Prototype - Apartment Hunting

Prototype really likes to live up to its name. This is not a good thing. The game is feeling half complete, like it needs six more months (maybe a year?) of development time to hammer out the finer details. The biggest issue for me is the city itself. Yes it’s crowded and full of hustle, but there’s no variety to it. It’s busy everywhere and always. The city doesn’t breathe, it doesn’t live. I can’t go from downtown to the ghetto to middle class suburbia. None of those exist. It all feels like downtown.

It gets worse whenever I start attacking citizens out of boredom. In games like Grand Theft Auto there are consequences for every action you do. If I start causing chaos the cops will eventually show up. Red Dead Redemption had the eye-witness system, where if you did something illegal and it was witnessed that person would run off and get the marshal. In Prototype I only get in trouble if I’m spotted by an officer while committing a crime. I can blow up 50 cars and no one will care unless a cop is actually on scene to witness it. Then all I have to do is run up a building and I get away scot-free. Even military guys don’t chase me up a wall. Assassin’s Creed had guards that chased you up walls and over buildings. I might get followed by a helicopter but nailing it with a swamp-cooler takes care of that pretty quickly.

Back to the story then. Alex has decided to go looking for an apartment, more importantly his old apartment.  He knows this is a dumb move and he admits to it, but the way it is handled is even worse. He walks in to the apartment and he’s there for 5 seconds when the apartment explodes and Alex is blown out of a window. Down in the street there’s a tank waiting with some military guys to escort some guy in a suit who comes out of the apartment building. Alex then has to go hunt the guy in the suit to get some answers.

I WANT SOME ANSWERS FIRST! I get the military guys surrounding the building in case Alex survived, but why was some guy in a suit hiding in the same building? Did he have to blow the bomb manually or something and why would the military use such stupid tactics in the first place? I just don’t get what’s going on here! Alex chases the guy and to get close he disguises himself as a soldier. Once close to the tank Alex issues an all clear, so the guy in the suit happily climbs out of the tank and goes for a merry little walk. Yes this is how the scenario actually plays out. So I just jumped the guy and absorbed his memories. That whole thing was so badly executed. I quickly killed off the rest of the guards and mission complete.

Time then jumps around a little bit as some backstory is told, but I don’t know if I’m now three days since infected or thirteen days earlier or what’s going on. The way they jump around is just as confusing as the rest of the game. Once the cutscene was done I noticed I had some new options on the menu. I was able to buy Alex some upgrades. I bought this shield thing that Alex can create with his tentacle powers to block attacks. I was then assaulted with tutorials. You can do this, you can do that, you can go here, you can go there. Options are starting to appear, little race things and the like, but I don’t think I needed a massive flood of tutorials, especially if I don’t understand them.

When I finally gained control again I hopped down into the streets and ran around with my shield out. I was flinging civilians and cars out of the way like the madman that Alex is. The thing is, I did this for 20 blocks or so and I never got in trouble. There were explosions, property was damaged or destroyed, and people were dead and dying in the streets. Mass panic was everywhere as people fled the scene in terror. Sure it was fun, but where was the consequences? When I finally did get in trouble all I had to do was kill the three officers on the scene and I was safe. There was no backup coming to get me and the situation wasn’t being escalated. This poor game can really use some fine tuning.