My Thoughts on the Prototype series [PC Version]

 Utter, bloody chaos

I was recommended Prototype by a friend back when I was still in school and owned a potato PC. He described it as a game in which our character could morph himself into anything or anyone, could change his body to resemble a person or a weapon. At that time, it sounded extremely fascinating to me and perhaps it actually was fascinating because I hadn’t heard of any other game that allowed the player so much power. Transforming your own body into a weapon? So cool!

When I began playing Prototype, however, some of that fascination felt missing. Lost, perhaps, along with the innocence and the overactive, gullible imagination of childhood. The selling point was still the same – I could indeed change my character’s hands to blades and claws and take the form of another human being, but compared to the newer games that are crazily innovative with their premises, Prototype didn’t feel as fresh as it did when I heard about it 11-odd years ago.

Of course, I didn’t let that take any enjoyment away from my experience. I still played it with all the innocence and fascination I could find within myself, and also with the adult wisdom required to make sense of the story. Not that it is very complex; though. In many ways it reminded me of Resident Evil in terms of biological testing for human augmentation and the results looking like zombies.

Prototype begins with a guy named Alex Mercer who finds out that he has acquired superhuman abilities to morph his hands into weapons and to take the form of someone else by consuming them, but he doesn’t remember anything about his past so he sets out on a quest to rediscover his life. There’s also a virus outbreak in New York to which he is directly connected. He soon finds out about a more sinister scheme in the works involving the military and some organisation named Blackwatch and sets out to foil their plans. Aided by his sister Dana, he consumes one person after another to infiltrate their minds and gain information about the next clue. This is a common progression mechanic in both Prototype 1 and 2. You consume someone, you learn about their contact, then you consume that person and you learn about their contacts, and so on.

Player movement in the series is hugely reminiscent of Spider Man. I wonder if Activision had any role to play in this, being the publisher of Prototype and at least one Spider Man game that I know of. Perhaps they recycled Spider Man into Prototype? Because the similarities are really noticeable. Alex can run on walls, glide in the air and jump to astonishing distances. Add a couple of web-shooters to this and it becomes a Spider Man game.

While we are on the subject of movement, getting around feels quite cluttered in Prototype 1. At times it gets difficult to get Alex to do what we want him to. This is significantly annoying in boss battles when you desperately and quickly want to get out of reach of the enemy but the clunky controls ensure that you end up landing in a completely different spot than the one you were aiming for. This is somewhat polished and improved upon in Prototype 2, but it could still be better.

The open world in Prototype 1 is bathed in a red hue, and the city is completely chaotic. There is so much going on around Alex that it sometimes feels overwhelming. But then, chaos is supposed to be like that. There are explosions all around, mutated human beings and Venom-like zombies eating people, tanks and helicopters raining bullets and rockets and esoteric military orders blasting through the radio. It’s a perfect setting to realize how much deadly and devastating the virus is.

Combat is great in Prototype, and even better in the sequel. You can turn your hands into claws, hammerfists, whip etc. and there are different attacks and special moves associated with each weapon. The animations for these are amazing, but too long. And for a major duration you are open to attacks so there is not much impetus to execute these special moves or “devastators” except when it is really necessary and you want to cause a large amount of damage and don’t mind losing a fourth of your health in the process. Hijacking vehicles has the same problem – you climb aboard a tank and are pulling open the lid and all the while there are shots being fired at you and you are losing health. This is what makes Prototype feel too chaotic.

The stealth element is exciting, especially in closed spaces. Pretending to be someone else and going about your work, even consuming someone and taking their appearance right under everyone’s nose has its appeal. Think about it – a patrol guard walks behind a truck and when he emerges he may not be the same person anymore. This is an incredibly powerful skill to have and yet, the military in the game seems conveniently ignorant to it which enables Alex to carry out many of his activities without raising any alarms. Sure, there is biometric verification, but is it enough to prevent someone who can completely disguise himself as another human – down to the genetic level – from accessing the military’s top secret information? Weirdly enough, the military and other human enemies carry on as if Alex didn’t have this transforming ability. They still trust each other to be the same person they know, without showing even a sliver of suspicion about their identities.

Perhaps they are too reliant on their detectors which can tell if Alex is in the vicinity. However, Alex can sabotage even these, so they are not of much use in the end. Then there are the super soldiers, who are humans but can recognize Alex even when he is in some other form. These are like the Captain Americas of Prototype – physically and mentally enhanced soldiers who can give Alex a tough fight.

Throughout the game, Alex keeps on gaining new powers and abilities, and the progression rate for this is quite steady. It doesn’t feel forced or rushed and this quest for more powers is a substantial driving force for the player to keep playing.

In spite of so much power, the boss battles still feel challenging. Though in my case this may have been because I didn’t express too much interest in completing all the random events and challenges scattered throughout the map, which could increase my character’s damage area and effect. So the abilities and strength that I possessed remained strictly within the limits of what the game’s story offered me.

Nevertheless, I managed to help Alex uncover his past, battle all the different types of beings infected by the strange virus slowly spreading through the city, and raising my eyebrows at the periodically occurring reveals and plot twists, helped the story reach its conclusion.

When the game ended, Alex was standing on the edge of a roof and the whole open world of New York was before me, but there was little motivation for me to explore it because a) I had already completed the story, b) the world looked dull and uninteresting and c) I wanted to play Prototype 2.

 

To be frank, I had wanted to play Prototype 2 from the outset but didn’t want to miss out on the events of Prototype. I had had a glimpse of Prototype 2 and its hunting mechanism on a friend’s laptop and had my heart fixated on this game ever since. So when Prototype ended, I was quick to move on to its sequel without trying a filler game in between like I usually do when playing games in the same series.

The second game is a huge improvement over the first, especially in terms of visuals and controls. The sky, for one, is not red. It starts off blue, and gets more ominous as the game progresses. The New York in this game is divided into zones. We start in the yellow zone, then the action shifts to the green zone and finally the red zone which is the worst affected. The red zone is more reminiscent of the city in Prototype 1. In comparison, yellow zone feels like a peaceful monastery where the sky is a clear blue and the city, much brighter. The world is designed in a better way and feels a lot less monotonous to traverse. There is more variety in the buildings and landmarks and you can hear NPCs talking in the background. Such subtle details breathe more life into the city.

We play a sergeant named James Heller in this one (Heller…Mercer…quite formidable last names, huh?) who loses his family to a virus outbreak similar to the one in the first game. He is convinced that Alex Mercer is behind all this, and sets out for vengeance until he meets Mercer himself who says he has nothing to do with Heller’s family. He blames Gentek, the bio-research organisation, for this outbreak and then proceeds to infuse Heller with the virus. Heller’s body survives this infusion and he gets the same powers as Alex, following which he is told to join Alex to eradicate Gentek and the virus. For a while Heller does Alex’s bidding, but soon comes across information that puts Mercer in a suspicious light.

It follows the same Prototype pattern – get clues, consume someone, get more clues, consume someone else and keep going until you solve the mystery of Alex Mercer and his role behind this new outbreak. I must mention, though, that the link between both the games feels a little weak to me. For the events in Prototype 1 to lead to Prototype 2, the motive on Mercer’s side had to be pretty strong and convincing which I don’t think was the case. On their own both games have an interesting sci-fi story, but I personally feel that the bridge from Prototype 1 to 2 could have been sturdier.

Apart from the main story, there are side quests and events to be completed, much like in Prototype 1. It might just be me, but I felt the events in Prototype 2 were much more doable and the rewards, much more achievable than its predecessor. Then again, rewards included BTS videos of the game like the mocaps and sound designing, so there was more to look forward to which may have driven me to work harder at the events and challenges.

Once I had gotten a taste for completing the events, the completionist in me woke up and I decided to complete all events and challenges needed to unlock these BTS videos. There are also collectibles such as Black Boxes in P2 which are radio recordings obtained from deceased soldiers. As opposed to the 100 location collectibles in P1, Black Boxes are much fewer in number. Only around 50 over the whole of New York, much easier to find and less exhausting to collect. Then there are the Field Ops, which are gatherings of scientists researching the dead remains of an infected creature, and a bunch of soldiers guarding them. Each of these barely takes 5 seconds to complete. Heller goes through the gathering in a couple of swift slashes and there you go – one Field Op eliminated. You also have underground Lairs of the infected wherein you have to eliminate all of its inhabitants. Completing these makes Heller more powerful and since I was always more focused on completing these side quests, I never had any difficulty in most of the boss battles in P2 as my Heller was always sufficiently adorned with new abilities causing high damage and a large effective radius.

A large number of the side missions involve accessing a Blacknet terminal by impersonating some high-ranking official. You then have to find them and consume them. The hunting mechanism that I mentioned earlier, which piqued my interest in P2, comes into play here and is the most immersive of all the elements in the whole series. Heller sends out a hunting pulse, and shortly after receives a returning pulse. The epicenter of this returning pulse is where the target is. This really puts you in Heller’s shoes because, as someone who is controlling Heller, you know no more than what your character does. You have to observe where the pulse is returned from, and follow that direction, possibly sending more pulses to pinpoint the target’s location. These mechanics, where it is not completely obvious where your target is but the game offers you subtle hints – in the form of tools or abilities or maybe even written clues – which you then have to work with to get to your destination, is one of the best ways to get the player more engrossed in the game. This reminds me of the crime scene reconstruction technology in Batman: Arkham Origins or extracting crucial leads from suspects and witnesses in L. A. Noire by catching them on their expressions and visual ticks.

So once I had completed all these side missions, events, challenges and collected all the collectibles, I proceeded to decimate my opponents with ease. This is not to say that the story missions were a breeze, the increasing difficulty could still be felt, but failing a mission once gave me enough insight to complete it in the second or third try. The last boss battle still felt difficult, though, but compared to the last battle in P1, it’s a piece of cake.

You see, the battle in P2 takes place in three stages, and each stage is a checkpoint. If you die, you resume from the last checkpoint. However, in P1, if the boss kills you, you have to begin all over again. From square one. And that’s why completing P1 took me a lot longer than P2. I just couldn’t defeat the last boss. Although the final battle in P2 is easier due to the checkpoints, the game tries to make up for it by having the boss change his strategy in each round. This forces the player to change their style as well, since the moves they were using in the first round may not work as effectively in the next. This provides a fleeting sense of accomplishment when Heller finally defeats the boss.

There it is, my experience of playing one of the most anticipated games in my life. I am glad I took my friend’s advice and gave the Prototype series a try. I cannot say it was an exceptionally unique experience as it did remind me of other games and movies – it looks to be heavily influenced by Spider Man and Resident Evil in particular – it was still enjoyable. Also Alex Mercer will remain one of the most stylish protagonists in my memory.