The mood to sandbox: an overview of Crackdown and Prototype

As I've established, the mood tends to strike me to play a specific game, series or even particular genre. Recently that particular genre was the sandbox, which I suppose is more like a style of game rather than a genre, but whatever. Sandboxes are a favorite of mine. I like virtual worlds, I like to explore, and - while I am also a fan of simple, relatively linear games - I like broader games with lots of freedom sometimes too. During this mood I made it through two slightly older games I'd never played before: Crackdown and Prototype on the Xbox 360. I enjoyed both significantly.

Crackdown could well receive my award for best Xbox 360 exclusive (not that such an award exists). I've been interested in it since I saw it played back when it was a launch title for the system and I'm glad I finally made my way to it. It only took a few days to go through it, but it was a great experience. I liked the game's simplicity, roaming the city at my own pace, searching for collectibles and going after gang leaders as I went. No missions, no hand holding - just you (a genetically-enhanced super cop), a general premise of what to do and very little keeping you from going about it however you want. That Crackdown is short yet very replayable is also a strength in its’ favor.

Finding the location of a gang leader, learning the boundaries of their area and then choosing usually one of several entry points to begin a bloody path toward the target is certainly fun and an element central to the experience. That said, I spent the majority of my time with Crackdown by doing super jumps from rooftop to rooftop, seeing the sights of Pacific City and occasionally shooting a rocket launcher at a cluster of gang members. It didn't get old and honestly it wasn't long enough to wear on me, so I look forward to a similar experience when I feel like going through it again (your agent becomes more powerful at various skills the more you use them and the game does have a "new game+" style option, so there’s also that).

Another perk of Crackdown: I found it used for a couple bucks. Money well spent.

Moving on, I’m going to now talk about Prototype. How I let this game pass me by until now is practically beyond me, but at least I've now remedied the situation. There’s just something about this game that makes it particularly appealing to me. It’s another game where you have superpowers but the word "superpowers" isn't nearly description enough. Sure, the player character (Alex Mercer, a freakish shape-shifting antihero) can change his limbs into various accouterments like a blade, claws or a shield, but that’s just the beginning.

Mercer can run up buildings from street level to the top of the tallest skyscraper, and he runs fast whether it’s on the ground darting over vehicles or at a more gravity-challenged angle. He can leap over several buildings. He can glide and do air dashes, which can turn a single jump into a vertical maneuver spanning the length of a city block or two. He can consume any character in the game’s world, taking their appearance if they are human, which comes in handy mostly for sneaking into military bases. He can rip open tanks from the top, climb inside and take command of the tank, which for this game is one of my favorite versions of this powerful military vehicle I've encountered. One thing I've regularly done with Mercer is had him run across the sides of buildings along Time Square, leaping back and forth between buildings as I went. He can do all these things, and much more, all while the game does well to show the speed and strength he has.

So like Crackdown, it largely comes down to mobility and how fun it is to get around in the game world, which Prototype excels at. The combat is fine too and there’s certainly a lot of fighting in the story missions. Outside the story missions you can pretty much do whatever, but a small complaint I have is the shallowness of other activities open to you. Like Crackdown it has collectibles scattered around the city, but unlike Crackdown these collectibles are somewhat difficult to spot and not really worth the effort. It also has various challenges, mostly combat with some more obstacle course ones thrown in, but these are mostly uninteresting. Despite all my praise for how fun it is to get around, I do kind of wish the game also had a truly long-range travel option, because there’s only so many times I can go from one end of Manhattan to the other, jumping and gliding the whole way, before it gets old.

I could talk about the story a bit, although I don’t want to delve deep. I’ll just say it plays somewhat like a mystery and is told in a very fragmented fashion. Going through the game normally and consuming certain targets gets you memory scraps (usually pretty creepy scenes) to help you piece together what happened. These scraps get added to a "Web of Intrigue" menu screen, where these scenes can be watched again, ordered in how the people involved relate to one another to help get a bigger picture of what’s going on. It’s a largely optional system, but it’s certainly unique.

Oh yeah, besides the military enemies there is also a faction of infected who are essentially zombies for the most part. Zombie-themed movies and other media are kind of a guilty pleasure of mine (I feel the phrase "guilty pleasure" is sometimes said flippantly, but in this instance I mean exactly what I say), so it has that going too for Prototype’s appeal to me. The game’s overall tone is bleak, bloody and disturbing, which neither really helped nor hurt it in my eyes.

When I was first considering this game, I thought about going directly to Prototype 2, but I’m glad I decided to begin with the first. Mercer isn't exactly likable, but it was interesting being in his shoes for a while. I plan on getting to the sequel eventually. Unfortunately, from what I gather, the likelihood of the franchise making it to a third installment seems slim. Also, one last random thought on the game, exactly how many collars does Mercer need? The more I look at the amalgam of what he’s wearing the more ridiculous it gets. It was genuinely distracting in the cut scenes while I was trying to figure out how many shirts and jackets he was wearing.

For now I’m going to call my mood for sandbox games sated. After the rooftop jumping extravaganza that was Crackdown and the speedy vortex of carnage that was Prototype, playing pretty much any other sandbox game right afterward would be a difficult shift just from the mobility perspective alone. You want me to drive a car in a game? I just played two games where I could pick up a car, hop onto a nearby roof and then throw said car over several other buildings. So yeah: video games.