Publisher: Activision
Developer: Radical Entertainment
Genre: Action
Release date: Available now

For years, millions of gamers who had grown tired of being led by the nose through endless dungeons and office buildings had been clamoring for an action game that they could play on their own terms. They got their wish with games such as the Grand Theft Auto series, in which they could progress at their own speed, turn down side tasks that didn’t interest them, yet still get the benefit of a good story that was fun to play. Developer Radical Entertainment has taken this concept a step further with Prototype, a sandbox sci-fi action shooter that places you in a detailed, authentic-looking world that’s crumbling right before your eyes.

Alex Mercer is in for a rough couple of weeks, but he doesn’t know it yet. He wakes up on a slab in the morgue shortly before scientists are scheduled to autopsy him. Emerging into the New York City night, Alex discovers that he has acquired superhuman abilities. He can run up the sides of buildings, glide from rooftop to rooftop, fall from an unlimited height without injury. He also finds that government scientists are keen to keep him under wraps because of his involvement with a secret bioweapon that has escaped the lab and is turning ordinary New Yorkers into bloodthirsty mutant creatures. With some outside help, first from his sister and later from an unknown soldier with inside knowledge of the situation, Alex sets out to evade the mutants and the military long enough to discover who did this to him and why.

In Prototype, you control Alex from the third-person perspective. The game map shows your current position and the places where you can find the beginnings of the next story mission and any of the side missions that you might have unlocked. A minimap on the HUD helps to keep you moving in the right direction, showing the relative positions of the mission icons. As you complete the story missions, you unlock more of the side tasks, some of which have you reaching a series of waypoints as quickly as possible, killing a preset number of enemies before a timer expires, or trying to destroy mutant hives or military bases. Alex also has the ability to absorb the bodies and minds of enemies, revealing all of their memories. These memories are stored in the Web of Intrigue, a compendium of 131 snippets of the game’s overall backstory that reveal what really happened to Alex.

It’s impossible to have a complete discussion of Prototype without bringing up Sucker Punch’s inFamous. These two games are so much alike that they seem to have been made from the same general outline. Both have main characters who have acquired abnormal abilities as a result of exposure to radical scientific experiments. Both take place in cities devastated by catastrophes. Both are open-world games with story missions and skippable side tasks, some of whose descriptions are almost identical. The games have so much in common, they could be twins; they even released two weeks apart in late May/early June 2009. There are subtle differences (you can choose a heroic or evil moral code in inFamous, while Alex is a badass from start to finish in Prototype; inFamous takes place in a fictional city, while Prototype is set in the very recognizable Big Apple), but the games are clearly cut from the same cloth.

Visually, Prototype looks great. Manhattan is modeled in amazing detail, including iconic buildings such as the Empire State Building, Madison Square Garden and the United Nations, and the streets are filled with the hustle and bustle of big-city life. Sound effects are an important part of the game. The cawing of flocks of birds warns you when you approach an infected part of the island; explosions are big, speaker-rattling sounds; pedestrian conversations can be heard when on street level. But there are difficulties and distractions that take away from the total package. The controls are haphazardly designed and overly complicated (the fire buttons for the weapons aren’t always the same for each weapon). Most of the side missions have nothing at all to do with the story, existing only to help you gain experience points, which you receive for doing almost anything. Enemy AI is very poor; many times I saw armed guards facing a wall as if their commanders had given them time-outs, and most of them fail to react to many of Alex’s hostile actions until it’s much too late. NPCs hosting Web of Intrigue memories can be killed, making it impossible to reveal the entire story. But the game does allow you to continue exploring the city after the final boss has been defeated, so you can complete unfinished side missions or collect remaining story fragments.

On its own, Prototype is a solid, fairly involving game that gives you your money’s worth; I completed the 31 story missions and found 70 percent of the Web of Intrigue memories in almost 35 hours of gameplay. It looks great, it runs smoothly and its story has a few interesting twists and turns. But the irrelevant and repetitive side missions, the unnecessarily complex controls and an unsatisfying final boss battle place it a clear second behind the much tighter and more involving inFamous. But they both end with sequel possibilities, so stay tuned for Round 2.

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