A Game of Survival... Of the Fittest

In a genre known more for crime sprees than superheroes, Prototype is a misfit. You play Alex Mercer, an amnesiac who seems to have been the guinea pig for genetic experimentation with a highly infectious zombie agent. He did not, however become a zombie, more of a super monster, and he is by no means a nice guy.

This game does not let you think for a moment that you are confined by the normal rules of third person shooters. It is entirely free roaming in a small cityscape, and from the moment you first hold down the sprint key and push forward you will know this is no ordinary game as you automatically run over car roofs, jump fences, run up the side of a building, jump over the heating/cooling systems littering the rooftops, and leap off the building, crashing down in an intersection with such force that cars are thrown around, trees snap in half, and civilians run away screaming.

With the positively relentless violence and gore, and straightforward game mechanics, you are a god among men, free to roam the city and devour people for health, go "street bowling" with thrown cars, cleave people in half with giant blade arms, or pound the ground with giant fists and watch people go flying. you have the freedom to destroy anything you please, and run away from the retaliating military with a sprinting speed that would make any Olympic runner envious, the joy of this game should be obvious, although the difficulty does increase!

You can hijack tanks and go on a rampage, or later on in the story you can even jump to a helicopter and hijack it in the air (this is no easy feat however!), or simply pull yourself to it with your grapple attack. While on the subject of helicopters, you usually dispatch them by throwing rooftop accessories (heating and ventilation systems, satellite dishes) or cars at them, though it can be entertaining to bring down a helicopter by throwing a few people at it, or just shooting a tentacle through the helicopter and listening to the pilots yelling about fire in the cockpit but that they're still operational - until you hurl the next tentacle their way. You can also use military weapons against enemies - and even call in artillery strikes if disguised as a military commander. That doesn't even touch on your "Devastator" abilities which can wipe out entire regions but require some strategy for the most efficient use, such abilities include shooting spikes up from the ground, or becoming a cloud of tentacles that attack every enemy within a large region and spell instant death even for tanks, helicopters, and Hunters.

In my mind all of this leads back to the arcade game Rampage, where the goal (as a monster scaling up and down buildings and punching people to eat them) was not to save the day but to cause as much mayhem as possible.

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