Prototype is a 12-year-old's edgy daydreams come to life.

Simultaneously one of the greatest action-adventure games I've ever played and one of the most busted-up pieces of junk I've ever experienced. Prototype's difficulty is brutal at times, going out of its way to make you feel as powerless as possible, but there's something thrilling about dodging five helicopters and five armored monsters all at once while blazing around NYC and tearing into innocent civvies just to get a crumb of health back. It's demanding, it constantly dips into chaos, the plot is edgy asinine garbage, and the whole thing is so silly and so ugly - holy shit this game looks really bad in places - so goddamn frequently, but Prototype is a liberating game that feels delightful to master. I have not played another action-adventure game with Prototype's loose, godlike sense of mobility and traversal - Alex Mercer can blaze across what feels like five or six square blocks in seconds, and getting up to top speed on both the ground and in the air feels as cathartic as it does amusing. If the combat had been ironed out and Alex Mercer was maybe given one more useful power, Prototype could have easily coasted by on the laurels of its gameplay and sense of freedom alone. But even as it stands, it's a game that's so much fun to play that it's honestly easy to ignore the over-the-top edginess of the plot and its' characters, the janky difficulty, the occasionally-lame story missions, and the sludgey, greasy-feeling visuals.

Prototype is the 12-year-old's ideal game. It's still hard to believe that this was made by actual adults.