You're an army of one boy, soon to be an army of several pieces

Alex Mercer, your protagonist of choice in Prototype, is a monster. There’s no getting around it; he is a slaughtering, shape shifting horror that leaps and flies around the high rises of New York seeking bloody vengeance against those who have wronged him. There’s no happy place here, no black and white morale system to choose from, you begin the game as a subhuman killer and learn how particularly inhuman you are as the game progresses. Prototype doesn’t even penalize you for the collateral damage you do to New York’s citizens, hurl a tank into a helicopter and watch the resulting fiery wreckage fall onto a busy intersection? Oh well, my bad folks, by the way I need to consume your grandmother to regain my health, munch, crunch, burp. This lack of a morale compass is one of the more disturbing elements of Prototype, but it does make it a little easier to focus on the task at hand.

The story of Prototype is told in reverse, beginning with a New York overcome by a rampant infection that’s turned most of the citizens into zombie monsters. Alex Mercer tells his story to an initially off screen listener. You get to play as Alex through his various flash backs beginning with him awakening on an autopsy table in the Gentek building, the research company Alex worked for. When he 'awakens' from being dead, much to the discomfort of the two doctors about to dice him up, he discovers he can consume people, right down to their knowledge and memories, and shape shift to look just like them. As the resurrected Alex stumbles outside he finds a city under siege with the US Marines on every street and the armed forces working under the direction of Blackwatch, a previously clandestine military unit responsible for mopping up viral weapon problems. There are also the first inklings that the population of New York may have a dose of something a bit worse than swine flu. Alex has some idea that all this has something to do with him but a severe day time soap level bout of amnesia means he can’t quite remember the who, why or what.

Please hold still as I eat your face, it's more polite

Alex’s amnesia raises one of the most interesting features of Prototype, the Web of Intrigue. It’s kind of hidden packages or collectibles in other games, except instead of packages or note books, its people. As you’re traversing the city you may see a red marker pop up on your map. This is a Web of Intrigue target and you need to grab him or her and consume them pronto. Doing so will provide a short cut scene of that persons knowledge of the story to give you a greater idea of what’s going on. The targets can appear at any time, whether you’re just cruising around or knee deep in a difficult mission. But when you see them they’re like mice to a hawk, you zero in and drop on that poor sucker like a ton of bricks, often having the effect on your environment of several tons of bricks. The short cut scenes play out as you’d imagine the consumed collective memory of a person would, with flashes of image and garbled bits of information which usually resonate into something you should know. It’s not a super original idea, telling the big picture part of the story through collectibles, but it’s executed far better than anyone has done it before. In addition to the Web of Intrigue collectibles there are also a few hundred orbs hidden round New York at various landmarks.

Super soldier? I eat super soldiers for breakfast, literally.

If you’d played Radical’s last game, the well reviewed Hulk: Ultimate Destruction based on Marvel Comic’s green goliath, you’ll have a pretty good idea as to how the gameplay works. You’ve got an open world city free for you to traverse at your leisure with checkpoints around the place indicating a mission, enemy base location, or one of several types of challenges. How you get around is also very similar to Hulk, you can run up buildings and leap huge distances (in a single bound) and an early ability allows you to air dash and glide over the city like an albatross. Naturally falling hundreds of feet isn't a problem and several of your attacks are all about falling huge distances to hit the ground like a tomahawk missile. The game is fast paced and when you level up your movement powers it’s not difficult for you to outpace an attack helicopter. But of course you can just leap at that helicopter and smash it right out the air, or just grab the side of it, tear open the cockpit and butcher the crew before taking the controls yourself (in a hijack animation that never, ever gets old).

Sometimes even mutant monsters need a good old fashioned face-punchin'

In addition to making yourself look like other people, your shape shifting gives you the power to form weapons from your body. I honestly don’t want to spoil these as they’re often really cool just to discover and unlock but there have various pros and cons to each ability and it’s a lot of fun just experimenting to find out which of your abilities is best suited to your current enemy. To get new shape shifting powers you can go to your super power shop (available at your local pause menu) and buy attack combos and abilities. These include a variety of brutal and hilarious fighting moves (yay, corpse surfing) and abilities such as stealth consuming. Normally when consuming someone for health or Web of Intrigue you grab the poor fool, tear them to pieces and then suck the pieces into your body. With Stealth Consume you can quickly slurp up a whole body when no ones looking. I immediately encountered a flaw in the games AI when I gained this power.

I headed straight to an army base disguised as a soldier and snuck around inside stealth consuming several dozen soldiers one by one. Eventually there was just me and a patrolling guard. I waited a moment to see if he noticed there were weapons scattered every where and all his friends had gone for a smoke at the same time. I hoped for perhaps a quiet sob from Sergeant Stanley No-mates as he realised he was all alone in the world; but no, he just kept on patrolling. So I crushed him with a truck. At this point (when you do anything overly super powered you lose your disguise) the alarms sounded, doors opened and a flood of troops who really where off on smoke breaks flooded the room. At which point I used a devastator attack. The devastator attacks are your smart bombs, capable of killing everything within a five hundred meter radius. There’s a few available but they are all brutal, violent and glorious to behold and can be used whenever your health is full. Just when you start getting a little overly cocky with your powers a boss battle comes along to slap you back down.

After careful study I've determined food goes in here

Some of the boss battles in Prototype are down right tough and a few of the missions are extremely difficult just for the sheer weight of numbers brought to bare against you. The difficulty curve can take you by surprise at times and you may find yourself unexpectedly dying, but often its just a case of using the right power for the situation. Prototypes controls often require some maestro gaming hands to manage at times. The last few missions in particular are unforgivably punishing and will have you cursing and sweating as you try and dodge multiple enemies and simultaneously fighting back while in a few cases trying to protect an objective. In the space of five seconds you’ll be running up a wall, dash leaping through the air to crash attack on an enemies head and then grabbing a car to hurl at another enemy before leaping to relative safety for a few brief seconds. A lot of tougher enemies require hit and run gameplay that requires a lot more gaming dexterity than you may be used to, it’s not quite Ninja Gaiden levels of knuckle cramping difficulty but its right up there at times. The trick of course is to level up Alex as much as possible between missions. There’s plenty of abilities and powers to unlock but you’ll learn which are the most effective against enemies pretty quickly. To gain the Evolution Points to level up you’ll want to take every opportunity possible to blow up infected Hives and sneak in and wipe out army bases before blowing them up as well. They appear around the map in increasing numbers as the story unfolds. There are dozens of challenges around the game and some are definitely more fun than others, the checkpoint races and target jumps can be frustrating, Alex’s insane speed makes accuracy a nightmare at times, but the fighting challenges can be a lot of fun. You receive a medal based on your score for each one but unless you’re a completionist there’s no reason to undertake them all, pick and choose the ones you enjoy to gain Evolution Points and never forget that you get points for every single soldier or infected person you kill and extra points for taking them out creatively.

Devastator attacks are also useful for clearing space on the bus

The story in Prototype is not bad, but it has a few holes that annoyed me. Your sister is essentially an integral character to the plot; she represents your tenuous link to your own humanity not to mention helping you with the whole terrible truth uncovering thing. Then about halfway through the game she disappears and I don’t mean ‘goes missing’. She just plain disappears from the plot and you never even learn what happens to her. Then there's the scientist Raglan pictured above who helps you for a bit and then again steps behind the curtain for the rest of the plot, did he escape New York? Did the Infected get to him? What the hell happened? Likewise there’s a few twists and turns with the bad guys that will take a suspension of disbelief to get past. If you thought the Specialist was a cool character you’ll most be likely be as disappointed, as I was, by his later appearances in the game, he's criminally underused and then unfairly taking out of the picture. But all up the single player story line is okay and you’d better enjoy it because that’s all there is, there’s no multiplayer in Prototype of any kind. It’s a shame because I’d read in an interview that the developers had a few multiplayer modes on the go, particularly for vehicle battles and infected versus military games which sounded pretty good.

Alex... crush... puny... tank!

Prototype may not have the incredible physics engine of Red Faction: Guerrilla or the comic book story telling and karma choices of inFamous but for pure adrenaline fuelled action gameplay it delivers. It’s like Burnout Paradise with mutant killing machines instead of cars, a symphony of speed, destruction and carnage. Being Alex Mercer is deliriously fun, you start of as a complete bad ass and just keep getting badder. It'd take a pretty stoney faced, boring person not to at least let a single evil chuckle at the amount of violence and destruction you inflict on New York. At times I actually felt sorry for my opponents, I’d walk slowly towards the soldiers as they fired away in vain, my body almost instantly repairing every bullet wound they managed to inflict, giving them half a chance to pick away at my health, then tossing them in the air and tearing them to ribbons. Let me put it this way, you know those seemingly unstoppable boss characters in games like Resident Evil? The ones who appear at various times of the game to butcher the second tier character? In Prototype you are that boss monster, only there’s no Leon Kennedy or Chris Redfield to stop you, no one can stop you, and oh, it feels good to be the boss.