Prototype 1 & 2
TL;DR: The first one is
insanity. The second one is
insanely awesome. Infamous-style "superhero smashing up a city" free-roaming 3rd person action games, with tons of leveling up, and a funky little bit of very original stealth.
Kombat Kuality: Both games use roughly the same control scheme, which is sensible and quite playable. It's fun to run around chopping guys up, and your power level is significantly over 9000 - you can literally sweep through an entire crowd of enemies and leave them all chopped in half, or pick up a tank and throw it. The difference is this: in the first game, everything happens at such a ludicrous pace, and so much junk is being thrown at you from every direction, that you can die in the blink of an eye, or completely clear a battle without a scratch. You can be juggled by tank blasts until you die with no chance to escape, or you can dive bomb everybody and level the whole block. You never know until you try, and it is pure chaos and luck. It's pretty fun, but also very frustrating.
In the second game, all of that is cleaned up into gaming bliss. You can still mow down a crowd of guys, and you can still take massive damage, but it's understandable and expectable. The chaos is controlled, the feel is polished, and it is
fun.
Story Stupid? The storyline continues on fluidly from the first game to the second, and while it's a little hand-waving just to get through the gameplay, it's also quite interesting and brings up some real philosophical issues. I actually spent a while thinking about the big issue that comes to play in the first game, which I daresay qualifies as a notable twist. It's definitely a video game, not a Russian novel, but I did have Real Thoughts while playing! There's also an element of sucking up peoples' memories as you play, to get little snippets of information building the bigger picture of what this world is like. Some of that is silly, and most of it is extraneous (I didn't need to get the memories of 50 different people who all think "wow, what we're doing here is pretty evil!"), but it does build a world beyond just you smashing up mindless drones.
Wrapid Wrap-Up: Prototype 1 is a questionable game. It's so utterly chaotic and just crazy that I can't even compare it to another game. It's kind of like a Ludum Dare game gone way too far. I couldn't put it down until the end mainly because I just couldn't stop wondering how this ever got released, and had to see the next level it would take things to. It's very buggy, in small ways like weird physics issues, and it's obvious that that's because they just let everything fly and couldn't possibly control everything. It's manic mayhem and I've never quite seen anything like it. You can jump up and down on top of a building until it collapses.
Prototype 2 is
amazing. It's one of the best games I've ever played. It's all the ideas of Prototype 1, but smoothed out and polished down into a shining jewel. I think there are a lot of people who don't like this game for how it reins in the insanity of the first game, but I love it. The frustration is gone, but the slicing and dicing and car-throwing remains. It is a beautiful work of art. There is literally one criticism I came up with while playing: there are basically no boss monsters to fight. It's glaring enough that it seems like they ran out of money or something. The final boss could easily have transformed into a massive towering beast, but (spoiler I guess) it remains a human-sized thing for the entire fight. And prior to that, there's only one fight I would really classify as a boss fight (against a big beast), but it turns out to be super simple to defeat, and turns out to be just a regular big enemy you see later on multiple times. Not often, but it really loses the "big boss" punch. Luckily, the regular gameplay is so awesome, you're okay without the bosses.
I bought the RADNet add-on for Prototype 2 (which adds barely anything, but I'll take any more Prototype 2 I can get!) and will be starting over on hard difficulty one of these days. I can't wait to get back to it!
