Prototype [X360]

My mind hasn't been good to Prototype. The early stuff I saw was all about destroying in-flight helicopters with your bare hands and consuming helpless people to further your body's growth into something more than human, but when I ran into the game in April of 2008, I pretty much just remember Alex Mercer, the game's protagonist, just running around the streets surrounded by some ho-hum visuals. I guess it didn't help that Prototype seemed to step into the darkness when Activision merged with Vivendi, but whatever the reason, my excitement for Prototype seemed to have waned.

That's not the case after playing the game last night.

Gearing up for a June release, Prototype's set to have more than few demo stations on the show floor of the New York Comic-Con so that Joe and Joan Public can kick the tires on this third-person action game, but last night Activision and Radical Entertainment gave me a shot at what folks will be playing today, and it was good.

As the lovely Matt Casamassina pointed out when he wrote about Prototype's CES showing last month, it's almost impossible to write anything fresh about the story because the bits that Activision has let out have been rehashed so many times -- you're Alex Mercer, you wake up in the hospital, you take to the streets and find you have all sorts of shape shifting powers, you also notice a bunch of infected people walking around and the military fighting them while trying to capture you. Luckily, I don't have to worry too much about talking story with you because the demo I played didn't have any. Meant to give players a brief taste of what Prototype's all about, this demo just drops you in Times Square and gives you a series of objectives that let you get the hang of just a few of Alex's powers.

The first thing that struck me was how different Prototype looked from the last time I had seen it. The graphics were cleared and sharper; the buildings didn't seem to have that muddied detail; New York looked like a disaster area with flipped cars and burning fires; the entire screen had a red tint to it; and there was a brand-new health bar HUD in the upper-left corner that was simple, sleek and red.

When the actual gameplay got going, it was the solid experience I remembered. The face buttons are punches, kicks, jumps, and grabs, and you can hold any button down to make the move stronger. With just a few button combinations, Alex was flying around the screen beating on all sorts of New Yorkers -- both those who were infected with the mysterious illness that turns them into wall-crawin' monsters as well as the normies. Soon the demo had Alex morph his hands into a giant set of claws and let him slice a bunch of people in half, then a tank showed up and Mercer's arms turned into giant clubs that he used to smash the military's toys into the ground, and then one of his arms turned into a giant blade and he went after a number of Brawler Hunters, massive beats that look similar to the creepy crawly infected but dwarf them in size. Alex slashed and slashed until these foes went down.

This battle actually led to my favorite moment of the demo. While I was trying to take down the big guys, a non-infected woman ran into the fray in her desperate attempt to get away. With one swing, Alex cut her in two at the waist. If you drifted any which way, you'd find more bystanders who would turn into a cloud of blood with little to no effort. These groups of sheep were only made more appealing when I remembered I could consume folks. I'd run into the crowd, grab one of the innocents by the head, pop their cranium, and suck their matter into my body. In the real game, Alex will know everything the person he just consumed knew and get some health, but in this demo, it's just fun. Luckily, there are a bunch of animations for consuming people so the experience should stay fresh for a while -- like when I torn some guy in half and consumed his two parts. In the end, Alex fights some more people and the demo finishes with that devastating tendril attack that sends dozens of spikes out from Alex's body and basically knocks out anyone in range.

Although it was just a taste, this demo of Prototype was just what the doctor ordered for my lagging excitement level. I'm ready for June.

©2009-02-06, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved