It's an interesting question to ask while playing: why did Prototype fail? Yes, it did fail, although for hours while playing I couldn't quite put my finger on what exactly missed the mark. It's a fun failure, in places, with a sense of power that feels almost unearned. The game begins with the worst cliche of this sort of game: you have all your powers straight up, and get to tear-ass around the city for a few minutes before the game shoves you back in time to explain how you got there. The problem—and this is a big problem for a superhero game—is that this approach makes you feel powerful, and then weak. Since you've already lost most of your humanity, what's the point of feeling like a weak monster?

Title Prototype Developer Radical Entertainment Publisher Activision Blizzard Price $59.99 Shop.ars Platform Xbox 360, PS3, PC

In Prototype you play Alex Mercer, who wakes up in the morgue, finding himself in possession of some interesting abilities but not many memories of how he got them. His only thought is to kill everyone who had a hand in creating what he has become.

The mark of a great superhero game is that even at the beginning of the game, you feel powerful. From there, you become more gifted, until you feel god-like. The sequence of events in Prototype doesn't allow for much forward momentum, and your quest for revenge feels hollow and empty. Prototype is going to suffer from comparisons to the vastly superior inFamous; the games jump on the scale to be weighed against each other, as they both feature a main character of nearly identical aesthetics and similar vocal stylings, in similar cities, with similar powers. When I began hunting down water tanks on the top of buildings in Prototype I was already ready to walk away; I was annoyed by this same mission in inFamous weeks ago.

While the protagonist in inFamous can be a good or bad force on the city, in Prototype you are a bad guy. You run around the city killing anyone who gets in your way, gaining health back by stealing the life force of those around you. You destroy buildings by running up their sides, and bounding along the street you cause destruction wherever you land. This is no grace or subtlety to what you're doing; in many cases the pedestrians feel like plastic soldiers on a kitchen table, and you're a five-year-old boy knocking them to the floor just for the joy of creating chaos. The problem is that this is fun once, and after that it just becomes ugly and clumsy.

You want to find out why you are the way you are, but unlike inFamous—a game that gave your character a soul and characters who brought out the best and worst in him—it just doesn't seem enough to keep the interest of the player. You have characters who give you missions, and what must they think as you slaughter hundreds while trying to find this woman or kill that man? Do they calmly wait while you shower the blood and viscera off your one outfit before saying there is a group of people you need to eat to gain their memories? That's right—in Prototype you "consume" characters to find out what they know about the sequence of events leading to your abilities and the chaos in the city.

What does it say that I kept hoping that a soldier with a rocket launcher would hit me? I had fantasies of letting the military cut me to shreds with their tanks and helicopters. When a game makes me virtually suicidal, that is not a good sign. Combat often feels like button-mashing, and since you're allowed—even encouraged—to kill everyone you see, it's a simple thing to just run around spamming your attacks to paint the ground red. As you become more powerful, you can lock onto and then elbow-drop a tank until it explodes. You'll gain a limited glide ability. In no time you'll be scooting around the city, but unlike the sublime Spider Man 2 you never really feel like you're a part of it; it simply doesn't feel alive.

The game is also somewhat small for an open-world title, feeling no larger than the first area in inFamous. The missions all feel designed by committee; you know what you'll have to do and how to do it before you turn the game on. The open-world superhero game is rife with tired mechanics we've played before. The ability to take on the identity of others to infiltrate some areas is clever, but it's one of the few things that the game does that feels interesting. Even the graphics are rather bland, and wait until you see a building collapse for the first time—the animation feels like the pre-visualization of a PSone title.

Creating a powerful being in a game has to mean something, and Prototype goes out of its way to make you feel out of touch with humanity (and even reality) throughout your mission for revenge. Being a bad guy can certainly have its own rewards, but being a monster isn't nearly as interesting. I couldn't sympathize with the character, I wasn't excited by his large number of flailing, bloody attacks, and I mentally checked out when I realized none of my actions had any real consequences other than to move the game forward.

The best I can say about this game is that if you have illusions of grandeur with a smattering of violent tendencies, it may work for you. But Prototype feels soulless and slightly hateful, and coming so soon after the wonderful inFamous, the empty journey of a soul who was damned before the game began feels like a waste of everyone's time.

Verdict: Skip