Superhero games have always been a gamble. For every good game that has come out, we've been faced with countless failed attempts and poor implementations. The previous generation had a few solid titles, but one that really stood out was Radical Entertainment's Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. A wide-open sandbox-style brawler, Hulk did the green giant proud and created a game that was just fun. It had a solid sense of humor about it, interesting combat mechanics, and was such a solid effort that its flaws could be overlooked. Why am I mentioning Hulk: Ultimate Destruction in a review for Radical Entertainment's Prototype? For all intents and purposes, Prototype is a sequel. It may not have The Hulk or be an official licensed game, but there is no denying that Prototype is a follow-up to Radical's last attempt at the superhero genre.

Players take the role of Dr. Alex Mercer, who wakes up in a New York City morgue shortly before he is about to be cut open, the seeming victim of a terrorist attack on Penn Station. It turns out that he not only survived, but the biological agent released at Penn Station also gave him super strength, super speed and the ability to shape-shift. Unfortunately, all these new powers also make him the #1 target for Blackwatch, a mysterious paramilitary organization that is somehow connected to what happened to Alex. As if that weren't bad enough, the same infection that killed Alex is spreading throughout the city, and the rest of New York didn't experience his lucky benefits, as they're turning into mutant zombies and rampaging through Manhattan. Naturally, Alex has to figure out exactly what happened to him and what caused the infection, while also dealing with being the military's primary target and having the infected chasing after him. It's not a particularly good price to pay for superpowers.

Prototype's story is told in a strange nonlinear fashion. While you get each major "beat" of the plot as your progress through the story, you have to collect Web of Intrigue targets in order to get the details. Most of these targets are optional, so you have to scour the city for the people connected to the web. When you find a person, you devour him and gain his memories, which fills in a part of the web. This is a neat idea that is ruined by a supremely boring story. The nonlinear aspect of the game makes things feel weird and disjointed, with characters constantly appearing and vanishing. The web reveals all the details, but once you know the whole story, it turns out to be rather boring conspiracy stuff mixed with a faint touch of Resident Evil. The game takes its story a lot more seriously than it should, and the payoff is completely unsatisfying.

On the surface, Prototype is almost identical to Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. You hear that occasionally from time to time in regard to games, but rarely is it as true as it is here. Almost every single gameplay feature from that game has made a return. Moving around is as simple as holding the run button and pointing where you want to go, at which point Alex will take off at a sprint, running up and down buildings as easily as a sidewalk. You can also jump by pressing the A button, or holding the A button to charge your jump for greater height. While in the air, you can air-dash to move fast or glide like a flying squirrel to get around faster. Combat is a simple three-button affair: X is the fast attack, Y is the strong attack and B is for grabs. Used in various combinations, you can perform special moves. You can also hold the buttons to charge the attack for greater power.

Alex has a regenerating health bar, but it only regenerates partway, and the best way to heal is to defeat enemies. Defeating enemies regularly causes glowing orbs to pop out from their corpses, which he can promptly pick up for a health boost. The real way to regenerate health, however, is to devour your enemies or nearby civilians. Pick up enemies with the B button and press Y to devour them for a tremendous boost in health, but you may need to weaken some of the game's bigger enemies before you can devour them. If your health goes above a certain point and you have the proper upgrade, you'll enter a Critical Mass state, where the extra health begins to glow blue. At this point, you can unleash a special Devastator attack, which drains some of your health and unleashes a tremendously powerful move that clears everything in the nearby area. If you've played Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, you're going to know exactly what to expect here because the functionality is almost unchanged. Even a lot of Alex's basic moves are very similar, to the point where I spotted animations that were quite familiar.

However, despite the similarities to Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, their powers do vary quite a bit. Alex has a wide variety of powers, divided into four types: Attack, Defense, Disguise and Sensory. Attack powers are Alex's ability to shape-shift his arms into different weapons. There are five in total: Blade, Claw, Hammerfist, Musclemass and Whipfist. Blade turns your arm into a powerful sword; Claw turns both hands into giant masses of spikes; Hammerfist turns both hands into slow but powerful clubs; and Whipfist allows you to attack at range with a long, stretchy mass of tentacles. The most important of these is Musclemass, which boosts the power of your character's basic abilities and ends up ridiculously useful; being able to throw things for additional damage or kick helicopters out of the sky with one blow makes many stages much easier. That is sort of the problem with your powers: You have a lot and probably won't use them very much. Other than Musclemass and perhaps Hammerfist or Blade, depending on your preference, the rest of the weapons just don't have much use. The enjoyment you'll get out of powers is directly connected to how you play games. If you play to crush, you'll find yourself rather bored with the limited selection of effective weapons. If you just want to fool around and brutally slaughter enemies, you'll enjoy the wide variety.

Defense powers come in two forms: Amor and Shield. The former gives you full-body unbreakable protection, as well as a nifty suit of biological power armor, while the latter gives you a powerful shield that can sustain a small amount of damage and then breaks. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages, mostly centered on mobility. Armor removes most of your agility, so you can't glide, perform parkour or dodge roll when you have armor on, so it becomes something more for a straight-up slugfest. Since this is a game built around dodging powerful enemy attacks, though, that makes armor more useful for escaping enemies than fighting them. The shield has no agility penalty but can be broken by repeated hits. Both are nice little powers, but ones you probably won't use as often as you should, since the nature of the game tends to be less about taking hits and more about avoiding them.

The final of your basic powers are the Sensory powers. Unlike the other powers, these seem to have been added in simply to buff up the power roster and serve almost no purpose. You have two of them: Infected Vision and Thermal Vision. Infected Vision allows you to see nearby infected enemies, even if they haven't mutated yet, and Thermal Vision allows you to see nearby heat sources. You'll probably almost never use them because there's very little benefit to Thermal Vision, as seeing enemies is never an issue, so unless you want to see enemies who are glowing slightly, you'll promptly forget you have it. Infected Vision is used for a story line mission and then joined Thermal Vision in the useless pile. There's no particular need to distinguish the infected from regular civilians, since the infected obviously resemble zombies. Even if you're going for the Nice Guy Achievement, which is earned by devouring fewer than 10 innocent civilians during the course of the game, it's relatively easy to distinguish infected civilians from regular people and more effective to just eat the obviously infected — or the marines — instead.

If there is one part of Prototype that doesn't work right, it's the disguise mechanic. It's a really neat idea on the surface: Alex can "absorb" any person in the game and gain the ability to take on his or her look at any time. He can use this to disguise himself and sneak into guarded bases or by enemy encampments, assuming they're human enemies. There's a disguise meter, which shows you how alert the enemies are to your presence, and if it fills, your disguise is compromised. Getting out of enemy sight and changing disguises or defeating all enemies who've spotted you will reset the disguise. Alex can also use his regular form as a disguise if he doesn't have his tentacles out, but it's less effective. The problem is that the AI has absolutely no way to handle most of the things you're going to do in the game. Instead of having to pretend to be the character you are, you can use all of your "basic" powers with abandon. Sure, you can't turn your arm into a claw, but you can still pick up a truck and toss it, leap nine stories into the air or dive from a building and land in the middle of an enemy base without the enemy so much as raising an eyebrow. It's even worse for pedestrians, who don't react at all if you snap someone's neck, convert him into meat and absorb him right in the middle of a crowd. I've seen enemies act like they're about to react to me and then wander off and do something else for no clear reason. One can't blame the disguise mechanic for being effective, but when the game world refuses to interact with what you're doing to this degree, it loses a lot of its charm.

A big part of the disguise mechanic is the ability to use military hardware. Once you've absorbed the proper soldier, you gain the ability to use tanks, helicopters and guns. Guns are usable while you're disguised for a more effective form of combat than your bare fists, and some of them, like the rocket launcher, can actually be more effective against certain foes than any of your powers. Tanks and helicopters can be hijacked Grand Theft Auto style and piloted, which instantly eliminates the enemies piloting them and gives you control over their firepower. If you're stealthy enough or avoid the military's eye for a while, you can even use the vehicles as a disguise. While this is a neat idea, it actually ends up being almost too effective. There are only a handful of situations in the game where it isn't far more effective to steal an enemy tank or helicopter than to use your actual powers. It really takes away from the superpowers aspect of the game when you spend most of your time in military hardware instead of using your awesome abilities.

All of Alex's abilities can be upgraded as the game progresses. As you complete missions and beat up enemies, you'll gain Evolution Points, which can be spent to unlock new abilities and powers. However, not all abilities are unlocked from the start of the game, so you have to advance the plot in order to gain new powers. With each section you finish, new upgrades will be made available, but Evolution Points are only spent to upgrade Alex's supernatural powers. Upgrading Alex's ability to use military hardware involves something different. Alex must sneak inside a military base and find a specially marked enemy. By devouring him, Alex upgrades his skill with some form of military hardware. He may pilot a tank better, gain the ability to call artillery strikes while disguised, or improve his damage with a rocket launcher. Either way, Alex must devour an enemy to do so. Like his Evolution powers, Alex's ability to upgrade his military skills is limited by how far he has advanced in the plot.

Prototype's enemy selection is kind of a disappointment because there isn't much variety, and very few pose any sort of threat. The soldiers have machine guns, rocket launchers, tanks and helicopters. Machine guns can't do enough damage to harm you, and tanks and helicopters give you more firepower and can be killed in one easy QTE sequence. Rocket launchers are powerful and a bit hard to dodge sometimes, but since their users can be killed in one hit, they're glass cannons through and through. This is one of the game's biggest problems. When you're spotted in both Prototype and Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, the soldiers will bring out powerful strike teams to try and suppress you. In Hulk, the teams got steadily more powerful as the game progressed and introduced Hulkbuster Robots, who could really mess you up if you weren't careful. In Prototype, you get ... an extra helicopter or two and some flying drones. Keep in mind that you can kill helicopters with ease from the very beginning of the game, and they never get much stronger. The military doesn't comes across as a big threat in the game, which takes away a lot of the fun of fighting them when the entire army seems like incompetent boobs. There is an advanced enemy called the Super Soldier, and they require a bit more to put down, but they only appear a handful of times and never outside of pre-defined areas within missions. Even then, they were not particularly difficult to defeat.

The infected bring forth infected civilians, evolved infected and hunters. The first two are basically zombies. The evolved infected are fatter and faster, but still not a threat, and you'll tear your way through crowds of infected like a buzz saw. Hunters are intimidating enemies who are as agile as Alex and can chase him to rooftops or over buildings. They would be a real threat, except they only have one attack combo and never deviate from it. Once you learn the combo, they're effectively harmless and provide tremendous health boosts when stunned and devoured, making them useful in long fights. Like the army, the infected also have an improved Leader Hunter, who is more difficult to take down. Yet, like the Super Soldier, this leader seems to almost never show up, and like the Hunter, he has a simple attack combo that leaves him wide open to an easy defeat.

Outside of the game's main story, there are also a number of optional side-quests to complete. Beyond the aforementioned Web of Intrigue, there are also orbs scattered around the city. Landmark orbs are hidden in various locations, while Hint orbs are more out in the open and provide you with hints. Either way, collecting Orbs rewards you with EP. You can also complete various "events" that are unlocked as the game progresses, which require you to do things such as fight off enemy or run over a series of waypoints before time runs out. Depending on how well you do, you can be ranked Bronze, Silver or Gold and receive an EP reward for it. Get a Gold rank on every mission in the game, and you unlock harder Platinum challenges. This is one area where it's very difficult to not compare the game unfavorably with Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. That title also had identical events, but they had a lot more style. In Prototype, most of your events are just "beat up this guy" or "glide to this point." In Hulk, it would be "play golf using soldiers as the ball" or "use a giant inflatable hamburger to glide to a certain point." All the events in Prototype are rather boring and bland, and while there's some satisfaction to be had in achieving a Gold ranking in a race, it's nowhere as fun as screwing around with your powers, and it never really provides anything interesting to do that you normally couldn't. The events tend to make it easier for you to find Web of Intrigue targets or hidden Landscape or Hint orbs, which is a nice benefit.

Prototype's visuals are a bit of a mixed bag. The game runs very smoothly no matter what is going on, and I never encountered any slowdown that didn't appear intentionally included for dramatic effect, but the actual visuals are a bit bland. The character models are okay but look dated, some of Alex's animations look a little off, and I swore I spotted a few animations that were originally designed for a certain angry green giant. The city suffers from some rather bad texturing and a real lack of interesting landmarks or locations to visit, despite being New York City. The draw distance and pop-in are weak as well. It's nothing to really distract from the overall gameplay, but it does become noticeable when you're gliding along the city, trying to get from point A to point B. Where the game really suffers is in its audio. The sound-mixing is all off, and the game really suffers from it. Sometimes you can't hear any characters speaking, sometimes the dialogue is desynced from the cut scenes, and sometimes the sound effects drown out everything else. It's a good game for which to pop in your own custom soundtrack, but that is about the sole positive to the game's audio. When you can hear it, the voice acting is pretty bad. A lot of the actors flub their lines or seem to have no idea of which emotion they're trying to convey. Alex's actor seems to have been told to channel Christian Bale in Batman Begins but growlier. Considering the boring and cliché story they're trying to tell, you really might be best off just skipping the game's many cut scenes.

Prototype is a sequel to Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, despite missing the big green guy. Almost all of the gameplay mechanics can be mapped onto Ultimate Destruction, and the few that can't feel the most tacked-on or poorly implemented. With that comparison come all of the usual pluses and minuses of a sequel. There are new features, some of which are good and some of which are not good, but mostly, they simply serve to add a slight flavor to the same basic gameplay. If you played Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, you know exactly what to expect from Prototype. It's a solid open-world brawler, although it has enough weak points and flaws to keep it from being a game for everyone. Prototype is a great rental game, but it's hard to recommend as a purchase. There's a lot of optional side content to do, but none of it is particularly engrossing, and the real fun comes from fooling around with your powers after the game is over. The title's worth depends entirely on how long you can be occupied with playing with Alex's powers, since there isn't much else to keep you coming back once you've finished the game.

Score: 7.5/10