As man turned monster Alex Mercer you leap around New York city committing acts of, gosh lets just say terrorism, skewering people, throwing vehicles around and even consuming people to take on their identities. The game is heavy on the gore and violence and you basically watch New York fall apart around you in the grip of a mutant virus.

That’s not the most shocking thing though. The most shocking thing is that it’s just been awarded an MA 15+ in Australia. Hooray!

Fans of big open world sandbox games should be eagerly anticipating Prototype. Much like Crackdown the game pits a spin on the concept, rather than being a lowly, regular human being your character Alex Mercer is some kind of mutated killing machine. Able to grow all sorts of claws and spikes and even send those spikes through the ground to skewer the unsuspecting. Developers Radical, who made the excellent Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, have based Alex’s movement around parkour skills to give his movement a fluid graceful look, except when he jumps he’ll travel fifty feet instead of five.

At the begging of the game you wake up on a morgue table just as your autopsy starts, you escape and spend the rest of the game trying to piece together your shattered memory while fighting the army, rampaging mutant monsters and a mysterious government agency. The game focuses on you discovering who you are and what has caused these changes (oh please don’t let it be a failed super soldier experiment… again).

Prototype is definitely shaping up to be one of the must have titles of the year and Activision promises us a confirmed release date will be announced soon. But if classification boards are getting copies to review it can’t be that far away.

In the meantime enjoy the developer video below.