One of many gnarliest video games ever printed by a AAA studio is accessible at a steep low cost on Steam. That’s nice information… if you may get previous the game-breaking bugs.

When Activision printed Prototype 2 in 2012, the big-budget online game scene was caught in a artistic rut. You possibly can have no matter you needed, as long as it starred a bald dude with an unquenchable thirst for violence. Hitman. Spec Ops. Max Payne. The quilt of Name of Responsibility was only a silhouette of a bald man with a gun. Even Mass Impact 2 (beloved, I do know!) fell uncomfortably into the identical bucket.

Prototype 2 is particular in that, with hindsight, it’s unclear if the sport is the furthest this development would go or a figuring out parody. My guess? Each.

You play as former U.S. Marine Sergeant James Heller, and your overarching objective is to kill the protagonist of the unique Prototype. Due to mutant powers, you may run up skyscrapers, leap total metropolis blocks, and glide by way of avenues — think about the traversal of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 with a metropolis dipped in Vaseline.

In contrast to Spider-Man, Heller additionally has a bundle of ultra-violent supervillain abilities. You’ll be able to eat folks in a single chunk after which remodel into them. His forearms morph into mutated claws that may humble Wolverine. Even a easy punch has sufficient energy to juice a civilian; each enemy comprises sufficient blood to fill a swimming pool.

Sadly, the sport is a product of its time in essentially the most literal sense: the PC port, launched a couple of months after the console model, is a catastrophe. You wouldn’t realize it from most evaluations on the time, as a result of simply getting a console sport on PC felt like a present. Publishers had been nonetheless scared of piracy and barely invested within the platform. It’s a far cry from immediately, when PC is quickly slicing into markets and publishers like Sq. Enix are rethinking their total enterprise fashions round it.

Now mix that 2012 drawback with a 2025 one: the trade’s normal indifference (if not outright disdain) towards online game preservation, particularly for sequence that now not promise large income. The result’s Prototype 2 on Steam — an excellent sport failed by the trade twice, nonetheless offered regardless of many gamers struggling to even get it to launch, counting on YouTube guides and outdated discussion board threads.

I like to recommend you play Prototype 2! However you may need to dig your Xbox 360 out of storage and discover a disc. Bear in mind these issues? They had been nice.