Prototype 2’s open world turns traversal into the main event, and the mission design can’t keep up

Prototype 2 gives you a city to eat. That is the pitch, and it mostly holds up. Radical Entertainment’s 2012 sequel moves the series away from Alex Mercer and hands the reins to Sergeant James Heller, a former U.S. Marine who returns from Iraq to find his wife and daughter declared dead. The Blacklight virus took them. Heller wants the man who let it loose.

The game puts you in a New York City renamed New York Zero, split into zones and crawling with infected. You play from a third-person view in an open world based on modern-day Manhattan. You can shapeshift, steal identities, and consume people for their memories. It is a power fantasy with a revenge plot bolted to the front.

Trailer, via IGN.

Heller Wants Mercer Dead

The setup is simple and mean. Two years after the first game, Heller rejoins the military to fight the outbreak. He gets briefed on earlier incidents, including an outbreak in Idaho in the ’60s, then finds Mercer and chases him. Mercer infects him with a strain that leaves his humanity intact while granting powers close to Mercer’s own. Heller wakes in a Yellow Zone lab where Gentek scientist Dr. Anton Koenig and Blackwatch Col. Douglas Rooks are running experiments on him.

He escapes. Mercer then tells him Gentek and Blackwatch recreated the virus and caused the second infection, the one that killed Heller’s family. Mercer offers a truce. Heller does not trust him and goes to his pastor, Father Luis Guerra, for advice.

That relationship carries the story further than the revenge thread does. Guerra feeds Heller information. Heller uses it to hack Blacknet Terminals and sabotage Blackwatch operations. He consumes his way up the chain until he reaches Koenig, who claims to be an ally and discloses a super-soldier program called Orion.

Koenig, Orion, and the Evolved

Koenig’s turn is where Prototype 2 gets interesting. Heller kills a super-soldier injected with his own DNA to stall Orion. Then he consumes a head scientist and learns Koenig was studying him to find weaknesses. He hunts Koenig down and finds a man with powers like his own — one of several Evolved agents Mercer planted inside Gentek and Blackwatch.

Mercer’s plan surfaces here. He wants Heller recruited to help control New York Zero. Guerra then shows Heller a video of Mercer releasing the virus at Penn Station, the same place Mercer first released and contracted it. Heller switches from vengeance to something closer to duty.

He heads to the Green Zone to hunt Mercer’s henchmen, including Evolved agent Sabrina Galloway. She offers help taking Mercer down, and Heller reluctantly accepts. Through her he learns Mercer intends to infect the world using Whitelight, a contaminated vaccine Gentek released that speeds infection and evolution instead of preventing either.

Guerra Dies, Maya Lives

Mercer kills Father Guerra. Heller finds the body and uses Guerra’s phone to reach Athena, who turns out to be Dana Mercer. She tells him his daughter Maya is alive. That single fact redirects the entire back half of the game. Heller pushes into the Red Zone to kill Mercer and save Maya.

Blackwatch tries a second time to level Manhattan Island. Heller stops it. Rooks, of all people, helps him reach Maya — then Galloway betrays him and hands the girl to Mercer. Mercer explains the endgame: infect every human being, end international conflict, build a Superorganism with Maya at its center.

He absorbs Galloway and the remaining Evolved. Heller fights him and wins, killing and consuming Mercer. He wipes out the infected across New York Zero and most of the virus, then uses Mercer’s memories to find Maya and Dana locked in a vault. The three stand over the city. Dana asks what they do next.

A Good Fight With a Repetitive Middle

The combat is the reason to stay. Heller rips a Gatling cannon off a tank and turns it on enemies. A dodging system and new, more realistic AI keep fights from swamping you. Consuming people is more tactical than it was for Mercer, and assuming a soldier’s identity in the Yellow Zone draws reactions that make clear civilians want nothing to do with Blackwatch.

The problem is the loop. Consume, sabotage, consume again. The game’s repetitive nature is its real weakness, and the main storyline does not carry enough weight to cover the stretch. The plot leans on twists — Koenig’s betrayal, Galloway’s double cross, Mercer’s Superorganism — that land harder on paper than in play.

Here is the schedule the game’s release followed:

Prototype 2 was announced at the 2010 Spike Video Game Awards. It sold well at launch, and the PlayStation 3 and Windows versions reviewed better than the Xbox 360 version.

The sequel fixes things the first game got wrong and then repeats itself until the fixes stop mattering. Heller is a better anchor than Mercer was, and the Penn Station reveal gives the story a spine. But a game about consuming everything should not feel like it is running out of things to consume. Worth playing for the combat. Worth patience for the rest.

action game · Activision · game review · open world · Prototype 2 · Radical Entertainment