Re: Prototype
Been playing this game for hours now & I can safely say it's has lived up to the hype. Radical Entertainment have clearly evolved a lot over their previous average/dud titles like Scarface: The World is Yours & Hulk . Combining genres seems to be a fad these days & PROTOTYPE has just upped the ante for fusing so many genres together. You have everything from open world adventure to action, stealth to hack-en-slash etc.
The story of PROTOTYPE is pretty straight forward. New York city has just witnessed an outbreak of a deadly mutagenic virus. The intro movie presents to you the game's protagonist, Alex J Mercer. Little do we know who he is or what he is capable of. He starts off by saying "I'm the reason for all of this. They call me a monster, a killer, a terrorist. I'm all of this" & leaps down to the ground from atop a high rise. He goes on to talk about the virus & says "I woke up in a morgue. Now I hunt, I kill, I consume, I become. I'm gonna find out who did this to me & I'm gonna make 'em pay"
And that is exactly what he does. The game instantly puts you into action post this intro sequence & you unleash hell. After the first mission, you rewind to 14 days earlier to the outbreak. Here you wake up in a morgue & escape. Evidently, you have lost all your memory & as your progress and consume key people, you acquire their memories. That unfolds the entire plot of the game. So you meet up with your sister, Dana Mercer & with her help, start bridging out the gaps in your memory. You also learn to track down people who have done this to you.
As most of you might have already seen from boat load of videos all over the internet, the gameplay is very intense. The first mission let's you witness most of your available abilities. But once you switch to the next mission, you're stripped off from those abilities (merely because it's a flashback). Now you track down the bozos who did this to you & start hunting them down. In the beginning you'll have your basic melee punch-kick moves, adaptive parkour & jumping manoeuvers. As the game progress, you begin to butcher the enemies & in turn gaining Experience/evolution points. Using this Exp points, you can unlock newer skill sets & also purchase your ability upgrades. Till now I have gained the claw as a weapon by defeating one of the infected enemies called, the hunter. It's an open-world environment, so you'll have the mini-map to indicate your objectives positioning. Objectives involve main mission & side missions. Side missions are mainly to gain some more EXP points to upgrade & main mission obviously leads to main progress. There are 2 ways to approach the objective, stealth or all out action. The former is least preferred as it doesn't help. You can scale walls with utter ease & leap off from the highest tower and plummet to the ground sending a small shock wave to the ground. You can also use heavy objects to destroy choppers & random enemies.
Graphics is an aspect which has been bashed on some forums. They say it's low res, washed out, muddy....yadda yadda yadda. I feel it's pretty decent. Not something to write home about, but acceptable. The screenshots won't do any justice to the in-game effect. Radical Entertainment used the heavily modified version of Titanium engine. I was able to max it out @1280x1024 with 4X AA & high details. The problem with this engine is like I mentioned before, it's CPU bound. Hence people with weaker CPU would suffer the wrath. In my case, the frame rates drops to 17-25 when in highly concentrated pedestrian & vehicles based areas. Once I scale the towers, it shoots upto 57fps. But most of the time, it's playable. The textures are not very sharp as some recent titles, but they're acceptable. Vehicle & character modelling is OK'ish. It doesn't sport a dynamic day & night cycle. So it changes with each mission. Explosion effects are average as well.
Audio is a bit dodgy. The default volume is very low for some reason and it's not just me, but pretty much everyone seems to be complaining about the same thing. Not sure if that's because of the integration of 7.1 channel surround sound in this game, or something else. But if you crank up the volume you can hear every discreet sound in the environment.
Overall, I feel it's superb. I'm just 2-2.5 hours into the game and it's already this exciting. I am still awaiting to unlock my remaining abilities & upgrade them. One thing I almost forgot to mention was a feature called "Wed of Intrigue". It allows you to view the memories of the bodies you have consumed. It can be found in the main menu along with the upgrades & rest of the stuff. Since inFamous has drawn innumerable comparisons to this game, I can say it's way ahead of it. I seen the demo of inFamous & wasn't too impressed, but this is something else. I could be wrong though. That's not even the point. inFamous of a PS3 exclusive which Sony can keep. PROTOTYPE is an asset for PC & console gamers for now. So grab your copies & unleash the beast within.
Sorry for the hasty review.
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