The 10-Cent Tour: Regular Joe gets mysterious superpowers, then spends a lot of time destroying stuff and beating people up.

1. New York City is crowded! Well, you probably knew that already, but Prototype's New York City is surprisingly crowded for a game with its level of graphical detail. Every street in the demo seemed absolutely clogged with vehicles, pedestrians and military men intent on bringing Alex down. The streets and buildings themselves were nice, but perhaps a bit too uniform and angular for a city as diverse and vibrant as New York...

2. Alex Mercer is not very powerful. At least, he isn't at the start of the game, when all he can do is run, jump, and pick up cars. That changes quickly, though, as he completes missions to gain abilities like flight, wall climbing and a set of spiky black tendrils that extend in all directions for offense. He can also gain new abilities by absorbing the thoughts and experiences of passing pedestrians or, in a pinch, helicopter pilots as they're sitting in their helicopters.

3. The game's story system uses revealed memories from other people to slowly unravel the conspiracy that resulted in Alex waking up on a morgue slab with these unexplained powers. Calling this the "Web of Intrigue," the developers said players will probably run into 30 or 40 of these 10- to 20-second memory nodes in a quick play through the game, but there will be over 100 available for obsessives to collect.

4. There will be no online play, or multiplayer of any kind. The developers played around with the idea, and even had two tanks rolling through the city attacking each other at one point. In the end, though, they had to make the "agonizing decision" to remove the feature because they couldn't get it done without "compromising the quality of the single-player experience." That single-player experience had better be pretty darn good!

5. The game will try to keep things fresh with missions targeted at three different types of gamers: the action fans, the explorer and the collector. According to the developers, there are roughly 12 hours of gameplay in the main storyline, but it would supposedly take 30 to 40 to complete every mission and see every memory.

The Crispy Forecast: The crowded city streets are the perfect locale for mayhem, but the mission design could easily prove repetitive and boring. Here's hoping the story drags us along for the ride.

This preview was based on a publisher-driven demo of the game at CES 2009. For Gus Mastrapa's impressions of the game from Spring 2008, check out his preview.