Prototype or Infamous?

[Cheezdoodles]

After playing the infamous demo i acknowledged i wanted a new open world game, crackdown was a lot of fun, and superpowers are cool. I noticed that there are two similar games out, prototype and infamous, and both are getting the same mixed 82-85% score average. Ive tried deciding through reviews, but its to hard.

Anybody played both?

What are the positives, negatives? Stenght of each game?

My only gripe with infamous is that the demo powers wheren't all that cool. With crackdown, i also thought it was super lame that we used normal weapons. I thought it would have been a much better game if it had infamous-style weapons (as in superpowers) rather than weapons. All infamous demo weapons seems like substitutes for regular guns, you got electric grenade, electric rifle shot, rpg, etc just like one would have weapons). Do you unlock more powerful\more interesting ones?

I hear that in prototype, there is a lot of crazy powers and moves you can pull off.
I like the idea of having more powers (i really enjoyed leaping from building to building in crackdown, wheras that doesn't seem to be very doable in infamous (in the sense that, you can only jump slightly higher than a normal human being. Can you unlock some better jumping\flying abilities? Other than that poor R1 while in air dash thingy in the demo? )

So, who has the coolest superpowers?

How do they compare graphically?

Lenght?

Thanks

 

[obonicus]

I've only played one (Infamous), so I'll just talk of what's not in the demo. The demo actually covers most weapons. What you're missing is the rocket launcher -- the good side one is one of my favorite weapons, since it allows you to fire a rocket and then guide it towards a target. The evil-side rocket launcher is much like the grenade, it splits into several other rockets. Besides that, you have the evil/good mission weapons. The good side's pretty useless, I can't even figure out what it's good for, while the evil side is essentially sith lightning. If weapons are your main concern, the demo should give you a good idea -- there's a lot more mission variety past the ones in the demo, which aren't really that memorabl.

You got a pretty good idea of what jumping abilities are possible in Infamous, as well -- you can make most jumps, but mainly with a combination of rail-grinding and thrusters. Unfortunately, they never really give you a double-jump (I'd sort of have expected this from the Sly folks).

 

[2real4tv]

On the weapons side I think prototype has more variety from impressions I read

 

[Arwin]

I've listened to basically all the podcasts on games out there, and they are unanimous on inFamous being better than Prototype. For a lot of people it's even their favorite PS3 game (which is not to say it's perfect, nobody claims that, just a lot of fun). Most reviews seem to agree on this as well. I think this one is probably a no-brainer.

 

[tha_con]

I wasn't a fan of prototype, it felt like a Hulk Ultimate Destruction clone. I tried to get into it, but it just didn't do much for me. Granted, I only played it at a friends place for about an hour, but it just felt like it was trying to hard to be "violent"so it could be "cool"... so I lost interest really quickly.

 

[fallguy]

inFamous.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Haven't played Infamous, noone I know that has a PS3 is into "superhero" type games so none of them are going to pick it up.

So I can only comment on Prototype.

If we ignore graphics and just get down to gameplay.

I'm already in controller overload with the amount of powers available to me, and I haven't even unlocked half of them yet.

You have 4 areas of active powers. Offensive, Defensive, Disguise, and Sensory.

The Offensive powers I've unlocked so far are Claws (fast melee), Hammer (not the real name, but it's the slow heavy hitter), Whipcord (might not be actual name, but it's a longer range more AE oriented attack). And I think there's still one or two to unlock.

The Defensive power I have unlocked is a shield. I can't remember how many others there.

Not sure which disguise powers I have unlocked either, I think there's just one general one.

Sensory one I have allows you to highlight enemies through smoke/darkness. There's also one or two others I haven't unlocked yet.

You can have any combo of offensive + defensive + sensory power active at a time. Using the disguise power automatically cancels offensive power. Can't remember if it cancels defensive also.

And after that you have a gajillion (ok exaggeration there) ways to upgrade everything. Upgrade categories are Powers, Movement, Survivability, Combat, Disguise, Vehicles, and Weapons.

Powers can be upgraded with secondary abilities. Movement and Survivability are passive superhero abilities. Combat are active and passive abilities that are always available. Vehicles and Weapons are modifiers that are applied when using the applicable weapon or vehicle. Artillery strike for example can be modified with greater AE radius and more shells.

Disguise, Vehicle and Weapon abilities are upgraded by consuming the appropriate type of personel. Consuming an APC driver for instance will give you the skill, and consuming additional ones will improve your skill. All weapons in game are fair game to use. So guided missle launchers, assault rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, etc. Only military vehicles are available to drive.

All others are upgraded with EP that are gained through completing missions, completing events (skill challenges), finding hint spheres, finding location spheres, or killing combatants (soldiers, cops or infected but NOT civilians).

Movement I'm assuming is similar to Hulk. With the huge jumping. You can also run on any vertical surface. However, you cannot run upside down. So no running on a ceiling for example. Makes climbing any building trivial.

You also have the ability to do an air dash (acceleration while in the air including when jumping as well as instantly changing your direction in the air) and later to chain air dashes. You also have the ability to glide. You can chain air dashes and glides. Makes for some really interesting ways to move around.

Jumps, Air Dashes, Glides, and Run speed can all be upgraded for speed, distance, or height depending on if it's relevant to the ability. And air abilities can be additionally upgraded with how many times you can use them in the air before having to land.

I haven't really noticed the gore too much as I'm having fun with the rest of it. However that leads me to...

The storyline. Don't want to ruin it, but it's basically all based around conspiracy theory's. And the way it plays out means it's has no other option but to eventually be violent. If I knew how to do the spoiler thing, I'd post a little more details, but don't want to ruin what little surprise there is for anyone that's going to play it.

The story for me was the weakest link.

Oh and the entire island of Manhattan is yours to play in. Never been there so I don't know how faithfully buildings and whatnot were recreated.

Regards,
SB

 

[DrJay24]

After playing the infamous demo i acknowledged i wanted a new open world game, crackdown was a lot of fun, and superpowers are cool. I noticed that there are two similar games out, prototype and infamous, and both are getting the same mixed 82-85% score average. Ive tried deciding through reviews, but its to hard.

Not rreally. inFamous has a median score of 9/10 with 50+ reviews. Prototype looks like it has 80+ mean score with like 17 reviews, but most of it's high scores are no-name reviewers, it it doing poor with most mainstream sites. When the dust settles Prototype will drop below into the 70s.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Not rreally. inFamous has a median score of 9/10 with 50+ reviews. Prototype looks like it has 80+ mean score with like 17 reviews, but most of it's high scores are no-name reviewers, it it doing poor with most mainstream sites. When the dust settles Prototype will drop below into the 70s.

Eh? Just checked metacritic.

Infamous PS3 - 85% based on 78 reviews.

Prototype PS3 - 83% out of 18 reviews.
Prototype X360 - 79% out of 32 reviews.
Prototype PC - 81% out of 13 reviews.

So around the low 80's out of 63 total reviews. They still seem to be pretty close. With PS3 reviewers seeming to like it quite a bit more than X360 reviewers.

I'm surprised the PC version scored as high as it did considering how buggy it is. I really needs a patch to smooth things out.

Either way, it doesn't sound as if Prototype is as polished as Infamous. But other than that, they appear to offer almost completely different game experiences.

Regards,
SB

 

[ShadowRunner]

Not rreally. inFamous has a median score of 9/10 with 50+ reviews. Prototype looks like it has 80+ mean score with like 17 reviews, but most of it's high scores are no-name reviewers, it it doing poor with most mainstream sites. When the dust settles Prototype will drop below into the 70s.

Eh? Just checked metacritic.

Infamous PS3 - 85% based on 78 reviews.

Prototype PS3 - 83% out of 18 reviews.
Prototype X360 - 79% out of 32 reviews.
Prototype PC - 81% out of 13 reviews.

So around the low 80's out of 63 total reviews. They still seem to be pretty close. With PS3 reviewers seeming to like it quite a bit more than X360 reviewers.

I'm surprised the PC version scored as high as it did considering how buggy it is. I really needs a patch to smooth things out.

Either way, it doesn't sound as if Prototype is as polished as Infamous. But other than that, they appear to offer almost completely different game experiences.

Regards,
SB

Median is different to mean, im guessing thats where he got the 9/10 from. Not sure why he was comparing the median score for infamous to the mean score of prototype though.

 

[obonicus]

It is amazing that no one has played both games, though.

 

[tha_con]

It's not particularly amazing We all have limited time, after all!

I gave Prototype a shot, played it for an hour, but greatly prefer inFamous. That's not to say that Prototype was bad, it just didn't click for me.

 

[upnorthsox]

Median is different to mean, im guessing thats where he got the 9/10 from. Not sure why he was comparing the median score for infamous to the mean score of prototype though.

Not sure why he did that either though the median for Prototype comes out to be roughly the same as the mean.

SB on the other hand used a total of reviews for all platforms when clearly some of those reviews are the same one applied to all platforms. Not sure it effects the scores though.

Btw, slightly OT but I see Eurogamer are still the retro-2D-minigame-wannabe snobs they had become, and yet I bet metacritic is still weighs their reviews heavier. And Tom Bramwell is still the worst of the lot, he really needs to just go play his iphone.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Not sure why he did that either though the median for Prototype comes out to be roughly the same as the mean.

SB on the other hand used a total of reviews for all platforms when clearly some of those reviews are the same one applied to all platforms. Not sure it effects the scores though.

Btw, slightly OT but I see Eurogamer are still the retro-2D-minigame-wannabe snobs they had become, and yet I bet metacritic is still weighs their reviews heavier. And Tom Bramwell is still the worst of the lot, he really needs to just go play his iphone.

Yeah some of them are the same across, I didn't feel like double checking all the subtracting those that were duplicates.

To be fair though from a cursory glace there appears to be as many duplicate high scores as there are duplicate low scores.

For example 1up with the 67 rating is duplicated as is Cheat Code Central with a 98. Someone with more time than me can feel free to recalc without duplicates. Or something.

Either way, just going by peoples comments about what they thought of Infamous (and even mentioned in some of the Prototype reviews), Infamous just sounds more polished to me even though I haven't played it.

But as I stated somewhere else, it seems that Infamous and Prototype are really two very different types of game experiences.

As such I expect some will like Infamous more and some will like Prototype more, and some may like both.

But just due to the polish I think more people will gravitate to Infamous. With that said though, it's a huge blast playing with the various power and the openess of the game in Prototype. I went in expecting to not like it, and ended up buying it.

And I totally expect Infamous to blow away prototype on PS3. But prototype has an advantage in being on 2 console platforms plus PC. So it may end up selling more in total.

Regards,
SB

 

[tha_con]

Yeah some of them are the same across, I didn't feel like double checking all the subtracting those that were duplicates.

To be fair though from a cursory glace there appears to be as many duplicate high scores as there are duplicate low scores.

For example 1up with the 67 rating is duplicated as is Cheat Code Central with a 98. Someone with more time than me can feel free to recalc without duplicates. Or something.

Either way, just going by peoples comments about what they thought of Infamous (and even mentioned in some of the Prototype reviews), Infamous just sounds more polished to me even though I haven't played it.

But as I stated somewhere else, it seems that Infamous and Prototype are really two very different types of game experiences.

As such I expect some will like Infamous more and some will like Prototype more, and some may like both.

But just due to the polish I think more people will gravitate to Infamous. With that said though, it's a huge blast playing with the various power and the openess of the game in Prototype. I went in expecting to not like it, and ended up buying it.

And I totally expect Infamous to blow away prototype on PS3. But prototype has an advantage in being on 2 console platforms plus PC. So it may end up selling more in total.

Regards,
SB

I agree, though I don't think anyone will really care which sells more, as it doesn't really matter at all.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I agree, though I don't think anyone will really care which sells more, as it doesn't really matter at all.

Agreed, as long as you have fun playing it. And considering I don't think either game had a huge budget, it should be easy for each to make a profit, IMO.

Regards,
SB

 

[obonicus]

Agreed, as long as you have fun playing it. And considering I don't think either game had a huge budget, it should be easy for each to make a profit, IMO.

I suspect Prototype's been through some sort of development hell. There was a year-long delay, a couple of devs (including the 'game designer') who were working on it (they were even in videos when it was still at Vivendi!) are now at different studios, there were 100 people laid off, half of Radical's staff. That, plus the Vivendi/Activision merger and it was one of the few titles spared the knife on a supposed promise of 'annualization'. I wonder if it's really low-budget.

Infamous is, according to Sucker Punch, 60 people working 3 years on the game. Plus it actually shipped early. Not that 130k copies sold in the US is excellent.

Not that this impacts relative game quality at all, just weighing in that I think Prototype is probably considerably higher-budget, especially since it's multiplat.

 

[Gitaroo]

I finsihed both, like Infamous waaaaay better, for its story telling, and gameplay. I dont mind prototype too, lots of stuffs you can do, lots of weapons and crazy combos, but I find it has waaaay too much combos, half way through the game I just memorizing them and stick with only 1 or 2 that I find is the most effective. If I would say Infamous easily.

 

[obonicus]

I finsihed both, like Infamous waaaaay better, for its story telling, and gameplay. I dont mind prototype too, lots of stuffs you can do, lots of weapons and crazy combos, but I find it has waaaay too much combos, half way through the game I just memorizing them and stick with only 1 or 2 that I find is the most effective. If I would say Infamous easily.

That's more like it. (a.k.a. someone who's actually finished both)

 

[zed]

I find gamerevolution tend to give the best reviews generally of the large sites

http://www.gamerevolution.com/review/ps3/prototype C+
http://www.gamerevolution.com/review/ps3/infamous B+