Prototype Gameplay Reel Disappoints

G4TV games minx, Morgan Webb recently interviewed Chris Ansell from Radical Entertainment about their upcoming open-world title, Prototype and showcased a snippet of an early build of the game in progress.

I first read about Prototype last year in Game Informer and it looked amazing. They were promising the super-powered, free-roaming gameplay of Crackdown with the graphical splendor of a game like Assassin's Creed. (Indeed, Prototype's protagonist Alex Mercer takes more than a few stylistic cues from Creed's Altair)

The game also hints at an intriguing storyline, using the standard amnesiac plot device to give players a blank slate at the start of the game, slowly connecting the dots as they progress through the story. This ties into a power they will be giving to players, which is the ability to not only take on the appearance of the enemies they dispatch, but to also consume them and by doing so absorb their powers and memories for themselves. Memory fragments retrieved from your victims will provide clues that will help drive the story along.

This is all well and good. Radical is totally cherry-picking the best elements of many recent A-list games to create a recipe that is exceedingly unoriginal, but could end up being one of the most ambitious projects of the year. So it's sort of sad to see our very first look at real gameplay footage deflate my expectations for the game.

Although it's touted as being only a 20 percent build of the final game, what I see so far looks playable but hardly exciting. Things are looking more skewed towards a Crackdown style of gameplay. I love Crackdown, don't get me wrong, but I can't accept another open world game that doesn't have a decent narrative behind it. I also want more interaction in these types of games besides pushing cars aside in traffic and jumping between rooftops.

The GTA series represents the other end of the spectrum in the open world genre. In their world, story and narrative play a huge role and I think most gamers are used to that. Gamers are used to being assigned tasks and given a basic path to follow. There's a main quest, with several side quests branching out from it. I still think this is a solid, successful formula. If Prototype really wants to impress, Radical is going to have to find a way to strike that perfect balance between driving a compelling narrative through out the course of the game, as well as giving the player the unbridled freedom that was the core (and sadly, the sum) of the Crackdown experience.