I stand atop a facsimile of The Empire State Building. It looks pretty good - a little pixilated, not as sharp as most current gen visuals - but the cornices are rendered adequately and scale, at least in terms of height, seems fairly accurate. The rest of the world, far, far below, the whole of Manhattan, splays out before me in a knobby stretch of angular skyscrapers. The landscape sprawls gray and more gray, punctuated with the shine of glass here, the shimmer of chrome there, interrupted by a large rectangular patch of Central Park green and brown. Again, everything looks pretty good, but again, again, shit is a little muddled and not as crisp as I've come to expect from high def graphics.

I look around and take in the view from all sides. You see, I went to New York City back in July and I am going again in January and while this is a game that is waiting to be played, not a three dimensional map of NYC, I am trying to familiarize myself nonetheless (I'm a native Californian and find the east coast fascinating). That PROTOTYPE, Radical Entertainment's sandbox mutant freak gorefest, uses a replica of New York City as its open world model, is pretty cool. GRAND THEFT AUTO, the game to which all open world, sandbox titles are inevitably compared, uses Liberty City, a New York like city, that shares similar features, but is ultimately its own world. While Liberty City's sort of NYC is far more detailed and graphically superior to PROTOTYPE'S sandbox, PROTOTYPE uses the actual New York City, and after a few hours of running the streets and viewing things from on high you really start to get a sense of how things are laid out.

Kind of.

Sort of.

There aren't any street names and the southern half of Manhattan is much more uniform than in real life, but Midtown, East and West, Times Square, and the Upper East and Upper West Side all look damn good and despite the lack of street names, are laid out in such a way that a tourist like myself can get a good idea of where say, Columbus Circle is in relation to The Empire State Building, or how far Times Square is from Central Park.

Blah, blah, blah...

I know, I know, get on with it already!

Is the game any good? How does it play? Who cares how accurately or inaccurately it portrays NYC?

Anyway... I crouch (holding the R2 on my PS3 controller), prepare to jump (depressing X), and then leap (releasing X) a good hundred feet into the air. As I begin my downward descent I spread my arms wide and glide (tapping X again) through the city, whooshing past skyscrapers until I arrive in Times Square where I drop to the street, grab the nearest pedestrian and consume him mind, body and soul. Utilizing my Claw power (up on the d-pad), I grow a gnarly set of, fleshy, sinewy talons and proceed to eviscerate, disembowel and decapitate hundreds of screaming tourists. The military sends in a strike team consisting of a couple of tanks and a few helicopters. I switch to my hulk-hands-bash-fist power, demolish one tank, hijack another, blow up a helicopter with a well placed rocket, then jump out of the tank and run up the side of a skyscraper. I leap out of my vertical run, shooting a good fifty feet from the top of the skyscraper, angle back, and then land on one of the remaining helicopters. I hijack it and then gun the third and final copter out of the sky.

Ah, that's better.

Okay, let's get reviewing...

Given the above scenario, a few days into PROTOTYPE, I thought I was playing the game of the year. Never mind the travelogue quality of a basic NYC map (which I appreciate - finally an open world game that uses an actual city accurately), the game is bloody, visceral and crazy good fun. Let's get all cliche here and call it a rollercoaster. There are tense climbs and thrilling drops, but, unfortunately, like those herky jerky amusements, a little goes a long way and what starts out as wild fun soon grows bumpy and monotonous.

Though it ultimately fails, there is an awful lot to like here.
You control Alex Mercer, an everyday Joe who gets caught up in a dastardly military experiment. Alex dies and then wakes up in the morgue to discover he is...different. With his new body, an action ready prototype / nasty biological weapon, Alex escapes the government and wreaks havoc upon NYC in a quest for the truth.

The plot (not too bad) is revealed a snippet at a time as Alex tries to piece together who he is and how he became a government beast. The open world structure works well here, sending Alex on storyline missions and providing plenty of mayhem driven side missions, but, though the story is decent, I never found myself too anxious to reveal the next piece of the puzzle. I had a whole lot more fun just running wild and fucking shit up. Herein lies PROTOTYPE's biggest problem - for every kick ass I-just-demolished-an-entire-city-block instance, there are ten ho-hum when-is-this-thing-gonna-end moments. The game is uneven as it gets.

On one hand, you have awesome control. Alex moves around the city at gonzo speeds, scaling skyscrapers, leaping hundreds of feet into the air, swinging his mutated limbs and eviscerating anyone or anything standing in his way, with finesse even, each move and function intelligently mapped to the gamepad. I spent hours (literally) just running around, launching into a glide and then landing and rampaging throughout the city on an apeshit killing spree. The game doles out evolution points (currency required to buy upgrades) liberally and the powers available for purchase are varied and fun. If anything PROTOTYPE succeeds at making you feel like a genuine badass. Your arsenal includes killer morphing limbs like ripping claw fists, hand blades, a whip fist, and massive crushing hulk like fists. You can summon ground spikes to impale foes and body surf on crowds of panicking pedestrians. You can hijack tanks and helicopters and blow shit up real good. You can consume innocents and enemies, absorbing their memories (some of which reveal plot points) and then, when the army has sent one too many strike teams your way, or you are trying to infiltrate a military base, you can become the last person you consumed and walk around incognito.

All of these ooh, ahh goodies work and play as awesome as they sound. PROTOTYPE is an ambitious mofo. But after a solid five hours of getting your rocks off consuming, goring and pulling off Parkour style acrobatics, shit starts to get real old real fast. With the same old mission types piling up, interest dries right up.

Radical Entertainment managed to infuse PROTOTYPE with a bit of crazy fun and Alex Mercer is one of the coolest anti-hero mutant morphing freakos to ever tear through a digital landscape, but despite a marvelous flourish here or an innovative design there, there just isn't much to do, rather (there are tons of little side missions), there just isn't much to do that's worth doing. Which is a shame. After I got bored of the carnage, I found a teensy bit of solace in shit like NYC's grid system, but then, most gamers could care less and will probably get bored even faster than I did.

In the end, however disparaging my comments, I think it is a game that deserves to be experienced. Where most games fail, PROTOTYPE gets horror right, and as a FearZone reader you can probably appreciate this game a bit more than the average gamer. For that I say rent it, or buy it used, and then run around NYC and have a nice, bloody, geographically correct (almost) visit. Rip shit up. Kill. Kill. Kill. Spend a week embracing the chaos. Then return it or trade it for something a little more substantial.