It's tightened and refined, generally being both easier to control and more excessive more quickly. Smashing stuff and people up with big ugly claws power-leaping and gliding around the rooftops consuming whoever you like in order to adopt their appearance, thus achieving disguise for either stealth or access to new areas. The key pillars of the first game remain. That stuff I could and did care about, because it's a festival of absurdist violence set in enormous grounds. In practice, this entails repeatedly finding and 'absorbing' a series of baddies, interspersed with big huge fights against soldiers, tanks, helicopters and genetically-modified monsters. I could not bring myself to care about the despondent story, Heller's vengeance quest against Mercer and the boo-hiss scientists responsible for his newly-mutated state and the death of his family. More actively pursuing the tongue-in-cheek could have given it so much more of a voice. It's foolish to What If or If Only when discussing a released game, but it feels so lacking in definable character of its own. There are occasional, jarring bursts of humour, such as when Heller inexplicably goes crazy apeshit because a computer he needs to access doesn't have an alt-key, or the parodic big brother PA messages from the cartoon villain military who control this infection-besieged New York. He swears and he moans and he swears and he never smiles and he swears and he doesn't like anyone or anything and he swears, and while he's got just, tragic cause for being such a bad-tempered miseriguts, that doesn't make wearing his shoes any more comfortable. The sequel outwardly seemed to do the right thing by ditching unloveable former protagnoist Alex Mercer in favour of a new, similarly mutated anti-hero, but autocue-reading megagrump James Heller is even harder to sympathise with. (Prototype 2 does love to swear, and in its constant, look-at-me-ma-I'm-mature stream of f-bombs the word it's so very fond of loses all force and meaning, instead coming off contrived and irritating). It's like hiring a clown for your child's birthday party, but then he just sits in the corner muttering and swearing to himself. Like its predecessor, it's an uneven blend of superheroic excess and grimdark moping, where the surly tone is distractingly at odds with the gleeful carnage. If you played 2009's Prototype, you're not going to be enormously surprised by Prototype 2. The whole business gets me down, I must say - and that isn't what a Hulk-inspired game about rampaging around an open-world New York should do. Then again, praising it to the highest heavens wouldn't result in any more cash or security for the people who made it. And with Activision having recently sent Prototype developer Radical Entertainment off to their unsettlingly large boneyard (in the company of Bizarre, Octane, Luxoflux, Budcat, 7 Studios, Underground Development, Shaba, Sierra Entertainment, Gray Matter and Infocom), criticising what becomes a posthumous sequel on PC does feel cruel. You shouldn't speak ill of the dead, they say. Allow me to foist the following words about it upon your monitor. I've been hulking out, wall-running up tall buildings and eating people alive for the last few days, and then I played some Prototype 2. Several months after its console debut - the so-so sales of which lead to Activision closing its developer - open-world superhero game Prototype 2 is now out on PC.
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