Difficulty:

Very Easy

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Boring"

My summer of whoring trophies and working my way up the list of easiest platinums has actually taken me across a newer game, Prototype 2.

I don't know if I have ever played a game that trivializes violence as much as Prototype 2. If you're using violence in a way that's obviously satirical then that's cool. But it's this bad trend of quasi-edgy violence with some realism that is just offensive when it's lacking any sort of substance or context to it. You're slapping folks around like rag dolls and slaughtering soldiers as casually as you would pick up health items while at the same time the game tries for some serious tone.

The gameplay and the attempted story are at complete odds with each other. I'm always annoying people with my rants about interactive story telling, where smart gameplay helps to tell a richer story. Prototype is interactivity gone awry. The story in Prototype stinks but the gameplay makes it so much worse. At one point the main "character" chooses not to kill a major villain because he overhears that the villain has a daughter. Wait… what? Chances are pretty good at least one of the thirty thousand people I casually slaughtered like destructible wooden boxes had a daughter too.

To make matters worse, they try to justify the violence by making the villains stupidly over the top evil through audio log collectibles. It's laughable… like you'll actually laugh at the audio logs and the ridiculously sadistic military. Meanwhile in the game itself the military regularly helps you fight the mutants so you can't help but feel bad about killing them in the later levels. Again gameplay at odds with brutally bad storytelling.

Otherwise this game is just really simple, silly and, at times, fun. I have to commend it on having outstanding movement. The key to a good sandbox game is making it fun to traverse the environment and Prototype nails it. They even give you fast travel. I have no clue why you would use it when it's so fun to move throughout the world. But a lot of sandboxes have terrible movement and no fast travel so it's still nice to see the effort.

There's some emphasis on stealth gameplay… if you can even call it stealth because the AI is so ridiculously easy and brain dead. You can just fly right into military bases in disguise without setting off alarms. "Hey missing scientist, did you just run up a building and fly into the middle of the base… that's cool, carry on then." You can kill people standing right next to each other one by one without setting off any alarm so long as they aren't looking directly at each other when you consume them. You can even push them slightly to change their line of sight before consuming them. The game won't even let you sneak kill someone if anyone is looking at them which makes the game absurdly simple.

But basically the reason this game kind of sucks is the repetition. You're playing the same one mission over and over. Steal a body, go into a base, kill stuff, repeat. There are a couple vehicle and escort missions but the game drowns in overwhelming repetition and mediocrity.