Previews// [PROTOTYPE]

Alex is a very versatile chap, with a whole range of acrobatics available at your fingertips. Pressing the A Button (I played the 360 version) makes you jump, but jumping several times in succession sees you taking larger leaps and bounds with every step. The X and Y Buttons are your obligatory main and heavy attack, and combining the two in association with the analogue stick can result in some rather tasty combo moves, especially when you have certain arms ‘equipped’. I managed to skid on a cop’s corpse along the city square by leaping up and landing on him with X. He’ll never use that face again.

Getting around New York is a breeze as well, with the right trigger used for sprinting down the street and up the tallest building. [PROTOTYPE] seems to want to give you a realistic world in the style of Grand Theft Auto IV, populated with NPC citizens and a working police force, with a character that can systematically break all of the rules. It’s a great escape from reality when you feel like the most powerful guy in the world, wreaking havoc on citizens and evil zombies alike.

There’s another element to [PROTOTYPE] that gets introduced as you progress through the initial chapters, and it’s the classic ‘disguise’. In grabbing people and performing a specific move to consume them, you basically absorb their identity in a Shang Tsung stylee. This adds to the roster of disguises you can use to evade capture from the SWAT teams and conspirators that are out to take you in and assumedly slam a bullet in your head. I had to consume a cop early on in the story to get into a friend’s house two blocks down, but obviously I had to refrain from doing anything out of place (such as running up walls like, I don’t know, a superhuman).

It’s clear that dark, superhuman anti-hero games are starting to form a bit of a trend this summer, akin to that of the annual blockbuster at your local cinema. [PROTOTYPE] seems to have the hallmarks of one of those popcorn flicks; an enigmatic lead, a twisted plotline, awesome and devastating powers and the sense of exhilaration you get from bouncing over cars and running up council flats.

I just hope that [PROTOTYPE] has the missions and the overall substance that can hold a player down for hours – the colour scheme evident in screens may already put some people off and if the environments don’t get more varied we might get a fun but shallow experience. So far, so good however - the game’s set for a mid-June release on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.