Prototype

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It must be tough being Alex Mercer. He's a man for whom even the very simplest of tasks, like catching a bus, enjoying the hustle-bustle of the New York streets, or buying a newspaper, is only ever one button-press away from tragedy. Wherever he goes he just cannot help but leave a trail of bloodied spike-impaled bus-drivers, crowds of scythed-in-half tourists, and middle-aged WHSmiths till ladies absorbed into his thirsty body. Ah well. Accidents will happen.

"Today we discovered something really cool and devilish in the game that we'd never found before," Radical's executive producer Tim Bennison tells us as we meet in the final months of Prototype's development. "If you find the correct 'tiered-roof' building in Times Square, you can take an enemy to the top and execute seven flawless continuous body slams and smash him into the pavement of Times Square for a perfect kill. Have you ever seen a slinky-toy move down a bunch of big steps? Replace that concept with Alex Mercer obliterating a Blackwatch soldier on each tier of a skyscraper and you're halfway there." We solemnly nod as we take in this information, pausing only to ride a pedestrian's body like a surf board - bubbles of gore in its wake - into a yellow cab's wheel arch.

Leap of faith
Never before have so many acts of extreme, extreme violence been accessible via one gamepad. Blood practically weeps off the right and left triggers. For the uninitiated who've missed our previews of this in the past, Prototype sees an authentically recreated New York beset by a mysterious infection. The iconic city is rapidly becoming a warzone in which the military battle to contain everything from mutated zombie-like civilians to bounding wads of angry muscle that are rampaging through its streets.

At the centre of this is our aforementioned angry young anti-hero, Alex Mercer, suddenly gifted with abilities such as consuming the guts, appearance and talents of those around him, picking up cars and using them as battering rams during rush hour, and performing wrestling moves on tanks from skyscraper rooftops. Prototype simply lets you do anything; just so long as it involves suffering and bereavement somewhere down the line. Or possibly just jumping really high.

As the game continues, more and more abilities are opened up, each one with various different slots to plug your amassed Evolution/Experience Points into, unlocking fresh moves and increasing your already remarkable capabilities. Hammer Fists let you knock rolling artillery into the stratosphere. Claws let you call up vast stalagmite-spikes to impale your targets. Blade Arm turns everything beneath your right elbow into the sort of goliath metal accoutrement usually waved around in Soul Calibur. It's all an extremely messy business. If Prototype had a mother, she'd almost certainly be ashamed of it.

"We've really beefed up the concept of traditional power progression," explains Bennison, bringing order to the buckets of gore set out before him. "The goal is to make players feel extremely powerful from the start, while correctly balancing the enemy threat so that you're always on edge and feeling challenged. The devastation that any one of these powers can cause is pretty spectacular - this is not a Tekken-like one-on-one fight, this is one man taking out 20 elite soldiers with a single killer move. One of our favourite things to do in the office recently is see how many moves we can pull off while descending from a high jump. Our top QA tester can actually jump off a skyscraper, fire off two RPG shells into a tank below, and then pull off the hammer-fist 'elbow drop' to decimate the tank in about four seconds."

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Enter the matrix
The game itself opens with a flash-forward to later in the game, giving you a taste of the joys to come in a confrontation between Mercer, the Military and the Infected in Times Square. As soon as you play it it's instantly obvious that Prototype's forced hibernation over the winter has entirely paid off. (Extra development time was granted partly due to publisher Vivendi being dissected by the Activision/Blizzard publishing conglomerate, and partly due to the distressingly rough state of code Xbox World saw at the tail-end of last summer.)

Visuals are crisper and cleaner, and the urban chaos Mercer causes around him, entirely more visceral. What's more, Mercer has now been granted the ability to glide in mid-air when leaping from skyscraper to skyscraper (not unlike a hoodie-wearing flying squirrel, with more than nuts on its mind) and a Whip Fist that not only lets him convert a crowd of pedestrians into a collection of gently teetering waist-stumps, but also lets him shackle himself onto passing helicopter gunships he wishes to call his own. If, in a bit of a Matrix "I know Kung Fu" riff, he's consumed the body of a helicopter gunship pilot that is, and suddenly has access to memories that inform how to fly it.

There are many and varied ways in which foreign bodies melt into you, including an excellent stealth move that will let you sneak up behind an unsuspecting enemy and change into them at the same time as you consume them, without even dropping their weapon. From here you'll crucially be able to access military bases unchecked (depending on your assumed body's clearance) and complete objectives with a touch more class and a little less chaos.

There's even a 'patsy' ability that you can gain which lets you point at another soldier and boldly proclaim that they're actually Alex Mercer rather than your good/bad self. In any other sci-fi medium this would result in a bitter argument, the line "No! You're Mercer!" and a lot of pointing. Here what ensues is a simple, messy death. The design ethos is simply that you can either deceive or destroy at any time, and usually come up with an inspired and impressive mix of the two.

Monster squad
Levels progress as the storyline feeds you information about your past and your mutation through the game's Web of Intrigue mechanic, leading you around the city intent on consuming the prime players in the conspiracy, and those around them, who have information to consume alongside their DNA and a resulting health boost. As the story continues, with Mercer's sister filling in plot gaps from her hideout (where she sits at her laptop keeping on top of events), the Infection spreads and develops throughout New York, creating ever more grizzly foes for our (anti)hero to contend with.

"One of our favourite infected types is the Hydra," picks up Bennison. "These things burrow under New York streets and smash up through the ground to take out vehicles and military personnel. They have this large tendril 'tongue' that protrudes out to capture any object close by, like cars, trucks, people... even newsstands! It's really awesome to fight these guys because you can actually get into situations where you'll throw a car at the Hydra and it will catch it mid-air and throw it back at you at twice the speed."

Because of this, another capability that's been added to Mercer's catalogue of carnage during the game's extended development is being able to use a chopper to blast cars and street furniture that have been hurled at you out of the sky, and into screaming civilians. This, we are promised, will lead to some epic battles when a gang of Hydras take up residence in some of the more heavily populated districts of Manhattan Island.

Apple die
Admittedly, the city of New York itself has been served up in videogame form on a tri-yearly basis for most of recorded history (and Ghostbusters will soon put the place through armageddon yet again), but as soon as you play that opening Times Square level you'll see what an utter play-ground of destruction Prototype has made it. Once the game proper begins you'll have the run of the place, whether you're stirring up hives of Infected and leading them into the military to kick off impromptu battles or simply attempting to climb the highest skyscraper you can find, giggling inanely with a struggling policeman in your left hand. The city will genuinely react to your presence and your actions; the days that people would ignore you or mutter something like "Hi Spidey" as you pirouetted into the middle of 34th Street in Spider-Man games are long-gone.

"We're pushing some serious volumes of pedestrians at the player during the action, because when you unleash hell with these devastating powers, it's more fun to see 100 people run in terror than it is to see twelve," reckons Bennison. "Pedestrians will react if they see Alex biologically transform his arm right in front of them. Some of them might decide to run onto the busy intersection because they're terrified, resulting in a taxi driver swerving into a military truck and causing a huge explosion. These kind of dynamic moments of mayhem are what we think Prototype excels at, because it's just so much fun to unleash Alex's powers and witness the world come crashing down around you." Seeing as this is NYC, people will also swear at you if you jostle them in the street; although whether they'll get through the whole "Hey, I'm walking here," without being hurled at a fire hydrant is quite another matter.

If they scale the difficulty correctly and if the pace of the storyline doesn't let up, Prototype could well deliver the action experience of the year. Even when starting out there's a feel-ing of power currently entirely unparalleled in gaming, and that's before you even start raising Mercer's attributes and abilities up into the stratosphere. You'll struggle to find a more gleefully amoral game, and you'll love it for that. There's a phrase about how power corrupts, and how absolute power corrupts absolutely. Well, today we threw a screaming woman off a building and watched her body being crushed by a tank - and then did roughly the same thing to five more innocent pedestrians. Some of them were on fire. As glib phrases go, it isn't a bad one.

Will Porter