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 Home -> Reviews -> Prototype
Prototype By: Forest "Lord Havoc" Hale
July 23, 2009
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Developer :Radical Entertainment
Publisher :Activision
Release Date :June 2009
Platform : PC, PlayStation 3, XBox 360
Table of Contents

· Introduction
· Closer Look
· Facts
· Final

Thanks For the Memories...

As the game progresses you unlock new abilities at a brisk pace with your earned "Evolution Points" acquired from all this devastation, and the game soon turns into a mildly compelling conspiracy-fueled novel, where you consume people who were involved in the project that created you to acquire their memories and unlock new clues in the "Web of Intrigue".

While the actual story is thin at best, overall it resembles a conspiracy thriller, in the form of video snippets of memories of the people you consumed, which have a quality not unlike propaganda clips from your perspective, and you have no remorse for killing these people.

It is hard to call this game a "zombie shooter" despite having zombies, because the zombies may be plentiful (as the story progresses) but they are hardly a threat to you, you have bigger fish to fry than a few stumbling zombies in the middle of a traffic jam, but they certainly add flavor to the game.

While you can do "silent take-downs" and other stealthy maneuvers akin to Assassin's Creed (and sometimes you do have to use stealth to achieve your goals), this game's strength really is in the sheer carnage you can unleash, the almost tactical planning with which you carry out your use of Devastator attacks and recouping of the health lost when using them, often involving the consumption of numerous civilians.

In contrast with most games that are centered on ethics and moral codes, this game simply does not care, the masses are frequently your sustenance after a mission goes awry and you need to recoup some health, since unlike the military they tend to beg for their lives or flee in terror, rather than shoot at you - not that the usual soldiers' assault rifles do much to your amorphous structure, mind you, but missile launchers and grenade launchers do dish out the pain, and you will certainly learn to fear the infected "Hunters." Strike teams of helicopters can be very troubling as well. The game does not have escort missions but it does have defense missions (yes, you actually care about certain people, and occasionally certain creatures) which add some variety and increase your attachment to the main characters of the story.

To top it all off, at the end of each story mission you get to see the running total expenditure by the military trying to kill you, along with casualty counts (for civilian and infected as well).

It is easy to spend hours just playing around with this game and ignoring the storyline entirely, or carrying out the semi-randomized "missions" - way-point races, assassinations, demolition of a zombie hive or military base, or getting the most military or infected kills possible with a specific weapon (or vehicle) in a public place within a timelimit, among other possibilities, all of this leads to many "cool situations" that arise on their own.

There is a real sense of achievement when you bring down an entire building using a hijacked tank (acquiring and protecting said tank often requires some planning), or when you evade a strike team of helicopters that is hunting you, with appropriate disguise switching after leaping into a back alley, out of view.

There is literally no limit to your use of any ability (no "stamina bar" here) other than the Devastator attacks (which consume health), you can run indefinitely, shoot spikes out of the ground as much as you like, and just generally make use of the gameplay mechanics as you see fit, no one strategy dominates here.

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