Unlike Infamous that led the gamer into the false assumption that you were supposed to favour a more notorious approach to the game or that calling the game 'Famous' just wasn't cool enough – Prototype doesn't give a crap what you do. The moral compass went through the wash one too many times and really doesn't giving a flying dyke which way you're pointing so long as you're having fun doing it.

While I figured these 2 would end up being close rivals, it appears that it's like watching Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan in X-Men have a quaint little sit down chat, pretending they get along nicely, while the conversation tends to veer towards personal digs and subtle comments about who had who's mother last night. In short, it's harder to make a comparison as while you might think these games are very similar, after playing them for 5 minutes it becomes apparent that they really had their own interests at heart.

Prototype, after one of those classic “start you off with everything” intros that let us know just what kind of badass we're doing to end up as, warps back in time a couple of weeks where you wake up in a hospital, after being dead for a bit, as you do. Startling a couple of doctors and soon having the military on your heels you hobble off as best as your mutant freak ass can manage. It's not long of course before you start lobbing things at helicopters and running across rooftops, but this isn't a game to get all gushy about the storyline, and so from this point on we'll refer to those as the “boring bits”.

If you mixed Crackdown, The Hulk and Spiderman together, while getting some sort of super mutant out of the combination called “Crackdulkerman!”, you'd additionally get most of the features that have been lumped into Prototype, albeit well, and fun, and addictive. This we can refer to as the “Good Bits”. Running up sheer walls to jump off them to elbow slam a tank redeems a lot. It appeals to my more aggressive nature by providing a well populated city and then giving you the ability to quite easily get away with crushing someone's face on your knee. Genius.

The fluidity of gameplay has been an obvious starting point for the game. Most the additional side quests and power-ups have felt a little tacked on / overkill. You have so many of both. Power-ups are easy to obtain early on, but once you've got most of the mobility ones that allow you jump higher and run faster, you're then picking ones that you'll rarely use, if not just for kicks. These are then further wiped off at a later date when you receive one of your best power-ups for free that practically makes the previous weapon skills you've obtained redundant.

Prototype states that it has adaptive Parkour. This, I feel is a slight bending of the truth. If Parkour (Free Running) is all about making your way from point A to point B in the most efficient manner, I imagine that being able to fly there, as Prototype allows, would be a slight advantage over your mates scaling buildings. I think the problem here is the use of “adaptive”. A better word would've been “rewritten” or “super-mutant-version-of-something-similar-to”, because at the end of the day there's not much effort involved in holding down R2 and running vertically up a building. Something I'm ultimately glad for because...

Everything's so freakin' intense in Prototype, from taking on the military, ripping open tanks, crashing helicopters and viciously opening up a grunt or 2, to running for your life from Apache's, rocket launchers and mutant hunters that want to savage your internals to fashion some sort of trinket for their loved ones. I can understand why generally the graphics look like toilet, there's no way the PS3 could've coped with this much going on at any one time, and as I fell plummeting to Earth destroying everything in my wake, sending bodies flying – I really didn't care.

The “boring bits” come into play from time to time in at least one interesting way. Each time you consume a key figure of the game you'll get a flash back of their memories to a certain key event. These guys are scattered around the world for you to eat and learn from. Each flashback is played to us in a short movie of which, considering you're trying to find out what's happened to you, can be as ambiguous as you'd expect. Unfortunately because of the way these are presented I certainly felt very little compulsion to find all the wandering governmental misanthropes to consume. Not that this really mattered, for it seems by the end the game offered no real twists or plot intrigues to invite spontaneous ooh's and ahh's.

No, lets just dispense with the storyline, brush over the graphics and get mildly enthusiastic about the music – to simply focus on gameplay. It's a game where turning your brain off helps, other than when difficulty spikes occasionally present themselves, at which point you're simply battling with staying alive from all the elite military and hard ass mutants they can throw at you ten-a-penny while you flail your way through whoever you wish without much of a care in the world.

It can get tough at times when so much is going on at the same time. You'll have choppers, tanks, mutants, military, civilians, Chesney Hawks and boss mobs to content with at some points of the game – and sure, you'll wonder why you keep dying at first. But, you get used to it. You get better with the controls and the environment and learn to keep yourself topped up on health.

It's a lot of fun as far as smashing things, lobbing vehicles and hijacking choppers go. A Hulk game for the new generation let's say. Well worth picking up.