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Yowza

06/10/2009|Matt "Steerpike" Sakey|News8
Home » Home » News » Yowza
Yowza

IGN has surprised us all with this review of Radical’s Prototype, one of the most anticipated and hyped games of the summer. A 7.5 may seem like a good score, but let’s remember that a 7.5 from IGN is a 1 from anyone with credibility. Moreover, the substance of the review is… chilly at best.

This is a game I was looking forward to – actually I failed to get it at Best Buy last night – but based on this I might just hold off. I have Red Faction to keep me company, and I’m still enjoying that immensely.

This is a perennial problem with open world games – blandness, repetition, insufficient uniqueness in art and models. Add to that the completely textbook missions that pepper most (even Red Faction is guilty of this) and you have a recipe for a game format that sounds brilliant but executes very poorly.

I’ll withhold final judgment on Prototype until I see some other reviews, but for a game as hotly anticipated as this one, from a studio that’s got some good hits to its credit, this is both a surprise and a disappointment.

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04/26/2017 Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

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Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

Tap-Repeatedly Overlord Steerpike is a games industry journalist and consultant. His earliest memories are of video games, and hopes his last memories will be of them as well. He’s a featured monthly columnist with the International Game Developers Association, and is internationally published in an assortment of dull e-Learning texts and less dull gaming publications. He also lectures on games at various universities.

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Prototype →

8 Responses to Yowza

  • Avatar
    Meho 06/10/2009

    My review should be up in the next 36 hours or so. I was really surprised that IGN would go for such a relatively low score. Sure, the game is nowhere near perfect but I have just finalised a three hour session on a PC (necesarry to compare it to the Xbox 360 version) and it’s destructive, chaotic fun without much depth but open world games are rarely about depth. It’s part Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, part Crackdown and that can’t really be a bad thing, can it? Oh, and, to continue our discussion from the messageboard: the PC version hardly has any visual edge over the console one so, get the Xbox version.

  • Avatar
    Matt "Steerpike" Sakey 06/10/2009

    So Meho, is it better than Red Faction? If I have one, do I need the other? I’ve seen some positive reviews as well, but that IGN piece lists some things that generally really irritate me, like popping and bad draw distance.

    However, anything that’s part Crackdown can’t be all bad.

  • Avatar
    Meho 06/10/2009

    He’s exaggerating about the popup and the draw distance. GTA IV this is not, but the gameplay is so quick that it would be a wonder not to have some popup. I agree with the criticism related to the blandness of Manhattan because a lot of architecture is just copypasted all over the place. The sense of a real place is simply not there, this is more a three dimensional playground.

    As for is it beter than RF Guerilla… well, I haven’t completed RFG yet but it’s a much more moderate game when it comes to pacing and a lot less open if you wanna talk in those terms. Prototype is much more brutal, much quicker and the destruction is technically less impressive (not as ‘real’ as in RFG) but philosophically more so because you destroy cars, tanks and people with your hands. There are also events such as rooftop races and killing sprees that give it that early GTA feel that I felt was missing from the RF Guerilla. As for do you need this, well, shit… The opening of my review reads “Why is it that YOU play games?” and if you play them because you want to fly over rooftops and bring the muthaphuckin ruckus using your mutated body parts, then yes, you need this.

  • Avatar
    GregP 06/10/2009

    *sigh*

    Man, I sorta hurried through the end of Cryostrasis last week JUST so I could start Prototype this week.  What a letdown.

    From IGN’s description, this just doesn’t sound like the game I thought it would be based on the hype leading up to its release (first time THAT’S happened, right?).  I can enjoy chaotic destruction as much as the next guy, but the fact that so little of the abilities seem to have any real utility (e.g. missions where they can be specifically showcased) and that much of the game seems to just involve waves of enemies being spawned at you – that’s a letdown.  I was imagining moments of calm as I stalked the streets looking for my next victims. 

    I would, though, like to see a video review of it on PC.  Meho, I know you said it doesn’t look much different, but were you running really high resolutions and everything maxed out?  I can’t believe that it couldn’t look any better on PC than it did on the 360 in IGN’s review.

  • Avatar
    Meho 06/10/2009

    I am running it on 1680×1050 with all settings on high. Of course, you do get better resolution that way and stuff but it just looks like upscaled Xbox graphics.

  • Avatar
    Jason Dobry 06/11/2009

    Wow.  IGN had almost nothing positive to say about this game, and yet it still earned a 7.5.  I know it’s not really a surprise to anyone, but…wow.  Is this simply a fear of alienating potential sponsors or just gross incompetence?  Either way, it gives Tap-Repeatedly a market.

    Think I’m going to pass on this game.  Crackdown didn’t really move me and this sounds too close with its waves of enemies and shallow open worlds.  You know what?  I’m SICK of open worlds with sterile environments and shitty gameplay. 

    In the meantime, I’m enjoying Cyrostasis at a leisurely pace.  The more I play it, the more I find to like about the game.

  • Avatar
    Matt "Steerpike" Sakey 06/11/2009

    IGN has no credibility; they’re the ones for whom the joke “7-10 rating scale” was invented. You have to look at the body of the review to get any value.

    Reviews are all over the map on this one, though everyone seems to agree that it’s not as good as it should be. I gather that our own Meho liked it pretty well, and some others have also given the game some praise.

    This is kind of an interesting time, with Red Faction Guerrilla, Infamous, and Prototype all released at once. RFG got WAY less hype than the other two, but in some ways seems to be the best of them.

    My problem is that I got this $100-use-it-anywhere gift card for speaking at a game conference last weekend, and it’s taunting me. Even if Prototype sucked, it’d be free. I’m so weak!

  • Avatar
    GregP 06/11/2009

    Heh-heh, Steerpike I’m almost in the same boat – I have a $25 Gamestop gift card that’ll drop Prototype to half price … trying … so … hard … to … resist! 

    Part of me, though, rationalizes that by buying it, I could thereby help render more judgment of it for fellow PC’ers.  So it might happen tonight on the way home from work.  🙂

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