JustAlex
2012
This review contains spoilers
This review is kind of annoying to make because the game can be rated from a sequel standpoint or as a standalone game, in this review ill take the sequel standpoint. As a starter, I really enjoyed this game, probably one of my favourite games in recent history and an incredible improvement over prototype 1, which I was dissatisfied with after a full playthrough that was greatly unbalanced and not fun, this game felt better in almost every way compared to the first prototype with a few exceptions, so we will start with what has been degraded against prototype 1 and then ill review the things I feel it gets right, so without further ado, enjoy:
-The Bad:
1-The dual weapon system:
The dual weapon system means that attacks are no longer separated between 2 buttons and instead are based on how long you spent pressing the button which led sometimes to input an attack you didn’t mean to do, but with the upside that the amount of time Heller spends recovering from attacks is much lower than Mercer in prototype 1.
2-The parkour is gone:
The parkour animations displayed by Alex Mercer are gone in this entry, while I can understand that maybe a sergeant like Heller wouldn’t want to waste his time learning how to parkour it still is kind of sad that those are gone.
3-The excessive swearing:
This game is probably the only game where I have heard someone say “Unfuck this situation” and that’s honestly kind of funny but gets a bit old after a while of hearing Heller say “Hell Fucking Yeah” after every RadNet event, or how it feels like every second sentence has to contain a “Fuck” just to spice it up, but I guess it could just be because I did two playthroughs to 100% on new game+.
4-The assassination of character of Alex Mercer:
This is a more personal one but, the change in character between the Alex Mercer from P1 to P2 is really shocking, until you read the comics that introduce the reason why Alex started to hate humanity, and I feel like a mission or maybe getting all those memories when you finally consume Alex at the end of the game would have helped the story. Also, Alex’s plan is fucking stupid, because in the story there are two “Evolved” that think as individuals, and kidnapping a Heller’s daughter because she has “Annoyingly resilient DNA” to his consumption doesn’t make sense.
5-The repetition of a few objectives through the whole game:
Some of the side-content felt kind of boring after repeating the same objective over and over, which led to a sense of fatigue and boredom in the process of 100% it but considering that I did 100% this game and not P1 it says that this formula wasn’t as tiring as the previous game.
6-The difficulty:
The difficulty of the whole game felt way too easy compared to P1, while granted P1 ways of making encounters difficult was not that fun, destroying everything on the first try in P2 felt sad, I did only play normal and hard difficulty, so maybe Insane difficulty goes back to the challenge that P1 had but I’m tired of only playing prototype, maybe in the future I can try a playthrough in insane.
7-The PC port:
This is a problem exclusive to pc, because in console there are no crashes, and the only way you can buy prototype 2 already includes all dlc, but you can only get prototype 2 in certain regions and in those regions you have to pay an extra 10$ just to get challenges that unlock the Alex Mercer skin and that blows, there are also a bunch of unlocks which are in the game files and can be unlocked with guides online that give you cosmetics and upgrades that were never released on pc for some reason, and to end this section, the amount of crashes I had was a lot lower than P1’s but it still sucks losing a bunch of progress just because there is a memory leak that makes the game crash If you spend too long playing, overall this game is easier to play if you pirate it which already includes all the fixes necessary to run the game on a modern machine with all dlc and that is shameful.
Well after a bunch of talking about what P2 did wrong let’s talk about what it did great:
-The Good:
1-The controls:
The controls in P2 were improved from P1 with changes that make it feel smoother to control, for example the glide now only requires pressing holding one button instead of pressing one button and then holding another button and that is really appreciated, another change includes the addition of a dodge button that has been designed into the game instead of feeling like it was added way too late in development and didn’t have time to get developed, Overall other than the dual weapon system sometimes feeling clunky I would say that this is purely an improvement.
2-The tutorial:
While more hand-holdy than in P1, it teaches you more about the movement and combat of prototype leading to a less frustrating experience, although it can feel boring if you already know how to play P1, because while a few things change, the base of the combat and movement is still the same.
3-The story:
The story in P1, without including the WoI which I feel is teaching considering that is side-content and not part of the main campaign most of the time was pretty bad, filled with unsolved threads by the end of the campaign, as opposed to P2 in which as far as I can remember everything that was talked about in the story had a conclusion by the end, while I’m not really a story person, I can appreciate when a story is not bad.
4-The upgrade system:
Gone is grinding water towers in that one mission, and in comes doing side-content to unlock upgrades to your arsenal, you get new abilities through the story by absorbing specific enemies, and then upgrade those abilities by finding enemies which when consumed give you an upgrade to one of your abilities, this can then be combined with the mutation system, which gives you upgrades in certain sections of your arsenal by doing side-content, like collecting lore, killing field ops or doing missions based on information found while infiltrating the BlackNet, And while EP is not gone, it works as a levelling system that gives you skill points to spend on more basic abilities like, more health, better speed or increases in the mass bar.
5-Stealth:
While stealth felt too overpowered and really boring in P1, in P2 the AI has seen improvements, it isn’t Batman Arkham level of stealth but it is greatly improved from P1 and much more enjoyable, it also doesn’t feel as necessary for progressing through missions as in P1, and now works more smoothly thanks to a context sensitive system of grab actions that don’t try to grab someone unless the npc is unseen by anyone and tell you who you have to get rid of to be able to pick off that person.
6- The balance of weapons:
While it is sad that some weapons were cut from P1 the product is a weapon sandbox that is better balanced than P1, where save from a bug in the whip fist giving it more damage than intended, the dominant weapon was always the blade, in P2, every weapon has its weaknesses and its strengths, and now you can parry with the shield ability adding a hint of skill to the combat (though it can be used to cheese enemies really easily) and also have a lot less delay between the end of a combo and the start of another, all of this leads to an incredibly fun and satisfying combat system that is greatly appreciated.
7- The RadNet:
If you ignore the price (or unlock it with a dlc unlocker if you are on pc) the RadNet is a neat way to extend your playtime with challenges that are like the ones in P1, and the reward of the Alex Mercer skin is awesome.
Overall Thoughts:
This game is a total improvement over P1 and it makes it all the more painful that radical entertainment can’t make a Prototype 3 that fixes all the problems that P2 had but overall I would say that this game has become one of my favourites of all time.
5/5 stars. Awful pc distribution and port, but good game that should be experienced at least once.
-The Bad:
1-The dual weapon system:
The dual weapon system means that attacks are no longer separated between 2 buttons and instead are based on how long you spent pressing the button which led sometimes to input an attack you didn’t mean to do, but with the upside that the amount of time Heller spends recovering from attacks is much lower than Mercer in prototype 1.
2-The parkour is gone:
The parkour animations displayed by Alex Mercer are gone in this entry, while I can understand that maybe a sergeant like Heller wouldn’t want to waste his time learning how to parkour it still is kind of sad that those are gone.
3-The excessive swearing:
This game is probably the only game where I have heard someone say “Unfuck this situation” and that’s honestly kind of funny but gets a bit old after a while of hearing Heller say “Hell Fucking Yeah” after every RadNet event, or how it feels like every second sentence has to contain a “Fuck” just to spice it up, but I guess it could just be because I did two playthroughs to 100% on new game+.
4-The assassination of character of Alex Mercer:
This is a more personal one but, the change in character between the Alex Mercer from P1 to P2 is really shocking, until you read the comics that introduce the reason why Alex started to hate humanity, and I feel like a mission or maybe getting all those memories when you finally consume Alex at the end of the game would have helped the story. Also, Alex’s plan is fucking stupid, because in the story there are two “Evolved” that think as individuals, and kidnapping a Heller’s daughter because she has “Annoyingly resilient DNA” to his consumption doesn’t make sense.
5-The repetition of a few objectives through the whole game:
Some of the side-content felt kind of boring after repeating the same objective over and over, which led to a sense of fatigue and boredom in the process of 100% it but considering that I did 100% this game and not P1 it says that this formula wasn’t as tiring as the previous game.
6-The difficulty:
The difficulty of the whole game felt way too easy compared to P1, while granted P1 ways of making encounters difficult was not that fun, destroying everything on the first try in P2 felt sad, I did only play normal and hard difficulty, so maybe Insane difficulty goes back to the challenge that P1 had but I’m tired of only playing prototype, maybe in the future I can try a playthrough in insane.
7-The PC port:
This is a problem exclusive to pc, because in console there are no crashes, and the only way you can buy prototype 2 already includes all dlc, but you can only get prototype 2 in certain regions and in those regions you have to pay an extra 10$ just to get challenges that unlock the Alex Mercer skin and that blows, there are also a bunch of unlocks which are in the game files and can be unlocked with guides online that give you cosmetics and upgrades that were never released on pc for some reason, and to end this section, the amount of crashes I had was a lot lower than P1’s but it still sucks losing a bunch of progress just because there is a memory leak that makes the game crash If you spend too long playing, overall this game is easier to play if you pirate it which already includes all the fixes necessary to run the game on a modern machine with all dlc and that is shameful.
Well after a bunch of talking about what P2 did wrong let’s talk about what it did great:
-The Good:
1-The controls:
The controls in P2 were improved from P1 with changes that make it feel smoother to control, for example the glide now only requires pressing holding one button instead of pressing one button and then holding another button and that is really appreciated, another change includes the addition of a dodge button that has been designed into the game instead of feeling like it was added way too late in development and didn’t have time to get developed, Overall other than the dual weapon system sometimes feeling clunky I would say that this is purely an improvement.
2-The tutorial:
While more hand-holdy than in P1, it teaches you more about the movement and combat of prototype leading to a less frustrating experience, although it can feel boring if you already know how to play P1, because while a few things change, the base of the combat and movement is still the same.
3-The story:
The story in P1, without including the WoI which I feel is teaching considering that is side-content and not part of the main campaign most of the time was pretty bad, filled with unsolved threads by the end of the campaign, as opposed to P2 in which as far as I can remember everything that was talked about in the story had a conclusion by the end, while I’m not really a story person, I can appreciate when a story is not bad.
4-The upgrade system:
Gone is grinding water towers in that one mission, and in comes doing side-content to unlock upgrades to your arsenal, you get new abilities through the story by absorbing specific enemies, and then upgrade those abilities by finding enemies which when consumed give you an upgrade to one of your abilities, this can then be combined with the mutation system, which gives you upgrades in certain sections of your arsenal by doing side-content, like collecting lore, killing field ops or doing missions based on information found while infiltrating the BlackNet, And while EP is not gone, it works as a levelling system that gives you skill points to spend on more basic abilities like, more health, better speed or increases in the mass bar.
5-Stealth:
While stealth felt too overpowered and really boring in P1, in P2 the AI has seen improvements, it isn’t Batman Arkham level of stealth but it is greatly improved from P1 and much more enjoyable, it also doesn’t feel as necessary for progressing through missions as in P1, and now works more smoothly thanks to a context sensitive system of grab actions that don’t try to grab someone unless the npc is unseen by anyone and tell you who you have to get rid of to be able to pick off that person.
6- The balance of weapons:
While it is sad that some weapons were cut from P1 the product is a weapon sandbox that is better balanced than P1, where save from a bug in the whip fist giving it more damage than intended, the dominant weapon was always the blade, in P2, every weapon has its weaknesses and its strengths, and now you can parry with the shield ability adding a hint of skill to the combat (though it can be used to cheese enemies really easily) and also have a lot less delay between the end of a combo and the start of another, all of this leads to an incredibly fun and satisfying combat system that is greatly appreciated.
7- The RadNet:
If you ignore the price (or unlock it with a dlc unlocker if you are on pc) the RadNet is a neat way to extend your playtime with challenges that are like the ones in P1, and the reward of the Alex Mercer skin is awesome.
Overall Thoughts:
This game is a total improvement over P1 and it makes it all the more painful that radical entertainment can’t make a Prototype 3 that fixes all the problems that P2 had but overall I would say that this game has become one of my favourites of all time.
5/5 stars. Awful pc distribution and port, but good game that should be experienced at least once.
2009
For starters this review will be separated in sections for easier writing and reading and I want to say that even though throughout this review I will be dogging this game hard I also feel like it was a decent experience and could have been a good game at the time but in the current time (2023) it is plagued with weird design decisions that only serve to lower the quality of the overall product and diminish its few good qualities. Enjoy the review.
1-Story:
it's story feeling really disconnected, certain points of the story feel unresolved by the end, and the big revelation feels like it was supposed to be really meaningful but in my opinion didn't feel earned because by the point that you learn it you have killed thousands of people leading it to feel meaningless, some of the story problems could be resolved in the web of memories but I don't really care to go find them because if they are anything like the main story I will probably end up even more confused.
2- Game Balance:
Another gripe with the game is that it suffers from really bad difficulty spikes at random moments in the story that leads to a reliance in vehicles and guns, which sucks because they are literally press 2 buttons for max dps as opposed to Alex's combat which "seems" to be more dynamic, emphasis on seems because I feel like in my time playing I never truly understood how you were supposed to effectively fight and just resorted to stealth when available. Furthermore, the bosses were really annoying, one of the bosses felt really bad because originally I thought you were supposed to fight it head on but all I you were supposed to do was shoot it with a tank to kill it and that felt really bad, and the final boss felt really hard for no reason and came out of nowhere.
3-Gameplay:
The game controls like ass, I started my play-through on Kb+M before realizing that this was a console port meaning that controller feels way better than Kb+M, even though controller did feel more responsive I still felt that I was moving through a cut-scene thanks to this game overreliance on the RT button leading to a bunch of misinputs and Alex sticking to places when all I wanted to do was run and jump but that could also just be a skill issue. Something that I should add is that the movement for a 2009 game feels really good when going from roof to roof but fails to work when fighting in the streets or on the inside of bases, furthermore as mentioned before this game balance is really weird and for some reason doesn’t like that the player I using the abilities given and brings AoE weapons that are hard to dodge and stun you in place leading to a frustrating experience unless you also abuse AoE weapons picked up from the ground, the problem with this is that the guns feel like an afterthought that they realized way to late in development were too weak so they just made them overpowered but without giving them any flavor which leads to a gameplay loop that is either really boring (stealth) or really annoying (weapons). There are other mechanics that don’t work that well like for example the grab action feeling clunky, or the stealth feeling really stupid (Like come on, how can I kill someone while standing next to a guard but not get detected just because I was pressing RB ) but maybe that is a blessing in disguise because if I had to do every encounter with only combat I would have dropped the game. Also the sections were you are force to ride a vehicle to do something are really fucking boring.
4-Side Content:
Idk, the only ones I enjoyed were the gliding minigames and the consume events, all the others didn't feel rewarding to play so I just resorted to cheesing one of the missions to get infinite EP and buy all the upgrades.
5-The PC Port
I would recommend to just play the game on console or emulate it because the PC port is just straight up unstable and it surprises me that you can buy this game on steam considering that if you have a machine with more than 8 cores you can't go past the first loading screen unless you hex edit one of the dlls included with the game, luckily I found a guide to fix it so I could start playing without any more problems but from my research online this isn't the only problem you might find if you have modern hardware. Sadly, all this probably won't be fixed ever considering the studio that made this game doesn't exist anymore and I doubt that Activision cares about this IP enough to push a patch on a 14-year-old game.
6-Conclusion:
This game seemed interesting when I first heard of it a few weeks ago but it did not live to the expectations after playing it, part of its problems could also come from its age but idk I wasn't playing games when this game released in 2009 so couldn't tell you.
2/5 Stars: I kind of enjoyed some parts but was really disappointed with the overall product but it was cheap so it’s whatever.
1-Story:
it's story feeling really disconnected, certain points of the story feel unresolved by the end, and the big revelation feels like it was supposed to be really meaningful but in my opinion didn't feel earned because by the point that you learn it you have killed thousands of people leading it to feel meaningless, some of the story problems could be resolved in the web of memories but I don't really care to go find them because if they are anything like the main story I will probably end up even more confused.
2- Game Balance:
Another gripe with the game is that it suffers from really bad difficulty spikes at random moments in the story that leads to a reliance in vehicles and guns, which sucks because they are literally press 2 buttons for max dps as opposed to Alex's combat which "seems" to be more dynamic, emphasis on seems because I feel like in my time playing I never truly understood how you were supposed to effectively fight and just resorted to stealth when available. Furthermore, the bosses were really annoying, one of the bosses felt really bad because originally I thought you were supposed to fight it head on but all I you were supposed to do was shoot it with a tank to kill it and that felt really bad, and the final boss felt really hard for no reason and came out of nowhere.
3-Gameplay:
The game controls like ass, I started my play-through on Kb+M before realizing that this was a console port meaning that controller feels way better than Kb+M, even though controller did feel more responsive I still felt that I was moving through a cut-scene thanks to this game overreliance on the RT button leading to a bunch of misinputs and Alex sticking to places when all I wanted to do was run and jump but that could also just be a skill issue. Something that I should add is that the movement for a 2009 game feels really good when going from roof to roof but fails to work when fighting in the streets or on the inside of bases, furthermore as mentioned before this game balance is really weird and for some reason doesn’t like that the player I using the abilities given and brings AoE weapons that are hard to dodge and stun you in place leading to a frustrating experience unless you also abuse AoE weapons picked up from the ground, the problem with this is that the guns feel like an afterthought that they realized way to late in development were too weak so they just made them overpowered but without giving them any flavor which leads to a gameplay loop that is either really boring (stealth) or really annoying (weapons). There are other mechanics that don’t work that well like for example the grab action feeling clunky, or the stealth feeling really stupid (Like come on, how can I kill someone while standing next to a guard but not get detected just because I was pressing RB ) but maybe that is a blessing in disguise because if I had to do every encounter with only combat I would have dropped the game. Also the sections were you are force to ride a vehicle to do something are really fucking boring.
4-Side Content:
Idk, the only ones I enjoyed were the gliding minigames and the consume events, all the others didn't feel rewarding to play so I just resorted to cheesing one of the missions to get infinite EP and buy all the upgrades.
5-The PC Port
I would recommend to just play the game on console or emulate it because the PC port is just straight up unstable and it surprises me that you can buy this game on steam considering that if you have a machine with more than 8 cores you can't go past the first loading screen unless you hex edit one of the dlls included with the game, luckily I found a guide to fix it so I could start playing without any more problems but from my research online this isn't the only problem you might find if you have modern hardware. Sadly, all this probably won't be fixed ever considering the studio that made this game doesn't exist anymore and I doubt that Activision cares about this IP enough to push a patch on a 14-year-old game.
6-Conclusion:
This game seemed interesting when I first heard of it a few weeks ago but it did not live to the expectations after playing it, part of its problems could also come from its age but idk I wasn't playing games when this game released in 2009 so couldn't tell you.
2/5 Stars: I kind of enjoyed some parts but was really disappointed with the overall product but it was cheap so it’s whatever.
2016
This was my first Pokémon game in which I completed the pokedex so it automatically makes it my favorite purely on emotional connection :)