Wandering around the floor of Comic Con, I came across a playable demo of Radical Entertainment’s upcoming game Prototype.  I almost moved on because someone else was playing and the game looked like a third-person sandbox action game, something which is hard to pull off and not a particular interest of mine.  But I watched for a few minutes and just the sheer amount of ridiculous mayhem on the screen had me captivated.  I mean, there was some serious craziness going on.

The kid who was playing Prototype was doing these insane jumps in the middle of an urban environment that looked like Times Square and bouncing off skyscrapers.  Then he started performing these sick glides over a bunch of soldiers that were shooting some wild demons.  He landed and started carving up zombies with wolverine-type claws and blood was flying everywhere.  The main character’s hand then morphed into some sort of bladed weapon and he charged into a group of soldiers, sending them flying and slicing them up.  For the heck of it he beat the hell out of a taxi and blew it up.  Then he freaking ate someone.  This all happened so quickly and looked so wild that I had to give it a try.

Even though I kinda sucked it up a bit and didn’t know how to morph my hands into different weapons, I still felt really powerful playing Prototype.  Picking up taxis and flinging them into groups of zombies will do that to you, as will running up the exterior of a skyscraper and then jumping off into the midst of a battle.  I found out you could grab weapons.  I picked up a rocket launcher somewhere, jumped really high into the air and started firing it at this tank that had come rumbling through the city streets.  Even though this seemed like an open-world type game, an objective flashed on the screen: “Consume the Commander.”  

Well, I didn’t consume the commander but I did jump on top of a tank, hijack that sucker and then started blowing the crap out of a bunch of helicopters.  I have to admit it was incredibly fun and cool, if a bit stressful and manic.  The atmosphere of the city was insane with all these fights going on everywhere and taxis flying about.  And it was awesome to be driving a tank through midtown.  The sound effects were good as well and I even heard some “mature” dialogue being thrown around as people screamed and yelled at each other.  You kinda have to see a video (here and here) to see how insane things are…but they look even crazier when you’re actually playing.  It’s not that the graphics are super cutting-edge, it’s just the amount of stuff going on and the coolness and variety of the animations.  Even though this is not the type of game I usually play, I was so curious about Prototype that I ended up going to the panel Radical was having…so hit the jump if you want to know more.

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