Last night I began to play Prototype, Activision's open-world anti-hero title, and it's hard to get used to the very different feel and style of the game after playing inFamous. Radical Entertainment and Sucker Punch have to be tired of their respective titles being compared to each other, but they both feature a gravelly-voiced man with super-powers making his way across an open world, trying to unravel the mysteries behind his powers. The main difference? In inFamous you can be a good guy, in Prototype your only concern is revenge.

The game doesn't tiptoe around the idea of being a bad guy, either. Battles between your character and the military feature bodies and cars flying this way and that as civilians are treated as little more than shrapnel. To fill your energy you can grab anyone in the world and "consume" them, first killing their body and then absorbing their body into yours. The game gleefully counts up the number of military and random passers-by you kill in each mission.

This is going to be a good thing for those of you who don't mind playing the villain every now and then, but for those pansies—like me—who quick load every time they accidentally run over a pedestrian in Grand Theft Auto, it presents quite the issue. I never harvested a single little sister. I disliked playing a dark side character in Knights of the Old Republic. If you want to play Prototype however, you've got to burn to shine.

Who knows what the story will hold later in the game, it would be a brave choice to have the main character completely disappear into the darkness and actually get his revenge. Turning things around would also be tricky—was Darth Vader really a good guy because he saved his son? Didn't he commit genocide not too long ago? In games and media it seems like one good deed can wipe out any number of bad deeds, and the men and women who I destroyed to get to the end of the game may find cold comfort in the fact that I let some scientist live, or had a turn of heart at the last minute.

That's for later though, for now I'm having fun careening through the game's 31 missions. And you know what? Being the villain isn't as bad as I thought it would be. In fact, it almost feels... good.

Prototype is available now for the PS3, Xbox 360, and PC.