inFamous vs. Prototype

The entertainment industry is not often credited with being very original. Ideas are ripped off wholesale so often that every song or story you hear is likely a retelling of some earlier idea. There is, however, usually some distance between the original and its copycat, but every now and then we’ll see these dopplegangers arrive on the scene at the same time, leaving us to wonder, “Who ripped off who?”

Filmgoers are perhaps the most acquainted with this phenomena. We had the classic pairings of A Bugs Life/Antz, Amageddon/Deep Impact, Dante’s Inferno/Volcano, or more recently Paul Blart: Mall Cop/Observe and Report. This month, gamers can get a taste of the double dip with two hotly anticipated open world superhero games, inFamous and Prototype. And in these rough economic times it may benefit you to know which one you should plop down mom’s hard earned money for. So here it is, a step by step breakdown of each game’s strengths and weaknesses.

First Impressions (Graphics):

The first thing anyone notices in a game are the graphics and these two triple A titles are sure to deliver in that regard, right? Not by a long shot. Both titles seem to have been hit by the ugly stick a few times.

inFamous actually features a fairly detailed world, nice character models, and fluid animation but all this is brought down a peg by the fact that it seems to have been put through a PS2 filter. This is one jagged edged game, something that should never be a problem in the new era of high definition gaming. Add to that a bland art style and color palette and you’ve got a game that won’t be impressing anyone with its visuals.

Prototype suffers from a different problem. It’s got the smooth edges and sheen we expect from the current generation games (Wii excluded, of course) but it just seems unfinished. The game has very simple textures, low polygon models, terrible draw distance, and jerky, unnatural animations. It really feels like you are playing the alpha build of what is sure to be an awesome looking game. The buildings are just big rectangular structures with almost no detail. There is almost no environmental damage that can be done but there are a few predetermined buildings you can destroy and the explosion animations will have you yearning for the days of sprite graphics.

Winner: inFamous (by a hair)

Playing The Hero (Gameplay):

Ok, so the games aren’t stunning but that’s not why we’re playing them. The idea of being a super powered being in a living vibrant world is not a new concept and not one that hasn’t been tried before but these games promised to deliver where others have fallen short, so how do they stack up?

In inFamous you play as a normal guy who, through a freak accident (or was it?), is imbued with the power to wield electricity. Could be cool right? Wrong.

Other that your electricity powers you really aren’t that powerful. You certainly never feel as though you’re some unstoppable force with a city as its plaything. Sure you can survive long falls and eventually hover for short periods of time but you won’t be leaping buildings in a single bound anytime soon. What you will be doing a lot of though is climbing. This marks the games first similarity to Assassins Creed. The best way to get around and escape trouble is to climb up the random water pipes and crevices of buildings (none of which are very tall), a process made very easy by the fact that you have an almost magnetic attraction (I guess a side effect of you being electrically charged) to any surface you can grab unto. This makes it seem like the game is pretty much playing for you while you just press jump over and over again.

This wouldn’t be so bad if it was just confined to climbing, but the game also features a fair amount of platforming and this magnetism completely ruins this aspect of the game. What’s the point of having extensive platforming set pieces if it requires nothing out of the player other than pressing x to get to the next platform? It’s almost a quick time event in disguise. The other major problem is that there are many, many surfaces to grab onto and climb and the game oftentimes chooses the wrong one, forcing you in the wrong direction during some pivotal moments.

So movement is a bit busted but hopefully the combat will make up for it. Wrong again. Where this game fails at making you feel like a bad ass superhero, it succeeds in being a “stand on rooftops shooting lightening bolts at other rooftops” simulator. Trying to do any close quarters fighting leads to punishing beatdowns as you are often surrounded by enemies you can’t see and who have perfect aim, so your best bet is to always stay high and just shoot lightening bolts over and over while the auto aim takes care of things for you. It’s monotonous and no fun. It also renders almost all of your character upgrades useless. Upgrade your defenses and your main attack and thats all you need to get through the entire game.

The last mark against inFamous is torturous repetition. It is not quite as bad as Assassin’s Creed’s famously redundant gameplay but it’s close. The missions are unimaginative and follow the same structure everytime. So instead of offering an open world where you are free to do what you want it ends up making you underpowered and enslaving you in rigged, repetitive gameplay.

So, that brings us to Prototype, does it suffer the same faults? No! It’s actually fun!

In Prototype you play as a character who wakes up one day infected with some crazy virus (think the Symbiote suit from Spider Man) that makes him able to shape shift and gives him super strength, and the game actually succeeds at making you feel like a bad ass. You can leap great distances, run at super speed, run up walls, glide through the air, and you have a ton of different (and useful) options when it comes to combat, whether it be through your own shape shifting powers or by grabbing military weapons and vehicles. The upgrade tree is pretty large and just about everything is useful.

Whereas inFamous was a platformer disguised as an open world sandbox game, Prototype is more of a brawler. Missions generally consist of putting you in an “arena” and throwing a ton of enemies at you for you to dispose of however you see fit. This can get a bit annoying towards the end of the game as the amount of enemies is really overwhelming but it really lends a chaotic and breakneck feel to the proceedings. The two big negatives here are that things don’t seem to have the proper “weight” to them and the graphics just don’t do the action justice (it also turns into a slideshow when things get too hectic).

The missions are nicely varied so you don’t fall into the repetition that you see in inFamous and traversing the city is fast and fun since you can move at great speeds and leap and glide over things whereas in inFamous you ran slowly and couldn’t even jump over a chain link fence.

Winner: Prototype

My City Screams (Open Worlds):

One of the biggest keys to success in open world games is the ability to create a convincing city to play around in. Grand Theft Auto reigns supreme in this regard with it’s utterly convincing alternate worlds full of small little details to sell it.

In inFamous you play in a fictional town that has been ravaged by a terrorist attack and this is where the problem starts. There is one explosion in inFamous and it is an electrical explosion that is confined to one area of the city, however the whole city is ravaged in the aftermath. Only a couple of days after the incident it looks like it’s well on its way to Mad Max territory with its dilapidated buildings and ruined vehicles and flamboyant street gangs. Why exactly did normal looking gangs all the sudden start dressing in cloaks and trash bags after the explosion? This is never explained. Also, in a matter of days these gangs have managed to erect a tower built of scrap metal and trash? None of it rings true. You have clearly delved into some fantasy realm here and that really takes away from the feeling of being an extraordinary being in an ordinary environment.

The town also fails to feel vibrant and alive, with only a few pedestrians roaming about and enemies randomly placed on rooftops (it seriously feels like the developers were just lazy and put an enemy on every rooftop instead of creating a convincing sense of territorial gangs roaming about. Why are they hanging out up there? Once again, I don’t buy it.). Everything about the world in inFamous feels false.

Prototype on the other hand is based in the real world location of Manhattan and this goes a long way towards establishing a sense of reality. It also has natural and convincing enemy placement with each faction (the military and the infected) having their own bases where their forces are amassed. The streets are also brimming with life which always helps.

It’s not without its faults though. For one, the detail is so bad in the city that it really hampers believability. You can never quite convince yourself that these are real functioning structures. Also, there seems to have been no time spent making the behavior of the citizens believable. They just run around randomly like ants after their mound as been kicked. Watching the crazy ways people drive is a constant source of entertainment (there are constant pile ups and weirdness like people driving in reverse everywhere). You could maybe convince yourself that all this is intentional and is meant to convey a populace losing its mind on the verge of destruction but given how unpolished the rest of the game is I think it’s much more likely just lazy programming.

Winner: Prototype (by a hair)

With Great Power (Story):

The final thing we’ll be looking at here is the story in the games.

In inFamous you play as a courier of sorts whose world is changed when a package he is meant to deliver explodes and sends the city spiraling into chaos while at the same time granting him superpowers. You are an established character here, with existing relationships, yet the game does a terrible job of conveying any of this to you. You don’t have a real sense of who the main character is or what his relationship is like with his best friend and girlfriend and that makes it very hard to care about any of them.

The game also fails at putting you in the shoes of a person who has just gained powers. After the chaotic beginning of the game where you gain your powers, it fast forwards a few days and shows a character already accustomed to his new abilities. It would have done the game wonders to have a tutorial chapter where we get to know a bit about the character and his relationship and get to learn about our abilities in the same way he does, to really have a sense of wonder about what is happening.

The major selling point for the game was its morality system. Yes, it’s another game where you can either be good or evil and the options for doing so are comically disparate. Few games are really able to pull this mechanic off in a subtle and believable way, and inFamous is not one of those games. I initially played through on evil and didn’t for a second buy that my character would do any of the things I was making him do. Since he was already an established personality, I knew enough to know he was at least a decent guy, not a serial killer.

But as I said, this is not a problem confined to just this game. As long as it succeeds at giving you a unique experience depending on the actions you take then it would have succeeded, but again, it doesn’t. I slogged my way through a second time to see the good side of things and was shocked to find that NOTHING is different. Apart from a handful of lines of dialog you are getting the EXACT same game no matter what you choose to do. All the events play out the exact same whether you go the evil or the good route, the cutscenes are the exact same, the ending is the exact same. It is horribly disappointing and borderline infuriating that they’d hype up a game mechanic that has NO IMPACT on the game whatsoever. Even the different powers you get don’t matter because all you’re going to be doing is shooting from one rooftop to the other the whole game.

The story in inFamous is also very comic-booky, and not in a good way. It’s got over the top villains, a non sensical story, and a complete lack of character development. Yet again, inFamous fails.

Prototype starts off a little better because you play a man who can’t remember his past and who is being overtaken by a virus/parasite. So you basically have a blank slate that you can project whatever personality you like onto. Which makes it much easier to swallow some of the evil stuff you do in the game. And let’s be clear, you’re a bad dude in Prototype. It doesn’t muck around with morality, you are the kind of guy who will rip the head off an innocent woman and drink her blood to give you a little bit more health.

Much of the story of Prototype is delivered through small flashback scenes that are acquired when you “consume” certain individuals. In order to regain health or gain new abilities in Prototype you basically allow the virus to assimilate that person into you and you gain all their memories and abilities. So there are certain key characters throughout the city who you can consume to fill in the backstory, which is shown in fun little sequences that mix live action with computer animation.

The story itself is simple and not particularly well told, but it gets the job done. Instead of coming off like a bad comic book, it comes off like a mediocre action film. Something Bruckheimer might make. You understand all the archetypes at play here and you get just enough info on them to carry you through. It also moves at a brisk pace that makes it hard to put the controller down.

Winner: Prototype

So there you have it. At the end of the day Prototype is the superior product but don’t walk away thinking that means it’s a great game. Both of these are fairly mediocre and quite disappointing for games that carried so much promise, but at least Prototype is a solid rental while inFamous isn’t good for much of anything.

Now I’m going to go back to praying that Rockstar makes a GTA game with a superhero lead.