One of the gnarliest games ever published by a AAA studio is available at a steep discount on Steam. That’s great news… if you can get past the game-breaking bugs.
When Activision published Prototype 2 in 2012, the big-budget video game scene was stuck in a creative rut. You could have whatever you wanted, so long as it starred a bald dude with an unquenchable thirst for violence. Hitman. Spec Ops. Max Payne. The cover of Call of Duty was just a silhouette of a bald guy with a gun. Even Mass Effect 2 (beloved, I know!) fell uncomfortably into the same bucket.
Prototype 2 is special in that, with hindsight, it’s unclear if the game is the furthest this trend would go or a knowing parody. My guess? Both.
You play as former U.S. Marine Sergeant James Heller, and your overarching goal is to kill the protagonist of the original Prototype. Thanks to mutant powers, you can run up skyscrapers, leap entire city blocks, and glide through avenues — imagine the traversal of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 with a city dipped in Vaseline.
Unlike Spider-Man, Heller also has a bundle of ultra-violent supervillain talents. You can eat people in a single bite and then transform into them. His forearms morph into mutated claws that would humble Wolverine. Even a simple punch has enough power to juice a civilian; every enemy contains enough blood to fill a swimming pool.
Unfortunately, the game is a product of its time in the most literal sense: the PC port, released a few months after the console version, is a disaster. You wouldn’t know it from most reviews at the time, because just getting a console game on PC felt like a gift. Publishers were still terrified of piracy and rarely invested in the platform. It’s a far cry from today, when PC is rapidly cutting into markets and publishers like Square Enix are rethinking their entire business models around it.
Now combine that 2012 problem with a 2025 one: the industry’s general indifference (if not outright disdain) toward video game preservation, especially for series that no longer promise big profits. The result is Prototype 2 on Steam — a good game failed by the industry twice, still sold despite many players struggling to even get it to launch, relying on YouTube guides and old forum threads.
I recommend you play Prototype 2! But you might want to dig your Xbox 360 out of storage and find a disc. Remember those things? They were great.
