[Prototype] (Review)

I was pretty excited for this game prior to it's release. The game seemed to cater to my needs of playing as some kind of super anti-hero going around and causing chaos. The end product is a tad disappointing, basically taking an interesting concept and doing almost nothing with it. Off the top of my head I cannot think of a single story mission that did not involve going somewhere, destroying this or kill that. It's mostly well done so it's not to much of a problem. The game does however commit some of my pet peeves in video games:

1) A large open world to explore with almost nothing interesting to do.
2) Boss fights where half of the difficulty comes from weaker enemies that attack along with the boss.
3) Collectibles that are too high in numbers and not worth the effort to collect.
4) Difficultly level that remains fairly consistent for most of the game and then suddenly jumps up at the tail end of the game (the final boss specifically).

The story in itself is rather bland and there's a convoluted backstory that is revealed by absorbing web of interest targets. Tracking these people down is fun and the backstory cutscenes that result from it are wonderfully designed, but their presented in a random order and when when you finally track down all of the targets, there's no option to view the related cutscenes in their proper order.

I know I just spent a lot of time complaining about the game, but I actually really enjoyed it more than I should have. You have a vast amount of attacks and abilities to tackle obstacles, so many in fact that most of them will never be used. The city is fun to run around as you jump and glide from building to building. The missions are really fun despite most of them following the same structure and they feature numerous checkpoints to avoid frustration. The game definitely could have been handled better, but luckily most of those pet peeves I mentioned come off more like annoyances than major problems. If you can handle some annoyances, this is still a really good action game.