Two games that are very similar in concept but very different in execution, “Infamous” and “Prototype” have been the stars of “versus” features all over the internet, trying to decide which game is better. Which I think is an exercise in utter futility, considering both games are extremely solid, ambitious and manage to deliver on their promises despite the inevitable nagging issues. This review will talk about both side by side, and there’ll obviously be comparisons, but always keeping in mind both are excellent, entertaining games.
When it comes to story, “Infamous” easily has the upper hand. Cole McGrath is a courier. One day he’s tasked with taking a package to the center of Empire City and opening it. Upon unwittingly doing so, it explodes and partially destroys the place, killing thousands of people. Cole himself, however, not only survives: he develops a variety of powers related to electricity, like shooting bursts of lightning from his hands and sliding power cables. Trying to come to terms with his new life and being used by several authority figures to achieve mysterious ends, Cole has to decide how to use his powers, and the game gives you the binary choice of being good or evil. And that’s the one glaring flaw in the game’s narrative — there’s no middle ground. You’re either child-rescuing good or child-raping evil. You choose a path and you get going, so the choices the game puts before you aren’t going to take a moment’s thought — if you’ve chosen to be evil, just take the evil route, and so on. In fact, being evil for a while then deciding to be good is not a clever call, because “good” powers and “evil” powers are different and only accessible if you’re one of either. So if you choose to be good or evil, you should keep that up all the way, because going from “Infamous” (the most villainous rank) to “Hero” looks like a lot of effort (I didn’t try it, since it seems very unrewarding).
However, once you get used to the black-and-white moral system, the story is intriguing enough to keep your attention, the dialogue is well-written and the characters, interesting and likeable despite their flaws — Zeke is a good example. An utterly selfish prick, he is however very funny and captivating in his child-like enthusiasm. And the moral system may be simplistic, but the choices you make DO affect the game’s story directly, and the way people see you and react to you. And intelligently, the writers always tell the story with a light, fantastic tone that allows for some campy elements, like monsters made out of trash and the twist in the ending of the game, which would sound ridiculous in a realistic game but in “Infamous”, fits the world established by the story.
“Prototype”, however, is about a man with no memory who is the victim of a military super-human virus and we hear his story as he tells it to us, via flashbacks. I counted three major cliches so far. This is not a game that focuses on its story, but instead, on its premise — allowing the player to control a mega-powerful superhuman in a destructible New York city full of pedestrians that apparently have ten liters of blood in their body rather than the usual five. The story is just an excuse to give you a sense of purpose as you blow up the place and cause mass murder.
The protagonist, Alex Mercer, has the obvious problem of lacking a personality. After all, while he claims to be interested in saving the city from the virus (which turns people into zombies and other types of monsters), he won’t hesitate to cause so much collateral damage I couldn’t help wondering if the virus was really the greater threat. The writers were clearly at a loss on how to portray Mercer, so they just give him a sister to care about and a sub-plot involving the recovery of his memories so he has more reasons to stop the virus, since “I want to save the world” does not fit well with a guy who can’t swing his claws without killing five pedestrians along with his intended target.
And the story itself is uninteresting and cliched, with characters you could care less about. You feel compelled to progress due to the excellent upgrade system, which offers so many new powers and moves that the next mission becomes suddenly very attractive due to the XP it will give you (or EP, Evolution Points, as the game calls them). In fact, the developers were VERY creative with Mercer’s powers, like the one were he sticks his claws into the ground and, several feet ahead, they erupt like spikes, impaling targets from the bottom-up. Not to mention he can kill and consume people to regain health and take on their appearances, a system that works quite well.
The upgrade system in “Infamous” depends a lot on your moral choices. For example, you have the power of throwing shock grenades — if you’re evil, they’ll FUCK SHIT UP upon exploding. If you’re not, the enemies knocked down by it will simply be restrained by lightning handcuffs upon hitting the floor. It has to be said the evil powers ARE more attractive than the good powers, but that’s only natural — when you play a game, it’s FUN to be evil and unwind a bit.
And the powers in “Infamous” are generally cool, but the XP system is remarkably cheap. All the game’s 40 main missions add up to 20.000 XP, which is barely enough to fully power-up your main lightning power. The game rewards you for kicking ass in style, but the rewards go from 1 XP to 20 XP, so patrolling around the city in search of enemies isn’t that attractive. And the side missions give you 100 XP each, regardless of difficulty — and some are remarkably hard, opposed to some that barely feel like a mission at all.
However, the side missions in “Infamous” are well-developed and have a quick but relevant back story to them. Pedestrians will ask you to destroy surveillance equipment in their buildings, or to recover a friend or sibling from the hands of enemies, or to disband a crowd of protesters. Every time you finish a side mission, the area it happened in is generally free of enemies spawning in it, too.
Meanwhile, the side missions in “Prototype” are more like challenges — and all of them have a time limit. They offer shitloads of XP but simply add an “arcade” aspect to the game rather than making the city feel more alive — stuff like, “kill this many enemies in this time limit”. There’s even medals. I didn’t feel like wasting my time on it, since it didn’t contribute to the story — except for the “Web Of Intrigue” side mission, that consists in finding people who are tied to the game’s main story and consuming them (and therefore, their memories), which unlocks a quick (optional) cutscene and an EP reward. And some side missions, like destroying a hive (a building infected by the virus) or a police HQ have their rewards, and sneaking into the HQ is fun due to Mercer’s powers — if you’re under disguise, you can accuse an enemy soldier of being you, and his friends will shoot the poor twat and only afterwards realize their mistake. And within HQs, there’s enemies that will offer you special skills upon being consumed, like piloting helicopters or using guns.
Yes, combat IS that diversified in “Prototype”. You can pilot tanks, APCs, helicopters, shoot machineguns, bazookas, grenade launchers, assault rifles, use five different main powers (claws, hammerfist, muscle mass, extendible tentacle and blade), two different defensive powers (armor and shield), hand-to-hand combat, grab enemies and throw them, and so on and so forth.
And in “Infamous”, it’s always related to electricity. There’s some nice melee combat, but even your blows electrify the enemy. And while blowing them up never gets old due to the nice looking visual effects — well, imagine slicing several people in half in “Prototype” with one single blow, as blood washes the sidewalk and their upper halfs shower over bewildered soon-to-have-the-same-fate pedestrians, and you’ll have to agree Cole McGrath is a bit of a pussy next to Alex Mercer. Something that is also reflected in their acrobatic skills, by the way. While McGrath jumps from ledge to ledge, surely but slowly climbing the side of a building, Alex Mercer SPRINTS THE FUCK UP THE BUILDING, somersaults upon reaching the roof and jumps again to another roof. Yeah, there is no doubt who’d win in a race, really.
But despite McGrath’s limitations, he can be powerful if the player uses his abilities strategically — like electrifying a puddle of water with enemies on it, or landing heavily from a large height on a crowd of baddies to send them flying in all directions. His health is shitty, depleting fast under fire, but his abilities can make up for that if you use them wisely — and if you drain electricity from nearby objects, you can regain health almost immediately. There is, of course, the tiny problem of enemies being S.A.S. level marksmen, capable of hitting you from two roofs away — but thankfully, “Infamous” has a balanced difficulty curve that always keeps the challenge up without ruining the fun, and the missions have well-placed checkpoints.
Mercer also gets to use some strategy before FUCKING SHIT UP. For example, some of your powers are practically useless against tanks, and ALL of your powers are useless if you’re trying to bring down a building. Therefore, hijacking armored vehicles to do so is vital, and so is choosing the right weapon to do the job. Once you do, though, your enemies are fucking DOOMED. While McGrath needs to use a relatively lenghty “drain” power to regain health from enemies, Mercer just CRUSHES THEIR HEADS AND EATS THEM THE FUCK UP YUM YUM NOM NOM. You become a force of nature if you choose the appropriate powers to fight an enemy, and yes, that is as fun as it sounds.
Rampaging in “Prototype” is one of the game’s attractions, and while it can be fun to do so in “Infamous”, the former was developed with rampaging in mind — “let’s make this shit as fun as possible”. Pedestrians will be cut diagonally, horizontally and vertically in half, destroy objects when thrown against it, leave blood splatters everywhere and most of all, react incredibly well to your frightening presence. Crowd A.I. in “Prototype” is very well-programmed — some pedestrians run the fuck away, some stay paralyzed in fear, some stay torn between the two, others seem to even try to get everyone to calm down (and these are the funniest ones to brutally murder). “Prototype” lets you be an utterly evil fuck, and in terms of sheer destruction, no other game can touch this one. Using your powers to virtually destroy New York City is an ambitious concept that the clearly misanthropic developers managed to nail. And it’s unfair to request the same of “Infamous” because that was never the game’s focus.
Of course, in order to render hundreds of fleeing pedestrians and large explosions, “Prototype” had to sacrifice its visuals. The polygon count is noticeably lower than you’d expect from a next-gen title, and while things look good on ground level, climb up a building and the draw distance is pitifully mediocre, with lots of pop-in and similar problems. But really, if this is what’s required to keep the framerate steady while I FUCK SHIT UP, it’s a perfectly forgiveable sacrifice — and the attention to graphical detail in “Prototype” is truly remarkable, with blood splatters, cracks, and destructible scenario everywhere, not to mention exceptional physics. And it’s not only you causing destruction in the game — you can always see a battle between the army and the monsters happening in several places of the city, and even without your intervention, said battles look amazing, with pedestrians being brutally caught in the crossfire and casualties happening on both sides.
By comparison, I think “Infamous” could have a larger draw distance, since it comes nowhere close to being as graphically busy as “Prototype” — but the game’s art direction and overall color palette give the visuals a lot of charm, and the buildings of Empire City are far more detailed than the blocky New York City Alex Mercer sodomizes. “Infamous” also has some 2D cutscenes that look just beautiful. However, one thing both games get equally right is the animation of their protagonist — Cole and Alex are amazingly well-done, smoothly transitioning between realistic movements. Cole can target enemies from any position he’s in, and Alex can shoot guns while hopping several feet into the air. Amazing work in both games.
On the sound department, “Infamous” and “Prototype” both have competent soundtracks, but voice acting and sound effects are stronger on “Infamous”, with Cole’s powers sounding appropriately electric and the voices truly bringing the characters to life. A lot has been said about Cole’s voice (as the brilliant Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw put it, he sounds like an “angry blender full of gravel”), but Jason Cottle is very charismatic and delivers Cole’s sense of humour and anger very well. Barry Pepper also does a decent job as Alex Mercer, but the rest of the voice acting in the game is “meh” — while in “Infamous”, everyone manages to do a remarkable job. “Infamous” having a better story and characters clearly is an important factor in this. And finally, “Prototype” could have used some extra attention here and there — I would have expected Alex Mercer sprinting up a building to sound more thunderous than it does in the game, for example.
All in all, both games have strengths and weaknesses, but most importantly — both games are really fucking fun, ambitious and manage to deliver what they intended. “Prototype” is more violent, more brutal, more inconsequent and “Infamous” is better-written, more captivating and more balanced in its difficulty curve. Both games are brilliantly developed and deserve to be played.
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