This game is a complete fucking mess. I have never played a game that is so keen on being frustrating and a complete slog even with all the cool powers it gives you (despite majority of them being pretty useless).
First off are the missions, which are the same from start to finish and have no variety at all. You'll be doing the same things such as having to consume an officer and disguise as him, then infiltrate some area and then just kill or destroy everything. Sometimes you have to control a shitty vehicle to "spice" it up a little.
Surely the combat when you get to the killing is where the fun begins? Right?
ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOT!!!
Alex Mercer controls like a dog with zoomies which just had its dog food mixed with crack. You'll be slipping around over the environment because the studio thought it would be a good idea to make a ton of parkour animations when you sprint over anything that get you stuck on geometry or fuck with your momentum.
Then you got the actual combat and enemies. Starting with the game's lock on system, holy shit it's so bad. No Prototype, I do not want to cannonball into the random civilian that I'm not even looking at, I am aiming at a fucking attack helicopter that has been peppering me with homing missiles for five minutes. Speaking of, lets talk about the enemies. First off you got the military which will slowly chip away at your HP with their ARs at range or you got the 7 billion RPG soldiers that will Lee Harvey Oswald snipe you off-screen that will knock you off your feet EVERY SINGLE TIME. Every time Alex gets tickled by an explosion, he goes tumbling on his face. It's so annoying, it makes melee combat unviable and makes you resort to just throwing shit at them or dive kicking them from a distance. You'll also deal with tanks and helicopters that will also smother you with explosives with terrifying accuracy. Occasionally a random military soldier will call for a strike team which comprises of 4-5 attack helicopters trailing you with heat seeking missiles until you hide or kill them all. And this happens all the time that if you want to get to one place without triggering the entire military, you just have to disguise as someone and not do anything "suspicious"
Then there's the Hunters, which are these Amazing Bulk looking mutants. They suck even more. You have tons of powers at your disposable except they barely flinch to any attack. Don't bother stringing attacks against them, they'll hit you out of it with a flurry of attacks that eat through half your health. To stun them you need to charge up attacks, but it takes so long to charge an attack up that they'll pounce at you before you can let it rip. Any fight against more than one Hunter is a nightmare because they zip right up at you and stunlock you to death. The only reliable way to take them out is to either throw stuff at them, spam cannonball/diving blade slash or to unlock the one move where you can actually grab them.
You also get these really cool super moves, but the catch is you can only use them at full health. You will NEVER be at full health in fights and these super moves also have to be charged up, so pray a soldier doesn't hit you with a rocket or a hunter doesn't pounce you in that time, but who cares about praying it's gonna happen anyway.
To heal, you either have to be outside of combat for a slow auto-regen or consume enemies in combat, but you still get damaged during these animations so you end up taking more damage than healing. It's so stupid.
Don't even get me started on the awful boss fights, I don't have anymore energy left to talk about that shit.
I can't recommend this game at all unless you like funny aerial divekicks and cannonball moves that home into things and make them splatter. Maybe Prototype 2 will be better, but my hopes aren't up from this game.

I could have sworn blind that I'd played Infamous on Xbox 360. As it goes I was actually thinking of Prototype.

I played this at a time when I was pretty much exclusively into COD so maybe that's the reason it's so forgettable. It's a game I'd give another chance one day, I've recently plugged my old Xbox 360 back in after a good number of years, so maybe it is a game I'll revisit.

It does not have a particularly high place in my backlog though.

A virus has started to spread around New York turning people into zombies, erm…infected, and causing a right nuisance for the people of the city. A special branch of the military is called in to quarantine the situation. In the middle of this, a man called Alex Mercer wakes up with amnesia and strange powers. Naturally, it’s up to him to solve the problem, fighting both the infected and the military (as he’s the result of ad old military experiment) to stop the virus (until the game’s twist, that is).

Much like Spider-man 2 (and other similar games, like The Hulk) you get New York (part of it, anyway) to roam around him at will, choosing when you want to do the next story mission. As you progress through the story, the fighting between the military and infected intensifies and the special ops get more desperate in their search for you. Luckily, the movement in the game is utterly spot on, jumping/gliding from building to building is precise and flows naturally, it’s a joy to control and really makes you feel like a superhero.

On top of the movement abilities are Mercer’s transforming abilities. You can absorb any human and take their appearance – from military personnel to old ladies – or transform your body into different weapons, offering a few combat options. These range from claws, to useless arm sacks and useful whips to powerful swords. You can also improve your defensive capabilities by transforming part of your body into a shield or armour. While there is a decent amount of variety and time between the weapon upgrades, some are ultimately more powerful and useful, rendering previous ones useless. For example, the whip can cause a good amount of damage from long range and allows you to hijack enemy helicopters with ease (with an upgrade).

The story missions unfold as Alex Mercer tries to find his memories, protect his loved ones and find out more about the outbreak. The cutscenes are pretty uninspiring (and seem to end with an awkward one-liner from Alex) and the characters are barely fleshed out. Still, it provides a good excuse to run around and kill things. When the story bores you then you can always complete side missions (checkpoint races or combat challenges), collect upgrades (some from infiltrating military bases) or simply roam around attacking never-ending hoards of zombies and soldiers.

And that really is all there is to Prototype. The graphics aren’t worth mentioning, but they do handle hundreds of enemies fairly well. It’s a good game with some great core gameplay, but is spoiled by unbalanced weapons and dull characters. There’s depth to the story that you can collect by absorbing certain people, but you don’t really learn anything interesting about it. There’s also one really frustrating part of the game where you can’t use any of your transformations until you’ve completed 5 or 6 story missions.

This fucking game.

The story? Absolute bananas. I read someone call this a more apt Shadow the Hedgehog and they were absolutely spot on. It's glorious.

The gameplay? A cancelled Spiderman 4 game turned into an over the top edge-fest by the creators of Hulk Ultimate Destruction with a whiff of Crackdown. Simplistic and barbaric macro action with great traversal. You can go full unga unga in this motherfucker, but there's also the disguise mechanic from Destroy All Humans which you can use to cheese the AI.

The thing is tho, the game just starts ridiculous and it just keeps going and going until NY is completemy fucked, and it's glorious, but when you reach the climax the game kinda fumbles it with some weak bossfights and a deflating last stretch. It's like they ran out of budget or ideas.

But even if they didn't wrap it up as nice as they could have, the core game is just pure chaos and unfiltered fun and it manages to go places. Very recommended.

This'll probably be the best Venom game we're ever gonna get, to some people that's alright but for me........eh it could've been better.

Prototype is probably the most 7th gen trying to kill the 6th gen open world games I've played in awhile. What I mean by that is it has all the annoying hallmarks of 7th gen that I've honestly gotten sick of while also having that "fun comes first" mentality a lot of open world games of the 5th gen had; games that come to my mind being Destroy All Humans, Bully, Simpsons Hit and Run, and funny enough Hulk Ultimate Destruction which this game is the successor of.
When you break it down to Prototype's core gameplay it's a great game to just sit back and vibe with friends on a Discord call while you brutally disembowel innocent civilians with your knife fingers. The variety of weapons is plentiful enough to where it never gets boring and the traversal is sleek and fast; as you bolt through the streets of NYC slicing through people and leaping from building to building as this walking Biohazard, I'd be lying if I said it never got old or tiresome after a while and while the map isn't too big to make traveling around the map a chore, I'd sometimes think about all the traversal mechanics of other games and think about how much more I'd rather be playing those games instead of this one. And I think that leads into one of my biggest gripes with the game is that I don't think it's that fun to play besides the surface level fun of causing panic in the streets.

The biggest gripes I have with the game are probably the story and characters and the map of the game itself. On the story front it seems it's taking it's notes from 6th and 7th gen storytelling, where a gruff and stern protagonist with almost zero personality is tasked to track down and kill the scientists of a evil corrupt mega corporation while also secretly being the catalyst for armageddon, it's like Shadow the Hedgehog only written completely straight and it don't have a little girl getting shot dead in the first 10 minutes; some people would say that's a plus but I personally see it as a missed opportunity. I have no problems with a game or movie taking its story seriously; but my problem stems from how horribly generic the whole story is. There's nothing wrong with a generic story I've seen games pull it off pretty well, Uncharted 2 has a pretty generic globetrotting adventure story; but what puts it above forgettable is a quirky cast of characters and a tone that's very campy that doesn't take itself super seriously until it's needed for the plot.
There is not a single iota of camp coming from this game, it's 100% serious all the time with only a few brief moments of poorly done melodrama. The game really wants you to take the events of what's unfolding completely serious and wants you to think Alex Mercer is this awesome badass figure with a lost past, when really I don't give a shit about Alex Mercer since he's about as charismatic and interesting as a self insert mary sue made by a very edgy high schooler. That also goes for the rest of the cast, none of them are interesting or likable; they either just exist to give missions to Alex/be lifeless connections to Alex's past, or are one note antagonist that serve no other purpose other than to have evil villains for Alex to fight against while also have zero personality of their own.
Look I get it, this game is still very much a remnant of how open world games of the 6th gen did their stories, and asking for more is probably asking too much. Except you miss the fact that this game came out with 2009, the same year as other games like Batman Arkham Asylum, Infamous, Bayonetta, and the game I was comparing it to earlier Uncharted 2. I understand wanting to do things simple but when you push the story to me through collectibles and long cutscenes it's very apparent that you want me to at least pay attention and care about what's going on, and I wish I could but I'm sorry I cared more about the story of Shadow the Hedgehog because at least that game knew how to have a modicum of humility in it's writing......................𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵𝘭𝘺

The last aspect I wanna bitch about is how the map of the game looks. I'm not gonna harp on about this as long as I did the story but all I really have to say is, man this is a UGLY looking game. I know 7th gen was a leap a lot of devs needed to get used to so a lot of early 7th gen games looked really muddy and washed out, even games I enjoy like InFamous 1 or Dead Space have a very muddy look to a lot of the models and textures. My problems with the look of the game don't come from the typical 7th gen look, no it mostly stems from how dull and plain everything looks. This isn't just some random made up city, this is New York City; one of the most well known and most used cities in all fiction, and it looks so boring. It's so gray and forgettable I'd sometimes forget that I'm fighting evil flesh monster in the heart of Manhattan, and even when a part of the city gets overrun with BOWs and the virus spreads causing mass panic in the streets; It didn't really change the map besides making some buildings hives for BOWs and changing the color of the area from boring gray to blood red. The map is still the same old map and I find the map boring and lacking character, which is something I shouldn't be saying about New York City in the midst of a biohazard outbreak.

I know I spent most of this review bitching about the problems I had but honestly I still liked playing this game. The core gameplay is still addictive enough to where I can still have fun with the game regardless of the constant boredom the cutscenes and characters give me. It's no InFamous or Spider-Man Web of Shadows but if I'm feeling really and I mean REALLY bored and I wanna pop something midless in and play for a while this isn't that bad of an option.

My goodness what a mess of a game this is. On the one hand, the gameplay is quite fun and entertaining, at least for a while, but on the other hand, there is the terrible, impossible to follow story line, the samey mission design and the absurd difficulty spike after about 40% of the game. I had a rather fun time until that difficulty spike and had no problem with continuing the main story. Then they robbed me of most of the abilities you unlocked since the start of the game and threw an abundance of tanks, helicopters, super mutants, missile launcher troops and soldiers at me. I had to play that part 11 times until I finally managed to beat it. After that, comes a mission where you have to defend a 50 meter long glass wall for 3 minutes while a constant stream of mutant enemies is trying to break it. I tried that two times, did not even get close to beating that part and then uninstalled the game for good. I can not really recommend the game to anyone that is not into self torture.

A very fun open-world action game that I enjoyed very much on console originally. It came out at a time where open-world super hero games were out, such as Infamous and though I wouldn't claim this game to be as good, it's still a lot of fun to run through bullets, smash tanks with your fists and absorb people into your body as you access memories and attempt to piece the puzzle together about yourself after waking up with no memory.

Edit: Though I do feel for the main character with how it was completely by accident that he ended up this way and after getting out of the morgue he gets shot down. However, the number of innocent people you end up killing by accident and on purpose makes it difficult to see him as a good guy to most, I still do even right up to the end.