Alex Mercer is having a problem. Eighteen days ago, he was shot, resurrected with no memory, and has since found out that a virus incubating inside of his body is capable of transforming him into a deadly creature. It was also eighteen days ago that the virus began to spread, infecting the inhabitants of Manhattan, New York at an alarming rate. The military quickly stepped in to halt the tide of mutants and carriers. Stuck between the virus, the military, and the truth, you will consume, slice, bash, devour, imitate, and crush your way through the mystery of the virus.

You start off in the present, hulked up and ready to rock. After crushing a few tanks and slicing through a few mutants, you unleash a wild power that sends tentacles flying in every direction. Then after you’ve witnessed such an awesome sight, in the harshest of videogame clichés, you are then stripped of your powers as the story reverts back to the first day of the outbreak. Being back at the beginning does allow for an easier transition into your new life of a shape-shifting creature and marked terrorist, but that is a poor trade-off for giving up the power to smash tanks. Not that you need too much practice, because if you are familiar with the past 7 years’ worth of Spider-Man titles – or, as Depoter Nick notes, the past few Incredible Hulk titles – you will be more than familiar with Prototype.

To be honest, I was struck with just how similar Prototype is to the Spider-Man line, particularly the infested setting of Web of Shadows. It doesn’t hurt that both titles feature Manhattan, with the same parks and landmarks, but the approach to combat and side quests is likewise similar. In fact, the way the virus reacts to Alex is comparable to how the alien symbiote bonds with Cletus Kasady: similar appearance, appendages turn into claws and spikes, tentacles whip out, enemies are absorbed, along with enhanced speed, strength, and reflexes. The main difference is that Alex can only glide, not swing from webbing-style tentacles, and looks more like the Guyver when fully encased in a hardened, armor version of the virus. But as I jumped and glided around the island, picking up side quests that had me racing to checkpoints, killing a certain amount of enemies, assisting one of the factions, leaping to a target on the ground to gain experience, I couldn’t help but think how close to a Maximum Carnage 2 this represented.

A big difference between Prototype and Treyarch’s offerings would have to be the amount of gore and violence. Impacts from punches and kicks result in maimed bodies and copious amounts of blood, not bright flashes. You can’t recklessly terrorize all of the citizens, though, because some of them contain memories that will help unlock the mystery of your past. As a person is absorbed their memories are added to a network of memories that end up telling Alex’s tale. The story isn’t particularly gripping, but the presentation of the memories, done with defaced photos and renders, is well done and keeps up an air of mystery. Absorbing soldiers, and the subsequent shifting to their likeness, will also allow for access to military bases and increased performance with any number of items – machine guns, tanks, helicopters, rocket launchers, etc. Sometimes being a parasitic, amnesia-ridden walking virus isn’t such a bad thing.

The ability to hijack vehicles and use weapons adds some flavorful variety. The world no longer becomes just about cultivating your power, but creating as much havoc as possible with as much as possible. The powers certainly don’t hurt; after all, you can’t help but feel a bit more like a badass when it’s your hands smashing armored carriers and tentacle whipping helicopters. The abundance of powers, though, means that many of them won’t be used, which is a shame given the overworked radial menu used to sort them all out. After being selected, the directional pad is used to engage the power, but there is also another menu to choose secondary abilities, such as stealthily absorbing people and ratting someone out - it’s a lot to handle for such a combat heavy title. However, the ‘patsy’ ability, accusing someone of being Alex, is one of the more inspired aspects of Prototype: pointing out a soldier and watching as they are immediately lit up is always a joy. I would have liked for the accusing and the shape-shifting aspects to have evolved into something more involved, because while they are nice, it’s hard to take stealth seriously whenever a Marine commander is absorbed a few yards from an oblivious comrade.

Good luck if you are spotted. When suspicions are raised, a meter changes from green to red; once red, everyone is on high alert, and being observed results in having to bear the full wrath of the military. Tanks, helicopters, APCs, turrets, regular and super soldiers, rockets, and a special ops Strike Team are on site within minutes. Engagements quickly become so chaotic that just getting your bearings is tough, with so many rockets hurled at you that running and gliding away become as common as fighting. I found the constant fleeing to be jarring: here you are, a terrifying destroyer of men, yet you are routinely fleeing for your life. Mastering the moves won’t do much good because of the enemy’s insane amount of resources; in fact, you might find yourself ambushed whenever squads spawn around you during a rooftop breather. The overall balance of the difficulty is uneven throughout, with some missions taking about a minute and being as simple as walking into a door while others are so brutal that you feel sideswiped. It can be very trying.

You don’t always feel helpless, though. There are some moments when you genuinely feel like a marauding beast, deserving of the battalions being called to stop you. Those moments are when I really enjoyed Prototype. I actually jotted down a bell curve in my review notes because of how well it portrays my time with the game: the beginning is low, tedious and slow; the middle is great, peaking where your powers have outpaced your enemies and you feel awesome after seeing people flee whenever you slam down into an intersection, creating a small impact crater; and then low again as the game becomes less enjoyable, its many problems grate on your nerves as your power are muted. Had the entire game been more like the middle, then it would have been a no-brainer.

A slow beginning, while not preferred, is understandable. After all, you have to learn about what the powers, weapons, etc. But to have such a slog for a third act is just a shame. Outdated designs rear up at such a high frequency that I regularly found myself walking away from the game to relax. Remember old NES bosses that had multiple bars of heath that had to be knocked away before you could do any real damage? Not only is that here, but that particular encounter, on Broadway, is about half an hour long and unbelievably frustrating. The boss shoots out tracking orbs and spews piles of garbage while minions stay on your heels, knocking you all over the place in wears-out-its-welcome-quickly slow motion – slowly flying off of a buildings, away from landing a punch or right into an attack, gets grating. Fighting a giant plant creature that has a multi-tiered health system, while being pummeled in all directions with cheap shots, was not a high point of the game. Other boss encounters aren’t much better, often in confined areas, surrounded, and fighting with an uneven checkpoint system that is either spot-on or having you repeating 20-minute blocks.

The real kicker is the final boss. An unimaginative and grueling encounter, it is simply a previous boss that has been given a devastator attack – and a prime example of how not to do a boss encounter. Throughout the game Alex will unlock devastator moves himself, which are powerful attacks that are unleashed when he has full health or during an adrenaline rush near death. I used them some but not too often, due to their charge rate. The final boss’ devastator attack is much quicker and can kill you in one hit; and your defensive moves, the vulnerable roll and virus shield and armor, are worthless or too restricting. The fight takes place on the deck of an aircraft carrier, so there is little room to maneuver. Oh, and Marines try to kill the both of you. Weapons and vehicles barely phase it, and you only wish you had his perfect blocking skills. To top it off, a counter is engaged towards the end of the fight that leaves you scrambling with about a minute and a half before an explosion, regardless of how long it’s actually been counting down until that point. The best part is that it unleashes a wide-radius devastator attack whenever it’s near death. Thanks. Dying also requires that you start all over, with each encounter taking around 30 minutes.

Even Alex, tortured he may be, fails to elicit much excitement, residing somewhere between Nathan Hale and Jet Brody on the scale of interesting protagonists. If the main character is going to be a dud, then at least make what they do awesome – but that isn’t always the case here. Feeding the virus evolve points, gained through absorbing and killing enemies, results in new and upgraded powers. Despite some costs reaching into the millions, only a handful offer up the kind of destruction or suitable spectacle worth the effort. Regardless, all are hampered by a confusing locking system that often prefers far-off and inferior targets to those that are nearby and those that you are, in fact, facing. The devastator attacks help to carry things, but the charge time negates them in many cases. I didn’t really feel like a terrorizing, unstoppable force, much of the time.

Trying to be a good guy is all but impossible. Thanks to Alex’s light touch of shoving anyone remotely close to him away and being able to literally run over dozens of cars and pedestrians and not be given a second glance, you’re pretty much always evil. Sure it’s fun to see a block of people run away screaming, but it’s hard to find Alex sympathetic when he murders indiscriminately from the get-go. In fact, it was when I heard Nick refer to Prototype as a “chaos simulator” that it clicked. He was dead on. The internal workings of the game world might not work as they should, and the graphics and sound might not bowl you over, but it’s when you embrace the game as a means to do nothing but cause havoc that it really comes into its own.

After I accepted that the heavy-handed story was in a bizarro world and that, intentions aside, I was really meant to do nothing more than toss cars and blow up helicopters, I got the a lot out of it. The openness of the world lends itself to some great moments, such as chunking a giant air conditioner into an intersection two blocks away and seeing the resulting pile-up.  Leaping to and fro, gliding between buildings, was just right whenever I got a rhythm going – and leaping from a skyscraper was exhilarating. Whipping enemies about, impaling them on ground spikes, and taking the guise of an 80-year-old woman, only to absorb the lone soldier in an alley, is how Prototype effectively engages. The slog of the third act, with escort and timed missions mixed with heavy respawn rates and blaring sirens, did a lot to dampen the excitement that the middle managed to build up. I can’t help but think that the post-credit free-roaming portion, allowing you to complete side missions and upgrading the powers, is more than a given but a reward to smooth things over for the last few tedious hours. That middle, it’s great while you’re there.

Overall: 6.5/10