James Heller is no Alex Mercer.
Taking place a few years after the events of the first Prototype, ex-Blackwatch soldier James Heller is on a suicide mission to kill Alex Mercer, who now has a death grip on the city of Manhattan. It's a suicide mission because Heller doesn't expect to survive, let alone care to. Mercer has taken his wife and daughter from him and now the only thing left is revenge. After being thrown clear from his APC, Heller quickly has to run for his life as the streets of chaos try to claim him before Mercer does. Descending like a harbinger of death, Mercer suddenly appears and Heller attacks him with the only weapon he has, his combat knife. Alex deftly fends off the attacks and stabs Heller with his tendril arm. Heller's now been infected by the Mercer virus, and he's been turned into the very thing he was hunting. Alex says to James that he didn't kill his family, that his goal is to eradicate Blackwatch, Gentek, and the virus itself, but can Heller really trust Mercer?
Familiarity isn't always a bad thing, but too much of it makes a game feel stale. Such is the problem with Prototype 2. You start off with practically no powers, and you must find, kill and consume humans and infected alike to gain new powers and become much stronger. The game's missions follow a very formulaic pattern of hunting a target, consuming them to gain access to a facility, and killing important people on the inside. It isn't until setting foot inside the third zone of NYC that the missions begin to show a little variety. By then, the game is already accelerating itself to a close.
There are side missions available called Blacknet, but just as with the story missions, they too lack variety. Go to a Blackwatch terminal, find a target, hunt and consume them, access facility, wash, rinse, repeat. Sometimes you'll need to jump and glide across rooftops to gather packages before Blackwatch can recover them, and other times you'll need to kill very deadly infected, but that's pretty much all that amounts to these Blacknet missions.
Sandbox games are very prone to a lack of variety if it's not handled well, and that's something Radical has done. A major problem is the lack of events that the first game had, such as killing a certain number of enemies, or divebombing as close to your targets as possible. They do exist, but you need to redeem a code on the back of your manual to get access to them, as they're considered online content since you can compare scores on your friends' leaderboards. These events come in sets, along with challenges, and when completed, you gain a new mutation upgrade. At the time of this writing, not all event sets have been released, meaning if you're looking to upgrade James Heller all the way, you simply can't. It's a horrible design decision on Radical's part, and it will greatly affect your game should you chose to buy it used with an already redeemed code.
If you really enjoyed the gameplay of the first Prototype, you'll get enjoyment out of the sequel. Jumping from building to building, gliding high in the air for several city blocks, running up vertical surfaces; it's still very much fun and gives you a terrific sense of freedom. Radical, however, still has a lot to learn about finessing their controls, because the main character is still as clumsy as the Hulk was when they made Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. Fleeing the scene or chasing after someone poses no real problems, but when you need pinpoint precision when you're undertaking an event, you'll find the game becomes frustrating.
Combat has actually been dumbed down quite a bit, and there shouldn't be any gamer out there, veteran or newbie to the series, that should ever find a moment in the game where it takes more than two tries to finish. Even when the game throws every infected in the city at you in an effort to defeat you out of nothing but sheer cheapness, the rate at which you evolve is so quick and yields so many benefits that you really need to fail on purpose. You are SUPPOSED to feel powerful with your deadly assortment of claws, hammer and whip fists, tendrils and sword arms, but your enemies are supposed to feel powerful as well, and the game's difficulty has become even more imbalanced than its predecessor. That's not a feat to take pride in.
Usually when a sequel is made, a new assortment of powers are introduced, but Prototype 2 thinks too highly of itself and only hands out just a couple new abilities. One such ability is being able to implant a Bio-Bomb into a target and watch as it becomes a black hole of tendrils pulling everything it can reach inward. It's great fun to use when you need to make a distraction or two, and you can even lob a Bio-Bomb infected person into the crowd. The other new ability is Pack Leader, which lets you summon the more aggressive Brawlers and sic them on targets of your choosing. It's fun to have them attack choppers while you deal with tanks, but it just feels like there should be a whole new arsenal of toys to play with.
Speaking of tanks, being able to hijack them, as well as with choppers, is a returning feature, and it's just as much fun to wreak havoc on the streets with machine guns, cannons and rocket launchers as it ever was, but it's missing something. There are no destructible buildings to be had in this game. Hulk: Ultimate Destruction had them. The first Prototype had them. Prototype 2 does not. In fact the general layout of the city seems to be less interesting than that of the first game. When you get really high above the city, it becomes blanketed in a tannish fog and makes the game look very dull. It's a poor graphical trick to keep the game running smooth, which suggests that the graphic designers of Radical need to take a few extra courses.
Prototype 2 also has an ongoing contradiction, and that's being incognito. For a game where you're spending a large part of time assuming the identities of other people, you really don't have to try that hard to remain undetected. You can fall right into the middle of an army base from 200 feet up, and all you'll generate is a few raised eyebrows. You can even stare a Blackwatch Soldier dead in the eyes as Heller and he won't even take a step back. Fleeing from an alert is far too easy, and you even shift disguises while gliding in the air with a homing laser still fixed to you. The AI definitely needed to be reworked, and just lends the game's already easy difficulty.
The Prototype series' closest competition are Sony's inFAMOUS games, and the one thing Prototype never had over them was graphics. Yes, Sony's brand of evolving superhero sandbox games had more detail, but Prototype was able to perform at higher and more consistent framerates. While Prototype 2 is still very smooth for the most part, it doesn't manage to be as silky smooth as the first title. It's also rather unforgivable that Radical this late in the game cannot seem to up the level of detail on buildings and objects to really make the city seem alive. There's far too many bland earthen colors, and as mentioned before, the city becomes blanketed in fog when soaring from high above. Even vehicle models could have used an extra layer of texturing when viewed up close. The bloody, pulpy, gory special effects are still as viscerally satisfying as ever.
Thank goodness the audio is fantastic. The sounds of Heller as he transforms his arms into tendrils is grossly organic. The clashes of his metallic claws and the smashing of his hammer fists into the pavement are deadly. The booms from tank cannons resonate and the whooshes of rockets fizz through the air. The sound design on all fronts is terrific. The music does a wonderful job of getting you absorbed into the moment, and the game's opening has such an emotional and melancholy them to it. The voice acting for the most part is pretty good, but James Heller may not be as likable as that of Alex Mercer. Also, some radio chatter could have been voice acted a little better. Still, it's overall excellent sounding game.
Prototype 2 is an unfortunate example of what happens when you don't take advantage of an opportunity to improve a game. Stagnating gameplay, a more casual difficulty and much needed variety in the form of events that are locked out to used gamers really brings the value of this game down. The core mechanics of mindless button mashing and gliding around the city are still very much enjoyable, but they are no where near enough to hold up the rest of the game. The story takes some time to get going and it's over just when it really gets good, and some plot holes are never fleshed out. It's a shame, considering the potential of the first Prototype was something that could have been very special.