Prototype (Xbox 360)
How not to make an open-world action game
6/16/2009 5:06 PM | 34 Comments | Page 2 of 4
What's Hot: Dynamically generated urban chaos; Some inventive combat powers
What's Not: Aimless game world; Pointless game progression; Lots of stuff that doesn't matter
Something to do
Now I realize that some people will think
Prototype is fun. This is their prerogative. For some people, a bunch of punches of varying flavor applied to a bunch of pointless bystanders in a pointless open world is fun. They just want to shoot and punch and break stuff in a middleware world. They'll have a great time with
Prototype, which reeks of middleware (seriously,
Prototype, that's the effect you're going to use when I destroy one of the buildings scripted to be destroyable?). It takes place in a typically bland Manhattan, as forgettable as the ones in the Spider-Man, Hulk, True Crime and Alone in the Dark games. Manhattan is to open-world games what World War II is to shooters. This one just has more low-polycount pedestrians.
Pulling this guy's head off is something to do.
Now there are times when
Prototype isn't awful. It does one thing very well: dynamic chaos. It populates its bland quarantined Manhattan with two warring factions. Infected mutants come from hives. The military come from bases. They clash, of course. Tanks prowl around and helicopters patrol the skyline. Crows circle the mysteriously red skies of the infected neighborhoods. The streets are littered with ruined cars and bodies. Civilians panic obligingly. These regions of order and chaos progress as you move through the story missions, although you can take out hives or military bases if you want. It doesn't seem to have any lasting effect, as the hives and bases will just come back. But it's something to do.
That's pretty much the extent of the game design in
Prototype: something to do. If you want. Shrug. Peppered among the 31 story missions like garnish are discrete challenges of the usual sorts. Kill so many dudes in so much time. Run between these points in this time limit. Hit these waypoints. Jump on this spot. Something to do. They spring up like mushrooms as you play. By the time you've finished the game, Manhattan will be crowded with about a hundred side activities with virtually no incentive to play any of them.
Something else to do
Turn your fist into a giant hammer and smack a tank. Or don't. You choice.
The game progression in
Prototype, based on a whole mess of sloppy superpowers, is as aimless as the game world. As you play, you earn experience points which you then spend on a sprawling set of powers and abilities and upgrades and combat moves. Very few of them matter. This is just a fighting game with a hundred different punches, and you'll only ever need 10, so the upgrades quickly turn superfluous. In a good game, you should look forward to earning and then spending your collectibles: the diamonds in
Far Cry 2, the salvage in
Red Faction: Guerrilla, the orbs in
Crackdown. Every new power should matter. The gameplay should progress, develop, evolve, change. Your interaction with the world should grow with your powers.
Infamous, drawing from its developer's experience with platformers, did this very well. But in
Prototype, I routinely amassed hundreds of thousands of points before remembering to spend them. Most of the time, I didn't bother to use what I'd bought. By the time the game was over, I was sitting on three million "evolution points" and more moves than I could remember how to use. Some things I never even figured out.
