is treated to the sight of the scientists who were supposed to be performing an autopsy on him being gunned down by soldiers working for the company. Why do they do this? Well, no reason that's evident. It's just a very quick and cliched way of getting across that the company are EVIL. As if doing genetic experiments on live human subjects didn't make that point clearly enough.

Problem number two with this game is the AI. Every cop and soldier in the game is looking out for you but you can disguise yourself as a civilian. This means that the AI has been programmed to ignore all but the most blatant signs of supernatural goings on. This boils down to you can jump across cars, superjump into the air and land right in front of a cop, shattering the cobblestones, and he'll just gaze at you. I punched a civilian once, several dozen other civilians saw me but a cop was looking the other way. The cop instantly ran over and looked at the civilians' corpse, ignoring me completely. Apparently me standing on top of the civilians body and several other people cowering at my feet pleading for me not to kill them wasn't a big enough clue for this flatfoot.

So apart from the AI and the plot is this game any good? I'm not sure. There's free running, which is okay, some faintly entertaining combat stuff. There's still far too much pointless running around and I'm not sure if I can be bothered to commit the sort of time to this game that seems to be demanded.

I will be playing a little bit more but after the first few hours of play, my impressions really aren't very good.