Welcome to Prototype, the next unconventional super hero which will be stuck on your top super hero list. Developed by Radical and published by Activision for PC, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360... The game delivers a great feel of action with an open world environment to blow you sky high.

You play the part of the main character, Alex Mercer which from the intro you will not have a clear picture of what is happening until you pass the first level which will have Alex Mercer talking with a soldier telling him his story from day one of the infection which began from Manhattan with an outbreak of this virus putting the city under a military quarantine... having the population being infected with the viral forcing them to mutate in a monstrous way, although the mutation of Alex will be larger one.

Alex Mercer doesn't fall on your standard model of a superhero since you will be forced to consume people to live which means you literally have to kill innocent people and absorb them, kill people and destroy military and city property making the entire quarantined city your playground! If you would wish to destroy something or kill someone you can grab a car with your super powers and just throw it to the victim or make havoc in the city.

The game is presented in a very great concept of freedom of movement with an open world action system having the freedom of both horizon and vertical movement. You will have the superhero powers that you can climb on anything, jump great heights and practically go anywhere and do anything. The game focuses on the action and the adrenaline rush which the game surely delivers.

You will be a menace to the military actions in the city and you will be constantly hunted down with fighter helicopters, tanks and infantry. The city will be surrounded by the military forces and you will need to fight hard to keep alive since the military re-enforcements get nastier by time. Apart from the being hunted down by the military forces, you will have some other enemies as well as the mutants and mutant hunters don't like you as well.

As regarding weapons, you will be given your hands and body fully mutated to make the maximum damage at the right enemy. Your basic weapons will be your hands along with great vertical leaps and during game progress you can achieve more powers along with upgradeable skills with EP points which you collect during gameplay. Some of the skills include gliding to give you more distance in your leaps from a building to another and the elbow drops to make a tank explode with one blow (which can be very handy in certain situations). With regards to weapons, some of them are the ability to have your hands mutate into swords and slice your enemies in half and whiplash arm which can grab a passing helicopter and hijack it.

Upgrading the character is quite interesting and fulfilling since there are a good number of upgrades, skills and weapon morphing which will make the fighting scene more interesting. The control to change from one weapon to another is quite easy and gameplay is not complicated to learn and manage.

By progress you will gain skills to hijack and control vehicles and aircrafts. This is needed when dealing with some massive enemies and vehicles could be an easy solution to the problem. During fights, beware of soldiers or surveillance system calling for re-enforcements and try to eliminate them as soon as possible before the call is made or else flee from the area quickly. Dealing with helicopters will not be an impossible task since you can throw anything at them... from air conditioning units from roof tops or going ground level and throw vehicles at them. Then you can use other weapons since enemies drop their weapons and you can pick them up and use them like machine guns and bazookas.

On the other hand, you can always morph into a person whom you have previously absorbed and blend into the crowd to escape your enemies, but first you will need to consume a person. Apart from that you can either grab the victim by the neck or run at great speed across the city.

The game features 31 missions which vary from destroying everything, stealth missions and boss fights. Apart from the normal story missions, a number of events and side missions can be entered when not in a mission. Such events vary from checkpoint races and mass kill. For a bit of a treasure hunt in the city of Manhattan there are 250 hidden orbs which you can collect them all along the way.

Conclusion

Prototype is quite an interesting game with many features and gameplay possibilities but unfortunately the environment graphics would have needed more polishing... but it's great gameplay makes it up for. The gameplay which is set in an open world system is perfect and the almost seamless diving from a 40 story building zooming into the city is quite cool. The game is recommended for anybody who likes some good adrenaline and action scenes with some chaotic scenes.