Being a latecomer to the PS3, I hadn’t ever played the Prototype games so I didn’t know what to expect from Prototype 2. Overall the game has a lot of nice touches and is pretty fun even though it lacks mission variety.
The main thing to like about Prototype 2 is the ability to run around a city and beating up bad guys (and civilians if you want) at random. To encourage you to just wander around the game has some collectables and mini-missions hidden around the city that can give you powerups when completed. One of the nice touches is that instead of making you wander around aimlessly looking for collectable 5 out of 5, if you pull up the in-game map you can see possible locations for the collectables and mini-missions which help you locate them. But because it only shows you some possible locations in the form of radar pings you still have to hunt around a little but you have some idea where to look so it isn’t totally aimless.
While playing the game I really wished someone would make a cyberpunk-GTA clone. I guess Watch Dogs was supposed to be that but I haven’t played it and it got terrible reviews. But the ability to wander around hacking into things randomly seems appealing.
Unfortunately, Prototype 2 isn’t cyberpunk. It is basically a series of fights where you get more powers and fight bigger monsters and tons of mini-bosses. Although you eventually get a few powers, the game only lets you use 2 at a time which is disappointing. The ability to switch which 2 you are using is nice but it is weird that they don’t let you use all of them at the same time – especially since the powers are only mapped to 2 buttons…
Also unfortunate is the fact that the game only has a few basic mission types: find the monster and fight it, sneak into somewhere to kill someone then fight the monsters, timed item collection, and protect the bad guy until he can lead you to something you want. The game tries to switch it up by making you wonder who to trust and things like that but this mostly happens in non-interactive cutscenes which makes me kind of uninterested and at least partially ignore them.
While playing Prototype 2 I enjoyed it but looking online it seems like there isn’t any talk of a third one which is disappointing since it was fun and I would like to see what they could improve on in a sequel. However, since the studio that made the games got shut down because of poor sales it seems unlikely that Prototype 3 will be coming any time soon.
five thumbs up
never played the first
but Prototype 2 was fun
there will be no more.