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Prototype opens with an Abilitease. You start out in a big fight, and you try out a lot of different powers.
None of them are cool.

This was the first warning sign.

I only played Prototype for maybe an hour, hour and a half. But it was already repetitive and grating on me. Why? Well, let me share.

First off, the main character is completely unlikable. He has no personality, and has nothing in mind besides revenge. He also kills innocents all the time for health. He’s a bad person, but they don’t even make him a cool bad person. He’s the “antihero,” and it’s painfully cliche. I don’t give a shit about him. I don’t care what he finds out as he unravels his web of intrigue. There’s no reason for me to want to find out. They don’t give me anything.

This wouldn’t be a problem if the gameplay were fun, but it wasn’t fun as well. You try out a wide variety of melee powers there at the beginning of the game, but they’re all essentially exactly the same with different animations. I got to the point where I unlocked the Claw power. It looked stupid, and honestly, it didn’t seem to affect my attack effectiveness much, so I turned it off and just punched people. Having gigantic metal claws should be cool. Prototype doesn’t make it as such.
Movement is equally silly. If you hold down Right Trigger, Mr. Hoodie Man will run over any obstacle. There’s nothing to stop you. You hold down RT and press forward, and can fall asleep. There’s more you can do with movement, but the game never gives you any reason to, outside of bullshit race missions that I didn’t want to do. It just wasn’t fun running around the city. In Crackdown, you have an obscene range of moment, but it requires some skill to really get going. That makes it feel REALLY good. Also, moving well can keep you out of firefights you don’t want to be in. It serves a purpose. I ran through groups of enemies as Hoodie Man and was in no danger. I didn’t have to do better.
Finally, the game just doesn’t know what it does well. The game is clearly a crazy, open world brawler, and yet all of the missions I undertook involved eating people for disguises and being stealthy. What bullshit. You’re supposed to be some crazy-powered guy. Why would you ever be forced to stealth? It would have been a cool option, but I had to do it for every mission. It was pretty stupid.

So, yeah, I returned it pretty much immediately, and I don’t feel bad about it. It basically matched all I had heard about it, and I’m glad I rented it. It’s a shame. There were some decent ideas in there. The Web of Intrigue, especially. But man, it just didn’t catch me at all.