Has Activision produced the ultimate expression of gaming’s will-to-power?
The narratives of videogame culture are rooted in the world of comic books – the stomping grounds of the superhero whose toughest quest is often a struggle to come to terms with the implications of their own astounding powers.
From The Hulk’s anger management issues to the literalised body consciousness of Invisible Girl, comic books both mirror adolescent anxieties and – by turning them into superpowers – provide the ultimate in wish-fulfillment. Their characters get to taste the thrill of superabundant adult power without the constraints or responsibilities that come with it.
Similarly, the lure of the videogame is the chance to remake yourself – bigger, better, faster, stronger. Activision – whose latest game comes with the strapline, ‘Become anything; change everything’ – evidently understand this. Perhaps more than any other game before it, Prototype gives you a sense of unbridled, freakish, unstoppable power – and everything in its sandbox world is designed to reflect that power back at you.
As the hoodie-wearing Alex Mercer, you wake up one day on a mortuary slab to find that you are no longer human, but a shape-shifting genetic prototype capable of consuming people and taking on their form. Handily, you can also transform your limbs into lethal weapons, morphing through an arsenal of blades, shields, hammers, whips and claws like a walking multi-utility knife. Top all this off with superhuman strength and speed, the ability to glide and to scale any surface using adaptive parkour, and it’s unlikely anyone’s going to try to make you eat your homework again.
After thus tooling you up, the game lets you loose in an open-world New York, where it’s time to contend with the now-obligatory apocalyptic virus outbreak scenario. Within minutes, Prototype plunges you into an intense battle with strike teams, giant mutant beasts and hordes of shrieking Infected, as the city’s downtown is enveloped in a viral red mist. Before you know it you’re racing up the sides of buildings, launching yourself at helicopter gunships and sending tentacles erupting from your body, under the feet of panicking civilians, and up through rip-holes in the concrete streets.
It’s one of the most breathlessly thrilling openings in gaming history; there’s a very real sense of kinetic, frenzied chaos, and the game engine manages to keep the frame-rate well on top of the action despite a gobsmacking number of antagonists on screen.
Having given you a taste of the game at full tilt, Activision set the clock back and your abilities along with it. From here you must progressively power up – no bad thing, as there’s so much to enjoy about being Alex, even on his lowest setting. Your parkour skills allow you to effortlessly negotiate every surface of the city with a few fluid movements. Soon you’re swooping and gliding, scaling skyscrapers, plunging hundreds of feet to street level and bounding over the heads of spooked pedestrians. You can grab civilians and rag-doll them around at comically frenzied speeds, or hurl cars around like toys. The game is also exceptionally and imaginatively violent: enemies can be cut in half horizontally, torn in half vertically, have holes punched clean through them, be decapitated, skewered, and even used as projectiles.
As well as its obvious link to the Grand Theft Auto series, Prototype owes a clear debt to Crackdown – not to mention the undercover gameplay of Assassin’s Creed and some aesthetic and conceptual borrowings from The Darkness. Graphically, Prototype isn’t pushing any envelopes. Alex himself is well animated, but the city is rendered in crude brush strokes compared to the stunning pointillism of GTA IV. Yet overall, the environment convinces. It’s in moments of recreation and repose that you find much of the game’s atmosphere: looking down over rooftops and seeing skirmishes playing out below you, there’s a real sense that mutants are sporadically wreaking havoc on an organic living city.
Prototype‘s ‘deceive or destroy’ gameplay promises a lot of depth, and initially at least, it delivers. It seems to encourage a genuinely strategic approach as you scope military bases and choose the right moment and entry point from which to attack or surreptitiously consume the identity of a target.
But beyond the immediate charms of its malleable open-play world, you soon come up against its limitations. The illusion ofstrategic play collapses as you become overtly conscious of the underlying game mechanics. Your choices start to feel arbitrary – merely a matter of triggering set pieces designed to lead you into the familiar cycles of repetitive, mash-em-up gameplay. Like Assasin’s Creed, which was a painting pretending to be a game, Protoype‘s depth is skin-deep, and the game feels like a rehearsal for a full experience that may only be realised in its sequel.
One day a developer will create a sandbox world with real depth and majesty, in which your decisions genuinely feel autonomous and success is not just about learning to outsmart the pre-patterned responses of the AI. While Activision have inched a step nearer that goal, they’ve fallen short of the giant strides the game claims to make in the sandbox genre. Thrilling as it is at its frenzied best, ultimately Prototype fails to break the mould.
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