Prototype Hands On

Page 2 of 2. Page 1

That's half true. Inevitably, the moment arises when there are simply no more tanks to be thrown around, no more mutants to be pummelled into the sidewalk, and no more frightened onlookers to accidentally slice to pieces, and so you're shuttled back in time to an evening a few days prior to the end of civilisation. The rubble and chaos has gone, yellow cabs zip past headed up town rather than rusting in sad piles halfway out of the window of a health food store, and the streets are filled with couples dashing back and forth, unaware that a distinctly unstable Alex Mercer has just woken up in a nearby morgue, and is about to turn their city into the urban equivalent of hamster bedding.

But the good news is that, although your arm blades and rock fists are MIA for the time being, when it comes to movement, even at your very weakest you can still expect to leap over buses and race down Fifth Avenue faster than a speeding pigeon. It feels utterly fantastic, with the game obligingly hopping you over oncoming traffic when you sprint across the road, and sending you running right up the wall and to the top of any building you point yourself at, as crunchy clouds of brick dust waft about in your wake. Once on a rooftop, and with some handy attack helicopters to practice on (even at this early stage, mysterious Blackwatch paramilitary folk are eager to have a word), you'll find you can also rip giant air conditioning units out of the ground and fling them halfway across town, taking out any flying enemies in a sad spiral of flames.

Prototype begins, in other words, roughly where Crackdown ends, and as the demo concludes, it's a proposition that's both exciting and worrying. Radical Entertainment's previous title, Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, gave you so many toys in the first few minutes that the game struggled to really go anywhere after that, and, with even a hobbled Mercer being able to get around Manhattan in a matter of minutes, and give baddies a comprehensive shoeing before he's even caught his first EXP boost, it could potentially be rather tricky to deliver long-term on such a high level of excitement. With a handy targeting arrow and such effortlessly exhilarating traversal, every route between missions could easily become a straight line from one fight to the next: has the developer got anything planned to tempt you off-road?

An early mission title is "Find out who you are". Happily, rather than joining the Open University and smoking a lot of Gaulois, the solution probably involves putting tanks through walls and chucking buses around.

Radical is confident it has tricks up its sleeve, of course, not least with the gradual return of all those gory powers. Then there's the - as yet, largely unexplored - mechanics of consuming certain NPCs to learn their skills and assume their shape (John Carpenter's Kirby!), which hints at both gentle puzzles and the odd stealth pace-changer to follow.

Whatever happens, however, Prototype looks to be at the very least a fundamentally brilliant laboratory for some much-needed research into mindless time-wasting. Just like Pacific City, this is shaping up to be an arcadey platform world you'll be happy to burn untold hours in, even if all you're really doing is leaping from one skyscraper to the next, and dropkicking buskers up and down the length of Lexington Avenue. A half-hour with the controller is enough to suggest that Prototype has the excessive nature needed to make a great open-world experience. Pretty soon we'll know whether it has the necessary restraint to carve the ensuing madness into something approaching a recognisable structure, for those who like their chaos mixed with coherency.