Heeeeey maaaaaann, I’m here to make your day, or ruin it. Whichever you feel is appropriate. Whatever, it’s Saturday, I hope. And I’m here to make you spend the next 5 to 100 minutes reading this, depending on your reading speed and how long I decide to make this.

Phew, playing video games is tough work, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve broken a sweat playing vidyo gams, here’s a hint, it’s less than one.

PROTOTYPE 2!

There you go, enough beating around the bush, it’s Prototype 2… sorry [PROTOTYPE 2] and there’s probably some form of registered trademark in there, so watch out for that. Anyways, yeah, it’s a game, so whatever. I played it, and then I beat it… I had no idea what happened in the ending, it was so sudden and unexplained and then it just kind of ended, so that kind of ruined the entire experience for me, I’m joking, but the ending is almost as bad as Mass Effect 3, but for totally different reasons.

Ok, so the story, I’ve already ruined the end so what’s a little more spoilers gonna hurt? The game starts off with Sergeant (I think he’s a sergeant) James Heller stationed somewhere in some place, it never tells you and it’s not important. Anyways, Heller’s wife and daughter were murdered back in NYZ (I’ll get to NYZ a little later.) by Alex Mercer (I’ll get to him when I get to NYZ) Heller, being the gravelly voiced angry man he is asks to be stationed in NYZ, some text comes up on the screen during the opening cutscene saying that he’s crazy with fatherly rage (which I’ll get to in a little bit.)

SIDE NOTE!!!

NYZ stands for “New York Zero” it’s called New York Zero because this takes place after the first game, that’s why it’s called number two, it’s a sequel. Little lesson for the day. Anyways, in the first game Alex Mercer, who is the hero of our tale, the first tale at least, releases some kind of virus in Penn Station, which I assume is some station with a whole bunch of pens, so many they had to add a second “N”. Anyways, they think Alex is dead but he wakes up in a morgue and gains super powers, which are totally rad, and if I could pick any super power, I think I’d pick that. Anyways, all Hell breaks loose, and some people get infected with a virus and turn into zombies. Then the military comes in and tries to contain the virus, they end up killing a lot of people, while the zombies kill more, and Alex kills the most. He’s not a good dude. Anyways. In the end of the first game they think Alex is dead, and they think everything’s good, but Alex decides that he’s not dead, and decides to re… what’s the word I’m looking for? Re-use? Reanimate? Regan? Whatever, he brings the virus back and turns New York into a pile of turd. The end.

So Alex kills Heller’s family and Heller doesn’t take no crap from no one. The opening scene features Heller in an armored personnel carrier sharpening a knife, a really big knife.  When it gets hit by a car… only the car was flying through the air at the time. Heller is the sole survivor and then he sees Alex causing trouble. Heller, being the crazy guy he is, decides it’s a good idea to go up against, what I can only assume, is the next step in the evolutionary process (That’s what they call ‘em) Heller takes his knife, that is probably larger than his daughter, and stabs Alex Mercer in the neck, yay. He leveled up. Mercer gets up, and he’s all pissed, then the two get into a fist fight. Heller actually does surprisingly well, considering the circumstances. Mercer tosses Heller around and then starts walking away. Heller being the ballsy ballerson he is, decides it’s a good idea to chase this guy. That doesn’t end too well for Heller and he gets stabbed. But it’s ok, Mercer just infected him with the same thing that he’s got. So they’re all even Steven.

Heller wakes up in a morgue, which is a really tired process at this point, and instead of being cut open, there’s a scientist who tells him to fight some zombies, Heller does that pretty easily. Which is a bad thing because there’s also the commander of Blackwatch watching. (the government military thing that was sent in to contain the virus in the first game)He tells the scientist to burn Heller alive because they can’t have two Mercers running around the streets all willy nilly. Through some series of events Heller escapes and meets up with Mercer. Mercedes Benz tells Heller that he didn’t kill his daughter and that it was the Blackwatch who did. Heller believes him and does what Alex tells him to do.

Early on in the game you realize that both Alex and Blackwatch are bad guys, through whatever reasons, and then you become an independent contractor, or whatever.

Now. Let me tell you about what’s really awesome in this game. The game its self. The game play is fantastic, you basically get to run around the streets of NYZ, but just doing that is lame, so you can even run up the sides of buildings, WHICH IS AWESOME! You even get some awesome powers, like an arm sword, some big ol’ claws, and the ability to multiply the size of your fists by ten.

The combat is amplified from the first game, where Alex had a plethora of useless powers mapped on his power wheel, only being able to have one active at a time, Heller only has five weapons on his power wheel and he can have two active at a time. Every other power is conveniently mapped on to the controller, and easier to access. In the first game, you had to open up the radial menu every time you wanted to switch from the blade power to the claw power, which is useless. In this game you can open up the radial menu, select one power and put it on the “X” button and select another to put on the “Y” button, this makes the combat more fluid and quicker. The reason the first game didn’t have this is because X was for regular attacks and Y was for heavy attacks, they changed that so that holding X is the power attack on your main power and holding Y is the heavy attack on your second power, which makes a heap more sense.

Heller can also consume people, it’s kind of like eating, but it’s more like absorbing than eating, if that makes any sense. He kind of takes them, and then breaks them in half, and then he grabs them with his body tentacles, and then he makes himself one with them. If you do that with certain people you get to see their memories, which is a nifty feature which helps advance the plot in some ways.

This game also features some RPG elements, like gaining abilities when you level up, but it’s more complex than that. You have your standard level system, which is basically Heller “evolving” as it were, but all that does is give you the ability to get more health or run faster, you don’t gain any perks by evolving. Perks are called “mutations” you get stuff like, “bullet-proof” which makes you invisible to guns, and other great things that I can’t remember. You gain mutations by completing side quests, which you access by sucking some military person up and getting his memories. You upgrade your combat abilities by consuming people or zombies with little muscley arm icons above their heads. The whole evolution system works really well and kind of forces you to stop rushing through the main campaign, which now that I think of, is painfully short, maybe that’s why they added all that padding.

Speaking of the campaign. Every cut scene in the game is black and white, with only the primary colours being in actual colour, so it draws your eye to blood, or the freaking inside of Heller’s hood. Geez. But it’s an artistic style that they chose, and I kind of like it. Unfortunately, there are only two main characters you’ll actually see in colour, one is Heller and the other is Mercer, so you don’t even know what colour any body’s shirt is. But they’re not red, yellow, or blue, I can tell you that much.

Let me talk about NYZ its self. The first game had the player stuck on Manhattan, which was a large enough island and had plenty to do. Prototype 2 features three islands of New York, I have no idea what they’re called, so don’t ask me. I do know, that in the game they’re called the Green Zone, the Yellow Zone and the Red Zone. You start off in the Yellow Zone, and then move to the Green Zone and finally the Red Zone which is Manhattan and completely crazy.

What else is there to talk about? Them greeaphiks? Nah, nobody needs to know about that.

On a scale of running around New York with super powers to shooting the same generic guns at some twelve year olds [PROTOTYPE 2] gets an abuse of caps-lock.

BUY IT!

Also, they took out that awful part where you lose your powers. Come on, you know what I’m talking about. Prototype sucks without your powers.