Biohazard: Manhattan

Remember that scene in The Incredible Hulk where the Hulk jumps from building to building throughout New York? Prototype will make you feel like that. Or maybe like Spider-Man, only with crazy leaping abilities rather than web-slinging. Or maybe Superman.

The point is the game makes you feel like a superhero. Yet, despite that rather familiar concept, Prototype generally feels unique. It’s what might happen to Resident Evil if it were shoehorned into Grand Theft Auto‘s body.

When you first meet Alex Mercer, he’s caught up in the middle of a raging biological siege. Times Square is in ruins, the air is thick with toxins and the grotesquely mutated populace is out of control. You can barely hear over the shellshock roar of tanks and RPGs whizzing past your head or see through the pervasive smoke choking the streets.

Mercer himself isn’t normal. He’s been infected with a particular strain of the virus that’s been unleashed on Manhattan Island, giving him super-strength, shape-shifting abilities and arms that can turn into blades, tendril-like whips and claws, to name a few.

Mercer isn’t necessarily out to save humanity. He’s just looking for answers about who did this to him. Needless to say, starting the game in present time (with a lot more powers unlocked) and then flashing back will immediately grab your attention—some of his attacks, like sticking his claws underground and stabbing them up to impale a group of enemies, are pretty wild.

From there, Prototype will probably feel familiar if you’ve played GTA or any other open-world game. Thankfully, because of the game’s mechanics it never really gets old.

See, unlike most open-world excursions, Alex can truly get anywhere in the city in minutes. Sprint and he’ll auto-leap Zelda-style over cars, run up buildings, whatever you want.

Another interesting idea is Alex’s power to consume—just grab anyone on the street and Alex will devour them, but not in a traditional sense. The virus (which bears a resemblance to Resident Evil 5’s Oroboros parasite) absorbs your prey’s essence, which refills some health (no regenerating health!) and allows you to assume their form.

Rather than having one or two gameplay elements worth slogging through, the developers’ main concern was really about making Prototype consistently fun, even when things become a little repetitive. The game isn’t perfect, though.

The A.I., for one, is laughably bad most of the time. Even when disguised, sprinting up buildings or leaping 50 feet in the air, it doesn’t do much but put your enemies in “caution” mode. Similarly, it’s too easy to do a stealth consume in broad daylight. Some may complain that the game becomes hard, though I appreciate the well thought out difficulty.

The plot makes some inexplicable turns, seemingly important characters are sometimes discarded and Mercer himself seems to feel little sympathy for everyone he’s slaughtered by the end of the game (though kudos to Barry Pepper, whose pipes give Mercer some emotion and personality, even if it is somewhat one-dimensional).

But this is all part of Prototype‘s charm—almost like a B movie, but played for keeps. These things aren’t really detractors, per se, since the story, as silly as it may be, continually shakes things up—sometimes Mercer helps the military to neutralize a viral threat, sometimes he’s forced to protect an infected monster and other times he’s at odds with both.

But playing sides isn’t something you see too often in any game, really, and it keeps things entertaining. Well, that and all the tank missions. Those never get old.