Tweet
Without any kind of pre-launch announcement - or indeed, a single word of warning - remasters of Prototype and its 2012 sequel crept quietly onto the Xbox One store earlier this week - almost as if neither wanted to be caught in the act. On first glance you might wonder why. On the face of it, we're in standard remaster territory: both versions output at native 1080p, boosting image quality over their sub-720p setups on PS3 and Xbox 360. However, everything else remains as you remember it: each game maintains the exact same draw distance range as the older console releases, while texture and shadow quality is identical.If what we're looking at is an HD remaster by the numbers, the situation swiftly goes downhill from there. The first Prototype remaster plays at 30fps with adaptive v-sync on Xbox One, dropping to the mid-20s with tearing once explosives are triggered. It's generally solid - and playable enough - but a touch under-ambitious given the plain, repetitive design of the world.
Even by latter-day PS3 and Xbox 360 standards the animations, effects and textures don't hold up well on the current generation of consoles, and it's hard to fathom why such a game couldn't operate at an absolutely locked 30fps. Indeed, given the vintage of the game, it's a real disappointment that the developers did not go the whole hog and target 60Hz gameplay. Otherwise, the original game is passable in its remastered guise, if a somewhat barebones conversion.
Read more…
More...