[Prototype]

When Prototype first surfaced, it looked great but seemed a little too close to the increasingly common 'guy with superpowers has to save the day while making lots of karma choices' template. Thankfully, the development time has been used wisely and the final product has ended up being so much more. No karma choices here, just a quest to track down the person who made you the way you are and kill them. Lovely.

The guys at Radical Entertainment thought up a nifty way for you to find out about protagonist Alex Mercer’s past and it involves consuming people in order to absorb their memories. This is all stored in the ‘web of intrigue’, an archive that lets you review collected memories and piece together the shadowy backstory.

This process of locating and absorbing people does seem simple enough to begin with, but later on when the city basically becomes a war zone and you have to run to get anywhere, unless you want to fight a couple hundred people and creatures on the way that is, this becomes irritating at points. When you finally spot another target to consume from the rooftops, it's incredibly fun jumping off the building, charging towards the target and attempting to grab him. However, if you get there too late, they get ripped apart by a hunter. Bad times.

This is just one of the many tense situations you will find yourself and another thing that makes this game stand out is the awesome powers. Some are the ‘common’, allowing you to jump higher than small buildings and run up any structure. But then there are the interesting ones where you can turn your arms into a multitude of various weapons, or if you're feeling trigger happy you could just kill one of the military soldiers and take his gun for a good old shoot-‘em-up with the rest of the jarheads.

If you decide to dodge confrontation altogether and run away from the fight, the military will hunt you down with helicopters. This is when another great power comes in handy, the power to consume anyone and take their appearance. So, simply put, you could take on the appearance of a soldier, run away and let the heat die down. You can even swap in and out of the same soldier and trick his comrades into thinking that he is Alex, then watching as they open fire on the poor guy. Sinister but so much fun!

The game is predictably based in Manhattan but seriously, you’d think super-powered people would have more places to go. If you’ve played any other games that are based here then you will quickly know your way around and realise that there isn’t that much to look at. Then you get a couple of levels into the game and the world basically goes to hell, there are hunters and infected people running around everywhere, the streets are swarming with people running and screaming with cars swerving left and right trying to dodge all the carnage and gunfire from the military and the general chaos that is going on in the area.

Whether you are looking for a game that has a good story or a title that lets you go around trying to destroy everything, this is the game for you. Yet, the whole thing feels overly familiar and for all of Prototype's great ideas, the developer hasn't really focused on one of them and made them great. Together they form a solid game, but one that could have been so much more.