Prototype - A Little Coherence

I actually feel like I played a normal mission. A mission that actually made sense. It’s kind of a creepy sensation and it might just be out of place in the game. It was a refreshing change of pace though and that made me happy.

In the most cohesive cutscene in the game to date Karen tells Alex that she needs some DNA samples, the fresher the better. This involves destroying water towers that the virus uses as incubators to grow hunters and then getting samples from a hive.

Alex rushes of to a part of town that is currently infected. He blames the infection on Elizabeth Green, but I don’t get the connection. All she did was jump out of a wall. It was never shown that she created the hunters that attacked Alex or that she forced them to attack him or that she can spread the virus. I’m brushing this off as an assumption for now.

So I blow up some water towers and snag some DNA all the while fighting off virus infected people. So far Alex is the only one to gain super powers from the virus. Everyone else just gets turned into insane monsters to be killed or absorbed.

Then I went to gather hive DNA. The hive conveniently spits these out as pollen-spore-things. The problem is that there are large amount of hunters and military personnel in the area. At least it should have been a problem. I just had Alex pull out his tentacle shield and run back and forth in front of the hive, knocking enemies out of the way and gaining EP, until I had enough DNA to complete the mission.

Overall it was simple and straight forward and fun.

I know I harp on the game a lot for all of its shortcomings, but there is a fun game underneath it all. It has a fun play mechanic to it. I like Alex’s combat system, especially now that I have his claws and other random tentacle abilities. His attacks need a little more balancing but the start is there.

The biggest issue for me is still the amount of chaos you can cause without getting into trouble. There are these people that wander town that Alex can absorb for memories, I went looking for these guys. I grabbed a tank and ran over thousands of people while trying to find them. I ran over them in front of other tanks, soldiers, police and still no one cared. It completely ruins the immersion of the game that way. Alex comes off as a dick who just slaughters everyone and everything just because he can. There is never any true consequence. Sure he occasionally gets into trouble, but that’s easy enough to avoid that I’m not concerned. And since people are Alex’s health source he is never in short supply.

I also blew up two military bases and a hive, that was fun.