Prototype is a tremendously ugly game. Not in the sense of having muddily-textured buildings and people and a draw distance which imparts a low-level fog on everything, though it does have those. Not in the sense of rendering its world in a grimly limited palette of greys and blood-reds, though it has that too, as well as a start-at-the-end intro which opts for a more distinctive hellish orange. It’s not even in the constant violence, though there’s plenty of that. The ugliness goes so much deeper.
Main character Alex Mercer is, at one level, just another sulky dark-haired white guy in a hoodie. The story, though, has him having already turned into some kind of freakish genetic anomaly, an over-powered shape-shifting mutant able to run up buildings, manifest claws, and consume people, the better to wear their appearance as disguise. It commits to this transformation not through anything much in the way of overwrought reaction, but by taking it largely completely as-read, which is somehow even more horrifying. He’s focused on revenge and working things out, and the game stays true to that.
Alex has a background of working in some kind of military contractor who did experiments on him and others, and as well as his own transformation there is a wider mutant threat on the loose to deal with. Part of his investigation is to gain access to people’s memories through the aforementioned gruesome consumption, and those memories are frequently parodically strident in their depiction of militarised culture. Prototype pretty much treats the military establishment as one more monster in a city full of them. Since munching on people is the easiest way to regain health and there is a ready supply of harmless passers-by, it also makes it the route of least resistance to remain a bigger monster still.
It’s set in an open world version of New York, which together with all that rooftop-clambering can’t help but bring to mind Spider-Man 3, also published by Activision – which even had its own amorphous monstrosity in Venom. The resemblance becomes even stronger when some of its movement powers get added and Alex is gliding through the air. He’s never as graceful as Spidey, but that kind of seems the point, this New York being a long way from the gleaming comic book metropolis.
Even without grace, you are at least usually able to keep up some movement even while under assault by various mutants, tanks and helicopters. That freedom flows through into where Prototype excels in combat, even as its route to escalation is generally just to brute-force send more enemies at you. Its range of earnable upgrades doesn’t just allow for different button-pressing combos, but genuinely different approaches. That could mean being stealthy and heavily using posing as others to get by. It could mean using various mutant powers. Or it could mean my personal favourite, focusing on the power to throw stuff. Ripping pipes from rooftops and taking out helicopters with one well-timed hurl feels like the best mechanics of The Force Unleashed now given a game to live up to them.
The appeal of Prototype is best summed up in relation to one more game it reminded me even more strongly of: the old Sega curio The Ooze. When I wrote about that one I put it like this: “You are the disgusting, toxic product of technology, roaming the burnt-out wasteland that technology has wrought, and using that technology to fight back and take revenge, the system turned in on itself in belching, poisonous fury. Celebration and condemnation both get ramped up until they collapse into a puddle.” Apply a particular militarised biological definition of “technology” to Prototype and every bit of that applies. Its more modern gameplay smarts join up to a rather retro singularity of purpose in a really striking way. It all makes for a tremendously ugly experience.
Top of the charts for week ending 20 June 2009:
